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Ominous Covert Transnational Flows and Global Security

Robert Mandel

International Studies Association

Recently cross-national transactions have risen dramatically in conjunction with the growth of global interdependence. Within these flows across boundaries are many that are not under national governments' exclusive initiation or control. While most of these transnational flows seem quite beneficial, some appear dangerous because they violate national laws and global norms, they create potentially devastating political-military, economic, social, or environmental effects, and they are virtually impossible to monitor and prevent. This set of pernicious transfers has largely escaped scholarly scrutiny because of their elusive surreptitious nature.

This study provides an integrated explanatory analysis of these flows and their implications for international security. It begins by demarcating their scope and discussing their general causes and consequences. Then it presents brief overviews of the four most important ominous covert transnational flows—clandestine conventional arms, illegal human migrants, illicit psychoactive drugs, and unsanctioned hazardous materials. Finally, it concludes by showing how these flows highlight hypocritical national government policy and weak global rules of the game, serving in the process to challenge the security of the existing world order. The distinctiveness of this study lies in its integration of flows often considered separately and—most importantly—its use of the patterns in these flows to focus attention on potential security dysfunction at both the national and global levels.

Scope, Causes, and Consequences of the Flows

Delineating the scope of ominous covert transnational flows is a bit tricky. A huge variety of people and substances moves across boundaries in today's world, and this study purposely examines only a narrow subset of them. Several criteria justify the inclusion of a global transaction here. First, included flows are directly and intentionally human-initiated, excluding such dangerous phenomena as the international spillovers of natural disasters and most international transmission of infectious disease. Second, although national governments may play a role in initiating, transmitting, or receiving included flows, these transactions extensively involve private forces operating at the global level (thus the designation of "transnational"), excluding exclusively government-to-government transactions. Third, included flows are secret (thus the designation of "covert"), usually deemed criminal according to national or international law, excluding above board formally-approved transactions. Finally, included flows are "ominous" in the sense that the dominant international community view is that they endanger in a major way national or international security, excluding both (1) positive transactions such as many transfers of wealth and ideas and (2) transactions without a sizable security impact such as the transmission of stolen art or automobiles. The notion of security embedded here is a comprehensive one, still emphasizing the survival of state governments and national societies yet extending well beyond traditional political-military issues to encompass economic, cultural, and environmental concerns. 1

The rationale for selecting this particular slice of global transactions reflects a desire to focus on the most severe challenges the nation-state faces regarding cross-border movement. Selecting intentional human-initiated flows links up with the central question of how coherent national policy and global rules of the game are in managing these transactions; unless governments have some influential opportunity individually or collectively to encourage or discourage cross-border movement, this fundamental concern would be considerably less relevant. The choice of transnational flows is due to the importance of analyzing transactions that governments can influence but not totally control, as in the post-Cold War context forces that are neither completely inside nor completely outside a state's purview merit particular attention. The emphasis on covert flows relates to the increasing opportunity for transactions that consciously violate or circumvent the norms and rules of the international system, in which coordinated criminal behavior has the potential to undermine system stability. Finally, dealing with the most ominous flows seems to be crucial in order to see the way the international system responds to stress. Ultimately, a significant overarching underpinning for scrutinizing these ominous covert transnational flows is their tendency to highlight weaknesses in the nation-state system: they can provide an index of the permeability of national borders, displaying for all to see the extent to which national governments can control what moves across their boundaries; and they can serve as a lightening rod for the meaningfulness of the notion of world order, revealing whether or not it is just a pretense for considerable incoherence and paralysis in international policy and action.

The four flows considered in this study are highly interrelated. On the surface, it seems that the flow of clandestine conventional arms stimulates strictly political-military threats, the flows of illegal human migrants and illicit psychoactive drugs stimulate strictly socioeconomic threats, and the flow of unsanctioned hazardous materials stimulates strictly environmental threats. But the interactions are more complex than this, and while depicting the entire web of potential interconnections would be too cumbersome it is worth noting a few examples of the more direct links: the profits made from the sale of illicit drugs has often fueled the purchase of covert arms to be used in insurgency or terrorist activities; 2 environmental degradation linked to hazardous waste flows has on more than one occasion led to the creation of outflows of illegal migrants seeking better habitats; 3 the use of illicit drugs may lead to hazardous waste flows, as for example Andean waterways now show signs of serious pollution from cocaine refining; 4 illegal aliens entering a country may serve as vehicles for transporting illicit drugs across borders undetected; 5 and the use of conventional weapons (often those procured covertly) in regional warfare can often accelerate the creation of hazardous waste. 6 When masterminded by transnational criminal organizations, the links among these flows can become even tighter.

The openness of the post-Cold War global environment has appeared to foster a nearly universal vulnerability to these ominous covert transnational flows. First, the rapid advances in transportation and communication (including the accelerating development of information technologies) have led to a huge increase in the volume of international transactions; and with this growth in trade, investment, and travel, those seeking to move covertly illegal people and products across national boundaries can easily hide in the mass of legitimate travelers and commodities. 7 Second, the international spread of liberal democratic beliefs, including support (especially at the rhetorical level) for free movement of goods and people across boundaries, has substantially lessened the capacity of border police to detect and restrict surreptitious flows across countries; 8 the earlier presence during the Cold War of police states with their informants and tight monitoring had made such transactions considerably more difficult. 9 Finally, the increasing number and power of transnational non-governmental groups has stimulated these covert flows; those involved in facilitating these transfers seem to be bound together by a desire to attack the rule of law "either to destroy it or (as in more recent times) to change it radically. 10

These flows appear inescapably to involve contagion within and across states, as their impact is not readily confinable. The national psychological implications include the potential for dominance of fear over trust and the spread of a xenophobic "fortress mentality;" the economic implications include the potential for increased cost and decreased quality of goods and services; the political implications include the potential for contraction of governmental ability to provide for the needs of the citizenry; and the cultural implications include the potential for the disruption of civil society and the breakdown of moral consensus. Because the motive of those responsible for these flows often boils down to economic profit, these transmitters tend to ignore the interests of the population at large and can undermine national and international regime stability. 11

Specific Flow Overviews

A brief examination of the special features of each of the four flows facilitates consideration of their broader relationship to the coherence of national and international security policy. Because of the covert nature of these transactions, the details are inherently speculative and largely anecdotal. However, the discussion that follows of the general trends, illustrative examples, and distinctive security issues involved in each type of transnational transfer conveys at least a general sense of their interwoven threat.

Clandestine Conventional Arms

The clandestine transfer of arms across national boundaries includes weapons components as well as finished weapons systems. Both black market and gray market transactions occur here: black market transfers directly violate relevant laws and usually involve weapons improperly obtained from government arsenals or legitimate arms dealers, while gray market transfers are more ambiguous legally and may involve either "dual-use" products shipped to recipients ineligible for military arms or government-sponsored transfers that violate existing prohibitions. 12 While the exact dollar amount of these covert flows is unknown, "guesses range from $1 billion - $2 billion for the average year's skullduggery (mostly by governments that do not want their neighbors to know what weapons they are buying or selling), to $5 billion –10 billion if there is a good war or two to drive demand. 13 " This figure is of course substantially lower than the public international transfers of large conventional weapons systems ($18.5 billion in 1992), but the clandestine traffic is more likely to involve the kind of small arms actually used in ongoing conflicts and shows no signs of abating. 14

The recent history of these clandestine arms flows (which are sometimes part of more broadly based covert operations) reveals that while they posed only minor problems for national governments during the early decades after World War II, by the mid-1970s the growing competition among supplying companies increased the volume of available munitions and made black market transactions—particularly in light weaponry—harder to control. 15 During the 1980s control eroded still further, as covert exchanges began to involve both light and heavy weapons and as governments themselves became more involved in clandestine arms flows, evidenced by arms scandals during that decade in the United States, France, Sweden, Austria, and Italy. 16 The proliferation of new primary suppliers, the breakdown of the regulatory structure, and the increasing market penetration of secondary suppliers of weapons and weapons components soon became embedded in a complex multifaceted "international underground economy" managing the global distribution of all sorts of illegal commodities; this predicament has led to "a virtually impenetrable network of commercial and financial fronts behind which all manner of contraband deals—including arms shipments—can be conducted. 17 " More specifically, since 1980 there has been a greater worldwide demand for weapons obtained outside of normal channels, a shift away from bilateral national dealings in favor of arms bazaars (in the form of proliferating international military equipment exhibitions), a growing emphasis on spare parts (which are easier to obtain illegally), an increasingly prominent role for private arms dealers, and a tightening connection between the clandestine supply network for the drug trade and the arms trade. 18 The root causes for the increase in clandestine arms transfers during the 1980s include the increased international arms production during that decade, the diminishing global demand for legitimately traded arms since the end of the Cold War, and the growing obstacles facing any effort to control commercial exports. 19

While undoubtedly much covert arms dealing remains undocumented, a few notorious cases serve to illustrate the wide range of parties involved. Perhaps the most well-known case is the Iran-Contra arms scandal, in which American government officials secretly sanctioned the sale of weapons to Iran in 1985-86 in an attempt to secure the release of American hostages, with the funds received used in defiance of Congress to buy arms for Contra rebels in Nicaragua. 20 However, for the United States during the 1980s this was by no means an isolated incident: in 1983-84 a couple of American businessmen shipped 87 state-of-the-art Hughes helicopters to the officially arms-embargoed North Korea; 21 and through most of the decade clandestine weapons aid flowed from the United States to Afghanistan through Pakistan in what has been called "the largest and costliest American covert operation since the Vietnam War. 22 " The United States has not been alone among industrialized nations in engaging in this activity, exemplified by a West German firm sending the components for an entire ammunition production plant to arms-embargoed South Africa in the early 1980s, a British firm secretly supplying weapons and ammunition to Burma in defiance of an arms embargo in 1990, and even a Swedish company sending military explosives to Iran in the mid-1980s in defiance of Swedish export regulations. 23 The Third World is also joining the fray of covert selling at the global arms bazaar, shown by Libya's secret transfer of arms and explosives to the Irish Republican Army in 1985-86 and Iran's clandestine shipments of weapons to the Bosnian Muslims in 1993. 24 Covert transnational flows of arms thus go both from governments to private groups and from private groups to governments, and while both kinds of transfers are worrisome they create different kinds of dangers.

Perhaps more directly than any of the other flows in this study, clandestine arms transfers have a major security impact. To begin with, "arms transferred under such illicit or semi-illicit deals appear more likely to be used in battle than normal legal government-to-government transfers since pressure for them is more likely to stem from immediate war needs;" and thus these deals represent "a challenge to government policymaking because they generally occur without full official consideration or public debate and because they increase the chances and severity of further fighting. 25 " Beyond ordinary soldiers fighting in the many ongoing low-level shooting conflicts, terrorist and drug traffickers seem to be the most security-challenging recipients of clandestine arms flows, with the black market in armaments appearing to be more important to drug cartels than to any other non-state actor. 26 With national governments the largest regular suppliers of weapons to the covert arms trade, 27 this activity undermines the credibility of arms control initiatives and, indeed, the moral authority of major power suppliers. 28 With the most eager national recipients being widely embargoed rogue states such as Iran and North Korea, 29 the potential seems quite high for security disruption and, more specifically, upset of the military balance in such volatile regions as the Middle East and East Asia. 30 In the end, the illegal global arms trade can increase threat by expanding the number and power of disruptive actors in the international system, complicating intelligence on the military capabilities of potential adversaries, frustrating attempts to restrain the military escalation or geographical spread of conflicts, penetrating national military supply systems and impeding the readiness of national military forces, and damaging foreign relations between the parties supplying the arms and the enemies of the parties receiving the arms. 31

Illegal Human Migration

Illegal migration across national boundaries incorporates both those pushed out by horrendous conditions at home and those pulled in by attractive conditions abroad, with in all cases an express violation of the national immigration laws of receiving states. While many illegal aliens make and execute on their own the decision to move (often with some help from relative and friends in both the country of origin and the country of destination), an increasing proportion of this undocumented migration ends up under the facilitating influence or control of transnational criminal organizations who find that smuggling human contraband across borders is a highly lucrative business. 32 This smuggling appears to be a "low risk, high gain" proposition: porous global borders and high-volume international human traffic make detection difficult; and the penalties for human smuggling in the United States and Western Europe are relatively lenient compared to those for smuggling narcotics, with the penalties in the rest of the world for human smuggling even slighter. 33 The worldwide profits of international smugglers of illegal aliens are about $7 billion a year, with the price for a single individual to be transported often in the $30,000 range. 34 The total number of illegal migrants crossing national borders in 1996 was about 10 to 30 million compared to about 100 million legal global migrants that year. 35

Smuggling people across borders has, of course, a long and sordid history, as "until just a few centuries ago slavery and slave trading were legal and commonplace features of society and commerce throughout the world. 36 " However, long after the world began to view the slave trade as both morally and legally unacceptable, the amount of illegal migration to the industrialized world has been increasing significantly over the last decade: 37 in the United States, despite an official policy of penalizing employers for hiring illegal aliens, between 200,000 and 300,000 undocumented migrants flow across the border from Mexico each year; the number of illegal migrants to Western Europe has risen dramatically to approach 3 million, largely from Eastern Europe and Africa; and Japan now faces increased illegal migration from mainland China, the Philippines, and other parts of Southeast Asia. The Third World has experienced a similar pattern of increase in recent years, with growing illegal labor flows from Indonesia to Malaysia, from Bangladesh to India, from Nepal to Bhutan, from China to Hong Kong and Taiwan, and from many parts of Africa to Ivory Coast, South Africa, and Nigeria. 38 The reasons for this increased illegal migration include the increased restrictions on legal migration by both developed and developing nations since the 1970s; the growth in global markets, stimulating the development of migration networks; the removal of obstacles to migration due to the breakdown of authoritarian regimes; and, most directly, the emergence of transnational criminal groups— "migration mafia"—that "extract fees from would-be migrants (sometimes turning illegal migrants into bonded laborers) to arrange their transportation and employment abroad. 39 " The most basic motives of illegal migrants continue to include not only the desperate attempt to escape from poverty but also a "revolution of rising expectations" associated with improving economic conditions in their home states. 40

Brief comments on a few of the more prominent illegal migrant flows serve to illustrate the general patterns. Perhaps the most widely-analyzed flow of illegal aliens are those moving from Mexico to the United States along their long shared border, driven not only by poverty, unemployment, and income disparities but also by the web of social and family connections Mexicans have in the United States, the experience of Mexicans living in the United States, and the increasing interconnectedness of the Mexican and American economies. 41 Less widely noticed are the flows of about 100,000 illegal Chinese migrants into the United States each year, smuggled in by criminal groups for huge fees and then forced to work in menial jobs in vain attempts to repay their debt in circumstances that can only be described as "virtual slavery; 42 " and the flows of illegal Cubans into the United States, recently restricted through a bilateral agreement but in the past purposefully stimulated by Fidel Castro and the Cuban government as a way of directing tens of thousands of "undesirables"—including criminals and mentally ill people—into the United States as part of what some describe as "demographic warfare. 43 " The rest of the industrialized world faces similar dilemmas concerning illegal migration: Germany recently faced mounting pressure to send back home 40,000 Vietnamese migrants who had settled in East Germany as guest workers in textile factories and light industry but who Germany classified as illegal aliens; 44 and Japan has been facing an internal debate about its over 280,000 illegal migrants that has moved beyond simply labor market issues to encompass potentially racist arguments about the need to preserve a homogeneous society. 45 In the Third World, Malaysia faces sizable illegal migration from neighboring areas, particularly from the Philippines from which about 350,000 have fled from poverty and strife, and the result has been a significant increase in ethnic tensions; 46 and Costa Rica faces the problem that its large undocumented migrant population— estimated between 80,000 and 223,000 during the 1980s—ironically enjoys fewer restrictions than its officially-recognized refugee population. 47 While the motives for this wide range of cases of illegal migration are largely economic, the difficulties engendered are often cultural in nature.

The security implications deriving from illegal migration appear to be more indirect but perhaps more wide-ranging than those associated with clandestine arms transfers. In general, this flow of people seems to foster confrontation, avoidance, and discrimination 48 : confrontation involves expanding internal and external conflict within and between the home state and the host state of the migrants, with pressure to resolve or eliminate differences by force; avoidance entails growing public xenophobia within receiving states, with pressure to send illegal migrants home and close borders; and discrimination encompasses intensifying competition for goods and services within receiving states, with pressure to protect the advantages of the native population. The movement of illegal migrants highlights deep moral dilemmas that national government officials are loath to discuss among themselves or with the public. In overburdening domestic social service systems and raising the crime rate, illegal aliens often cause increasingly putative laws to go into effect in receiving societies aimed at all immigrants. 49 In the end, illegal migration can disrupt the relationship between state and society--"many citizens feel that their governments have lost control of their borders, and governments are in turn alarmed by the growing hostility of their citizens to the foreigners living and working in their midst. 50 " While legal migration clearly can be quite beneficial to receiving states, this covert transnational flow has the potential to produce considerable social instability.

Illicit Psychoactive Drugs

The illicit transfer of psychoactive drugs across national boundaries involves both mild narcotics such as marijuana (cannabis) and severe ones such as heroin (opium) and cocaine. The global drug trade nets between $420 billion and $1 trillion a year, making it about three-fifths the size of the federal budget of the United States and making illicit drugs the single best-selling product in the world. 51 The United States is the largest consumer, with 30 million American users spending per year about $28 billion on cocaine, $68 billion on marijuana, and $10 to $12 billion on heroin. 52 A common explanation for this lucrative transnational business is inadequate success within source states in producing traditional agricultural goods— "because farmers in countries like Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia have great difficulty securing access to markets for their food crops or selling them at an adequate price...they often have little choice but to grow coca and other illegal drugs. 53 " Due to the huge number of coca farmers, exporters, and smugglers, the supply of cocaine is difficult to eliminate, and the rewards from selling it are great because the price rises roughly 200 times between the coca farm and the street. 54 Drug traders generally view globalization as their "greatest growth opportunity, 55 " and given frequent "finger-pointing" by drug-consuming and drug-producing nations—with each blaming each other for the problems linked to these shady transactions— these traders feel that they can consistently evade local authorities. 56

Looking at the history of international drug trafficking, one quickly discovers that "the desire of individuals to alter their state of consciousness is one of the few constants of civilized human history," with a variety of psychoactive substances used for thousands of years for medicinal, ritual, and recreational purposes, and that this use was not globally censured until the twentieth century. 57 One recent development that has complicated the management of transnational drug flows has been the growth in the production of "designer drugs" and synthetic narcotics, allowing their creators to enjoy a brief "window of legality" before the regulatory system catches up to them. 58 The global "war on drugs" began in the United States in 1986 when President Reagan identified illicit drug traffic as a national security threat and authorized the Defense Department to engage in anti-drug operations, leading to interdiction expenditures that grew from $400 million in 1987 to $1.2 billion in 1991; 59 but widespread consensus exists that this effort has largely failed to make a dent in the illicit drug trade. 60

Examining the case of the world's best-known drug exporter--Colombia, the most important source of cocaine and marijuana transported to North America--helps to illustrate the general nature of this flow. Colombian drug dealers have created elaborate transnational trade networks and, when challenged, have engaged in assassination, bribery of international officials, and even full-scale military assaults. 61 When the Cuban mafia fled to the United States in the early 1960s in the wake of Castro's ascendancy, they used Colombia as the primary source of their drugs; Colombia's gradual emergence as Latin America's preeminent drug supplier was due to its geopolitical position, its vast central forests that effectively hide secret processing laboratories and airstrips facilitating the traffic, the strong entrepreneurial skills of the Colombian people, and the willingness of the Colombian community ion the United States to function as a distributor network. 62 A "drug-insurgency nexus" has appeared to develop in which leftist guerrillas work hand-in-hand with drug dealers to help undermine the United States government through the influx of illicit narcotics, thereby weakening the "dependent-capitalist state" in Colombia and accelerating the pace of revolutionary change there. 63 Today Colombia is the leading refiner and distributor of cocaine, with its annual production of 80 metric tons accounting for three-quarters of the global supply, and it has recently (1) vertically-integrated by branching out into cultivation of the coca plant and (2) diversified into more extensive cultivation, production, and distribution of marijuana and heroin. 64 Of course, the recent intensification of the global drug trafficking problem is confined neither to Colombia nor to cocaine: the world's first independent mafia state emerged in 1993, as a powerful mafia family living in Sicily and Venezuela bought the sovereign Caribbean island of Aruba using a fortune amassed through the North American heroin trade; 65 and—when it comes to heroin—Burma cultivates the majority of the opium that is turned into heroin for a booming Asian drug market. 66 These examples hint at the incredible sophistication of modern drugrunners, comparable in many ways to the most efficient multinational corporations.

The security implications of the covert transnational flow of illicit drugs appear to involve the gradual decay from within of nation-states. On the social level, this trafficking associates in consuming states with a rapid rise in drug-related violent crimes in inner cities and escalating health care problems, including the accelerated spread of AIDS via drug users. 67 On the political-military level, the American promotion of the use of military force to fight drug traffickers in some states has the potential to lead to an undue strengthening of this coercive element within the fragile democracies in drug-producing states. 68 On the economic level, several major source countries—including Burma and Colombia—have been "decertified" as cooperating in the war on drugs, and as a result do not qualify for credit from the Export-Import Bank or the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. 69 Finally, the spread of drug-related corruption in both producing and consuming societies involving both the police and key government officials causes corrupted individuals to lose their sense of dignity and integrity and corrupted regimes to lose whatever sense of confidence and legitimacy they possess in the eyes of their citizenry and fellow nations. 70 More than any of the other covert flows, the level of influence illicit drug sales provide for transnational criminal organizations over the governments of key source countries poses a major security threat.

Unsanctioned Hazardous Materials

Of all the ominous flows considered in this study, the movement of unsanctioned hazardous materials across national boundaries has received by far the least attention. Part of the problem here is the paucity of knowledge about this transnational flow, with little reliable data even on open official interstate hazardous material transfers. Hazardous materials include both conventional toxic wastes and nuclear materials, especially weapons-grade plutonium and uranium. One of the roots of the inattention and ignorance has been the ongoing controversy about how to define hazardous materials, which in theory could mean virtually any substance if stored or transported improperly in sufficient volume: perhaps the most widely accepted notion encompasses any material that poses a substantial threat to human health or the environment when managed improperly, including a variety of toxic, ignitable, corrosive, or dangerously reactive substances such as acids, cyanides, pesticides, herbicides, solvents, obsolete explosives, nerve gas, radioactive material, sewage sludge, PCBs and dioxins, fly ash from power plants, infectious waste from hospitals and research laboratories, and compounds of lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and zinc. 71 While the scope of this problem area is obviously difficult to specify exactly, the best guess is that the world Finally, the spread of drug-related corruption in both producing andproduces about 338 million tons of hazardous waste annually; global trade in this waste is a multibillion dollar industry, with the American import and export of precious metals waste alone exceeding a billion dollars a year. 72

A historical perspective indicates that since World War II, "the amount of toxic byproducts created by the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, petroleum, nuclear devices, pesticides, chemicals and other allied products has increased almost exponentially," leading to a rise globally in the transboundary movement of hazardous waste. 73 While much of this trade occurs between advanced industrialized nations with highly developed regulatory regimes ensuring the environmentally sound management of the hazardous materials, a significant proportion flows from developed states to developing countries that lack the proper means of disposal. 74 The motives for this North-South flow of waste include not only the "not-in-my-backyard" mentality of the industrialized states but also a widespread belief that "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable" because the costs and concern surrounding environmental protection are lowest there. 75 On May 5, 1992, The Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal went into effect, requiring signatories to adhere to a notice-and-consent procedure and to take into account whether recipients will handle waste in an environmentally sound manner, but this has by no means resolved the international concerns or the negative impact of these dangerous transactions. Even with the agreement in September 1995 by over 100 countries to amend the Basel Convention to ban the export of hazardous waste from the rich nations to the poor ones, this legislation may have served largely to push these transactions under the table.

Turning directly to the unsanctioned transnational flows of hazardous materials, the current predicament appears particularly foreboding. Strong incentives now exist to engage in surreptitious transfer of hazardous materials in order to avoid both paying relevant taxes and abiding by cost-increasing government regulations designed to minimize environmental damage. 76 Although no means are available to estimate the magnitude of these covert flows, there is every reason to believe that these transactions—including nuclear smuggling—are rising because "the large profits to be made from their disposal encourage illegal trafficking;" and a United Nations study concludes that the "foremost characteristic of illegal traffic in toxic and dangerous products is the dominant movement of these substances from the industrial to the developing world. 77 " It seems no coincidence that the most common direction of the flow of unsanctioned hazardous materials is also politically the most volatile.

Some truly noteworthy incidents of unsanctioned hazardous materials transfers have occurred in recent years. Between August 1987 and May 1988, in a deal arranged by an Italian trader with a Nigerian national, five ships transported over 8,000 drums containing 3,800 tons of hazardous wastes (some of which contained PCBs, some of the world's most toxic pollutants) from various European countries and the United States to Koko, Nigeria; when residents near the dirt lot where the waste was dumped fell seriously ill and Nigerian officials found falsely-labeled leaky drums full of the waste, the Italian government eventually had to send two ships to pick up the waste and to return it to Italy and repackage it for disposal. 78 In spring 1987 the Mexican navy had to prevent forcibly the unsanctioned dumping by an American garbage barge of over 3,000 tons of hazardous wastes in Mexico; a common reaction to the incident was that it exemplified the "scorn" some in the United States felt toward Mexico, viewing it as their "outhouse. 79 " Looking specifically at nuclear materials, the prime example of transnational smuggling revolves around Russia, where in addition to thousands of nuclear warheads being dismantled in accordance with arms reduction treaties there are about 1,500 tons of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium stored in hundreds of poorly-secured sites across the country: since the fall of the communist regime, there have been more than 800 attempts smuggle illegally nuclear materials out of Russia and the former Soviet Republics, areas characterized by the pervasiveness of criminal influence and political instability, including (1) beryllium (used for high-grade nuclear weaponry) intercepted in Lithuania on its way to a buyer in Switzerland probably representing North Korea and (2) plutonium intercepted in Munich very possibly on its way to Pakistan. 80 The disintegration of the Soviet Union has made access to weapons-grade materials so much easier than in the past that a Russian military prosecutor commented recently that "potatoes were guarded better" than weapons-usable nuclear fuel. 81 These cases suggest that global vigilance about unsanctioned hazardous materials transfers is even lower than that pertaining to clandestine arms, illegal migrants, or illicit drugs.

Onlookers generally have more difficulty seeing the security impact of unsanctioned hazardous materials transfers compared with the other flows considered in this study. Illegal trafficking in hazardous materials is significantly more dangerous than legal trafficking "since the latter is at least governed by a regulatory regime that aspires to environmentally sound management. 82 " It is not surprising that "it is the poor, the young, and the working class who suffer most" within states from hazardous waste, 83 just as it is the less developed countries who seem to suffer most from it on the international level. Yet the impact of the unsanctioned hazardous materials trade on the stability of the relationship between the industrialized world and the Third World is a bit muddled: several Third World countries, mostly in Africa, have labeled the secret dumping of toxic materials abroad as a form of "toxic terrorism" undertaken by Western "merchants of death; 84 " but when the industrialized world began seriously considering a formal ban on this flow in 1994, many Third World businesses complained that the move "represented a conspiracy by the developed world against them" because the ban included the transport of hazardous scrap materials which they have been using to recycle to produce aluminum, zinc, steel, and paper. 85 Of course, the most direct security link is with the illegal smuggling of nuclear materials: some have argued that "nuclear leakage"—the global spread of nuclear weapons or weapons-usable material—"constitutes the most serious direct threat to vital U.S. interests today and for the foreseeable future; 86 " and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency recently characterized this flow as "a major national security threat," particularly if the primary recipients—as some believe— are transnational terrorist groups rather than transnational criminal organizations. 87 One of the major concerns here is that "the smuggling of nuclear materials may enable some country or crime group to independently produce a nuclear weapon, therefore raising the potential for nuclear blackmail. 88 " While the actual amount of nuclear materials that has been smuggled across national borders is miniscule compared to that of hazardous waste, alarm bells ring much louder for national governments.

National Hypocrisy and Crippled Global Rules of the Game

How have national governments responded to these challenges posed by these ominous covert transnational flows? Unfortunately, government policies addressing these transactions appear to exhibit considerable ambivalence, inconsistency, and downright hypocrisy. It is certainly unreasonable to expect national policy on these flows to be perfectly coherent across time and geographical areas, especially given that these transactions are deeply embedded in a large and complex set of domestic and foreign problems; however, state responses—particularly those of industrialized nations—to the flows considered here seem in many ways to exceed the normal threshold for embodying contradictory tendencies. While some of the inconsistency here is clearly a product of the web of other issues involved, in many cases corruption, greed, shortsightedness, ignorance, or fatalistic acceptance appear to play a role in government officials' hypocrisy regarding these transactions.

With respect to conventional arms, where perhaps the clearest inconsistency exists, industrialized nations' governments openly state that they are adamantly opposed to conventional arms proliferation for security reasons, while privately permitting, encouraging, and even participating in the covert sale of their weapons systems and components abroad through direct and indirect channels for economic reasons. 89 The rhetoric of restraint ("we are opposed to indiscriminate conventional arms sales"), order ("we sell weapons only to our friends"), and security ("military assistance helps to enhance military deterrence and to stabilize alliances") appears to clash with the reality of expansiveness ("we need to help our defense industry achieve global market penetration"), chaos ("if we don't permit sales to them, someone else will"), and profit ("arms sales provide jobs and income for our citizenry"). Supplier states appear to be trapped between the utility of the public good and the attractiveness of private gain.

Regarding illegal migration, industrialized nations' governments have voiced increasing opposition to this flow and increasing commitment to stop it in order to maintain the security of their citizenry, while at the same time they have repeatedly not tightly enforced existing regulations, not imposed strict penalties, and not properly restricted offers of asylum when their own companies have privately arranged to import cheap illegal aliens for economic profit. 90 An underlying ambivalence exists about how much government time and effort ought to be spent trying to keep out those who seem to want desperately to come to one's country and who seem to have a beneficial role to play—at least in the short-term—in one's economy. Increasing enforcement of restrictions aimed at illegal migrants can stir up charges of nativism, activate citizen groups originally from the same home country and their sympathizers, and amplify domestic ethnic and racial tensions; so for many states with highly permeable borders the questionable payoff from coherently-applied sanctions against illegal aliens does not appear to them to justify the high costs.

Moving to illicit drugs, industrialized states' governments have expressed grave concern about drug trafficking due to its dire security implications; but in practice defense agencies have been reluctant to participate in the war on drugs, 91 and consuming state governments often functionally tolerate or under-punish the use of illegal drugs because of either the widespread social demand for them or the economic profits deriving from their sale. In the United States, the originator of the war on drugs, impediments to more effective illicit drug policy at home and abroad also include bureaucratic wrangling and clashes with values related to protecting human rights, reinforcing civilian democracies, and promoting regional stability. 92 Drug-producing states share as well in this atmosphere of hypocrisy: "attempts to repress the drug trade in the Andean countries have also been dogged by corruption and lack of political will, 93 " explained by some as deriving from contradictions between domestic interests involved in drug production and the official state policy formulated in response to pressures from North America. 94

Finally, concluding with unsanctioned hazardous materials, industrialized states' governments have repeatedly uttered general disapproval of the transboundary movement both of conventional hazardous wastes and dangerous nuclear materials because of the security threat to human life, but these nations have been quite lax in strictly enforcing regulatory controls and in finding better ways of monitoring the cross-border movement of these substances because of the economic profits generated and the "not-in-my-backyard" syndrome. 95 The United States government has been among the most vigorous in attempting to clean up its own contaminated land, yet—seemingly ignoring that recipient nations might have the same desires--it has simultaneously been the largest producer and exporter of hazardous waste. 96 In the short-run, of course, this contradiction is largely invisible, as a kind of "blissful ignorance" 97 often exists about the long-term harmful side effects of hazardous materials transfers.

Within each of these flows, a significant clash exists between publicly stated rhetoric largely motivated by security concerns and privately practiced action largely motivated by economic concerns. It is certainly possible to argue that this inconsistency is not particularly novel or unexpected because only a narrow range of elites would notice it and because cynicism is so widespread that most would accept such contradictory tendencies. However, it would appear that for state policy to have any prospect of effectiveness in restraining clandestine arms, illegal migration, illicit drugs, and unsanctioned hazardous materials, it would need to exhibit the kind of coherence and integrity that would send a strong signal affecting both demand and supply. In other words, there seems to be little hope for diminished activity by the people who receive and facilitate these transfers if it is clear to them that their governments are not really sure they want to stop these flows.

How has the international system as a whole responded to these ominous covert transnational flows? Certainly in all cases national laws—and in some cases international agreements—have emerged attempting to restrict these activities. A more probing answer to this question, however, reveals that the post-Cold War global "rules of the game" have helped to inhibit a truly effective collective response here. The notion of rules of the game in international relations is a long-standing concept reflecting what is implicitly or explicitly permissible in patterns of interaction on the conflict-cooperation continuum. 98 The quagmire surrounding these rules appears to be particularly salient to the security challenges posed by the flows considered in this study.

With the old Cold War rules largely gone, there appears to be little understanding of—or compliance to—a new set of rules. Some have even argued that the international system "changes are so thoroughgoing as to render obsolete the rules and procedures by which politics are conducted. 99 " In the absence of a uniform and universal ruleset that is consistently voiced and followed, each actor in the system is free to behave largely according to its own idiosyncratic premises. A common image is that the West plays by the rules, since it sets them, while others are more likely to ignore and violate them; but the reality is that nobody consistently plays by a coherent global set of rules, including the West (tying in with the earlier discussion of national hypocrisy).

The West generally assumes its rules are universal, and either projects in a misleading way its ruleset onto others (interpreting others' behavior in terms of its own rules) or attempts to impose directly its ruleset onto others and force compliance. The results here are resentment, misunderstanding, and largely ineffective international initiatives (including those addressing the flows considered in this study). In contrast to many past systems, core powers do not seem to be able to set by themselves the rules of the game, at least in part due to their lack of widespread legitimacy in the global arena, a deficiency that can also increase their vulnerability to covert transnational flows. 100 The West operates as if a mix of military coercion, economic dependence, legal prohibition, and moral outrage will suffice to quell violations of their idea of the rules of the game, a premise that appears particularly flawed when applied to the types of groups that facilitate the ominous flows considered here.

With major powers still clinging to a largely outmoded set of rules, weaker states are able to ignore them and non-state groups can subvert them. The increasing popularity of moral relativism, with its premium placed on non-judgmental multicultural patterns of diversity, can cause any discussion of establishing a more coherent set of rules of the game— especially by the West—to run the risk of comparison to the most virulent forms of cultural imperialism; to establish more universal rules in this way of thinking seems to be the equivalent of an anti-democratic squashing of each global actor's ability to experience independent empowerment by defining its own mode of behavior. For the disenfranchised nations, the very notion of rules of the game in today's world is reminiscent of an era where they sacrificed autonomy in their foreign policy for what they perceived to be a quite arbitrary world order. Moreover, for many disadvantaged states and groups that seem permanently unable to be upwardly mobile in the global hierarchy, violating the rules of the game may be a primary means for escaping from a stifling and humiliating status quo, a system whose premises they feel powerless to influence. 101 Actors who do not want to play by the rules, including rogue states, terrorist groups, and transnational criminal organizations, know that in today's international system it is extremely difficult for major powers to exert effective pressure on them over the long haul to change their behavior, and indeed a significant component of these non-compliant actors' status appears to derive from their ability to thwart in flagrant way the major powers' rules of the game and to get away with it without suffering devastating consequences. Thus in some ways it is actually useful for these unruly actors to have the West continue to portray its rules as universal so that their defiant power can be ever more visible.

While there is a clearly mutually reinforcing link between state hypocrisy and crippled global rules of the game, the difficulties in responding to the ominous covert transnational flows are by no means confined to national governments and their interrelationships. Compounding these external impediments are sharp internal divisions within public opinion, where the citizenry of these states is split between (1) those who want to eliminate the flow of clandestine arms, illegal migrants, illicit drugs, and unsanctioned hazardous materials, and (2) those who want basic freedoms preserved—including those who genuinely desire to consume or utilize what is being transferred covertly— or who profit from these transactions. Moreover, highly consistent with the global spread of these transactions is the well-documented spread in recent years of an emphasis on self-gratification 102 and the absence of any sense of general responsibility for one's own actions among the world's population: acquiring clandestine arms seems to be an instant remedy to a sense of powerlessness, with recipients able to ignore the more general violent effects associated with the spread of weaponry; illegally migrating to another country seems to be an instant path to wealth, with undocumented aliens able to ignore the more general economic problems they may create in recipient societies; indulging in illicit drugs seems to facilitate an instant escape from confronting the depressing realities of one's existence, with users able to ignore the more general breakdown of social structures in consuming nations; and pawning off unsanctioned hazardous materials seems to provide immediate relief from suffering the dangers of one's own toxic contaminants, with transmitting agents able to ignore the more general spillover effects and—in the case of weapons-grade nuclear materials—threats to global survival associated with such transfers. As long as a substantial portion of the mass public is in a mode where it expects to be able to get whatever it wants wherever and whenever it chooses—regardless of the legality of the transaction—and where the pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit reigns supreme, national governments will be handcuffed in attempts to control these flows.

As states become increasingly aware of their vulnerability to these ominous transactions, national governments face intensifying cross-cutting pressures from within and without, leading to more finger-pointing and tensions both among governments and between a government and its people. Given that clandestine arms and unsanctioned hazardous materials flow mainly from the North to the South, and that illegal migrants and illicit drugs flow principally from the South to the North, security tensions between developed and developing states appear to be particularly likely, with neither side able to claim any moral high ground with respect to its innocence in stimulating these transactions. Under these domestic and international pressures, state regimes may find themselves experiencing declining capacities to govern and possessing declining legitimacy, 103 fueling "a growing privatization of security and violence—in the form of legions of private security guards, the proliferation of small arms among the general population, and the spread of vigilante and ‘self-defense' groups. 104 " This privatization trend would seem to play right into the hands of those facilitating the ominous covert transnational flows.

In the broadest sense, these flows place national governments in a real international relations bind. Basic clashes of values between economic profit and political security and between individual freedom and collective order clearly help to prevent the formulation and implementation of strong sanctions here. Great difficulty exists in distinguishing clearly acceptable from unacceptable commodities in global exchange (the pervasive non-judgmental stand mentioned earlier tends to see everything exchanged among nations as "neutral commodities"): differentiating defensive firearms from assault weapons, legal refugees from illegal migrants, over-the-counter stimulants such as alcohol, tobacco, and coffee from illicit drugs, and "safe" substances from hazardous materials involves considerable ambiguity in the eyes of governments and their citizenry and the international community as a whole. Finally, the reality that such a significant proportion of these flows occurs covertly creates what seems to be a nearly insuperable stumbling block for national governments: if they construct more regulations outlawing the transmission of undesired people and products across boundaries, they run the risk of pushing more of this activity underground, making it even harder to detect, more likely in many ways to have dire effects, and easier for the criminal element to dominate cross-national distribution.

Many other writings addressing this study's topic conclude with an impassioned plea for immediate passage of stricter national policies and strengthened global prohibition regimes to control these ominous covert transnational flows. In contrast, this analysis has attempted to indicate that neither national governments nor the international community is yet in any real position to take meaningful steps in that direction: national hypocrisy and inchoate global rules of the game, buttressed by a value clash about economic freedom versus a secure order, a definitional morass about what is acceptable, and a regulatory system seemingly unable to address effectively covert transnational activity, serve to all but stop any forward movement in its tracks. This near-paralysis faced by individual nation-states and the system as a whole reflects a crucial security gap, one not readily remedied by the immediate enactment of new policies. While there is little doubt that an urgent need exists to confront and reduce these flows, it would appear that prior to policy development there is great utility in pursuing some old-fashioned consensus building on the national and international levels. If frank discussion occurred that led to some common understandings about the scope and priority of the mutual dangers involved and about the pervasive dysfunctional deficiencies linked to national hypocrisy and crippled global rules of the game evident in responses to these dangers, then there would be a solid foundation for coherent concerted action that might cause all of the parties involved in both the demand end and the supply end of these transactions—those who initiate them, those who facilitate them, and those who receive them--really to take notice. Without that discussion, those profiting from the ominous covert transnational flows are probably quite right in viewing the world as their private playground, with token monitors that simply look the other way when stated rules are broken.


Notes:

Note 1: Robert Mandel, The Changing Face of National Security: A Conceptual Analysis (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). Back.

Note 2: Scott B. MacDonald, Dancing on a Volcano: The Latin American Drug Trade (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1988), 5. Back.

Note 3: Astri Suhrke, "Environmental Degradation and Population Flows," Journal of International Affairs, 47 (Winter 1994): 473-496. Back.

Note 4: Xavier Raufer, "Gray Areas: A New Security Threat," Political Warfare (Spring 1992): 2. Back.

Note 5: "Drug Smuggling: Stairway to Heaven," Economist, 328 (August 7, 1993): 29. Back.

Note 6: Johan Galtung, Environment, Development and Military Activity (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1982), 34-41. Back.

Note 7: Louise L. Shelley, "Transnational Organized Crime: An Imminent Threat to the Nation-State?," Journal of International Affairs, 48 (Winter 1995): 465. Back.

Note 8: Ibid., p. 466. Back.

Note 9: Senator John Kerry, The New War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 20. Back.

Note 10: Scott B. MacDonald, "The New ‘Bad Guys': Exploring the Parameters of the Violent New World Order," pp. 41-42, in Max G. Manwaring, ed., Gray Area Phenomena: Confronting the New World Disorder (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). Back.

Note 11: Shelley, 1995, p. 468. Back.

Note 12: Michael T. Klare, "Secret Operatives, Clandestine Trades: The Thriving Black Market for Weapons," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 44 (April 1988): 18-20. Back.

Note 13: "The Covert Arms Trade: The Second-Oldest Profession," Economist, 330 (February 12, 1994): 21. Back.

Note 14: Ibid. Back.

Note 15: R. T. Naylor, "The Structure and Operation of the Modern Arms Black Market," pp. 45-46, in Jeffrey Boutwell, Michael T. Klare, and Laura W. Reed, eds., Lethal Commerce (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1995). Back.

Note 16: Ibid. Back.

Note 17: Ibid.., pp. 48-49. Back.

Note 18: Edward J. Laurance, "The New Gunrunning," Orbis, 33 (Spring 1989): 229-232. Back.

Note 19: Edward J. Laurance, Political Implications of Illegal Arms Exports from the United States," Political Science Quarterly, 107 (Fall 1992): 525. Back.

Note 20: "The Covert Arms Trade," p. 23. Back.

Note 21: Laurance, "The New Gunrunning," p. 225. Back.

Note 22: "The Covert Arms Trade," p. 23. Back.

Note 23: Klare, "Secret Operatives," pp. 16-17; and John Pilger, "Dirty Secrets in Burma," New Statesman & Society, 9 (May 10, 1996): 28. Back.

Note 24: "Arming the IRA: The Libyan Connection," Economist, 314 (March 31, 1990): 19; and "The Covert Arms Trade," p. 21. Back.

Note 25: Frederic S. Pearson, The Global Spread of Arms (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 60-61. Back.

Note 26: "The Covert Arms Trade," p. 21; and Aaron Karp, "The Rise of Black and Gray Markets," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 535 (September 1994): 183-84. Back.

Note 27: "The Covert Arms Trade," pp. 22-23. Back.

Note 28: Robert Mandel, "Exploding Myths About Global Arms Transfers," Paper Presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Toronto, Canada (March 1997): 11-12. Back.

Note 29: Karp, "The Rise of Black and Gray Markets," p. 186. Back.

Note 30: Laurance, "Political Implications," p. 506. Back.

Note 31: Laurance, "The New Gunrunning," pp. 232-35. Back.

Note 32: "Smuggling Chinese: Heroin Substitute," Economist, 327 (May 22, 1993): 33; and "The New Trade in Humans," Economist, 336 (August 5, 1995): 45-46. Back.

Note 33: Kerry, The New War, pp. 135-36. Back.

Note 34: Ibid., p. 136. Back.

Note 35: Michael Renner, Fighting for Survival (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), 103-104. Back.

Note 36: Ethan A. Nadelmann, "Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in International Society," International Organization, 44 (Autumn 1990): 491. Back.

Note 37: Myron Weiner, The Global Migration Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 7-8. Back.

Note 38: Ibid., p. 8. Back.

Note 39: Ibid., pp. 5, 8. Back.

Note 40: Jon Vagy, "Sometimes a Crime: Illegal Immigration and Hong Kong," Crime and Delinquency, 39 (July 1993): 370. Back.

Note 41: Douglas S. Massey nd Kristin E. Espinosa, "What is Driving Mexico-U.S. Migration? A Theoretical, Empirical, and Policy Analysis," American Journal of Sociology, 102 (January 1997): 989-990. Back.

Note 42: "Smuggling Chinese," p. 33; and Kerry, The New War, pp. 136-38. Back.

Note 43: Kerry, The New War, pp. 143-44. Back.

Note 44: Shada Islam and Adam Schwarz, "Double Deal: Pact on Illegal Migrants Paves Way for EU-Hanoi Talks," Far Eastern Economic Review, 158 (February 9, 1995): 28. Back.

Note 45: Kiriro Morita and Suskia Sassen, "The New Illegal Migration in Japan, 1980-1992," International Migration Review, 28 (Spring 1994): 153-162. Back.

Note 46: Suhaini Aznam, "Sabah Cuckoo's Nest: Uncontrolled Migration May Tip Political Balance," Far Eastern Economic Review, 143 (March 16, 1989): 24-26. Back.

Note 47: James Wiley, "Undocumented Aliens and Recognized Refugees: The Right to Work in Costa Rica," International Migration Review, 29 (Summer 1995): 436-37. Back.

Note 48: Robert Mandel, "Perceived Security Threat and the Global Refugee Crisis," Armed Forces & Society, 24 (Fall 1997): 77-103. Back.

Note 49: Kerry, The New War, p. 148. Back.

Note 50 Weiner, The Global Migration Crisis, p. 3. Back.

Note 51: Kerry, The New War, p. 87. Back.

Note 52: Joseph J. Romm, Defining National Security: The Nonmilitary Aspects (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), 9. Back.

Note 53: Renner, Fighting for Survival, p. 192. Back.

Note 54: "Colombia's Drug Business: The Wages of Prohibition," Economist, 333 (December 24, 1994): 22. Back.

Note 55: Kerry, The New War, p. 88. Back.

Note 56: MacDonald, Dancing on a Volcano, pp. 7-8. Back.

Note 57: Nadelmann, "Global Prohibition Regimes," pp. 502-503. Back.

Note 58: Kerry, The New War, p. 106. Back.

Note 59: Romm, Defining National Security, pp. 9-10. Back.

Note 60: "Colombia's Drug Business," p. 21. Back.

Note 61: MacDonald, Dancing on a Volcano, p. 27. Back.

Note 62: Ibid., pp. 28-29. Back.

Note 63: Ibid., pp. 124-34. Back.

Note 64: Kerry, The New War, p. 79. Back.

Note 65: Claire Sterling, Thieves' World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 21. Back.

Note 66: William O. Walker III, "Drug Trafficking in Asia," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 34 (Fall 1992): 210; and Hamish McDonald, "Hooked on Smuggling," Far Eastern Economic Review, 157 (June 9, 1994): 34. Back.

Note 67: Romm, Defining National Security, p. 9. Back.

Note 68: Rafael F. Perl, "United States Andean Drug Policy: Background and Issues for Decisionmakers," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 34 (Fall 1992): 29. Back.

Note 69: Kerry, The New War, pp. 82-83. Back.

Note 70: Ibid., pp. 84-86. Back.

Note 71: Jang B. Singh and V. C. Lakhan, "Business Ethics and the International Trade in Hazardous Wastes," Journal of Business Ethics, 8 (November 1989): 889-890. Back.

Note 72: Sean D. Murphy, "Prospective Liability Regimes and the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes," American Journal of International Law, 88 (January 1994): 25, 29. Back.

Note 73: Singh and Lakhan, "Business Ethics," pp. 889-890; and Brian R. Copeland, "International Trade in Waste Products in the Presence of Illegal Disposal," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 20 (March 1991): 143. Back.

Note 74: Murphy, "Prospective Liability Regimes," p. 30. Back.

Note 75: "Let Them Eat Pollution," Economist, 322 (February 8, 1992): 66; "Pollution and the Poor," Economist, 322 (February 15, 1992): 18-19; and Singh and Lakhan, "Business Ethics," p. 890. Back.

Note 76: Copeland, "International Trade," p. 48. Back. Back.

Note 77: Murphy, "Prospective Liability Regimes," p. 31; and "Uranium, Plutonium, Pandemonium," Economist, 327 (June 5, 1993): 98. Back.

Note 78: Murphy, "Prospective Liability Regimes," p. 25; and Singh and Lakhan, "Business Ethics," p. 889. Back.

Note 79: Singh and Lakhan, "Business Ethics," pp. 889, 895. Back.

Note 80: Kerry, The New War, p. 116; Graham T. Allison, Owen R. Cote, Jr., Richard A. Falkenrath, and Steven E. Miller, Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 7; and "The Plutonium Racket," Economist, 332 (August 20, 1994): 39-40. Back.

Note 81: John P. Sopko, "The Changing Proliferation Threat," Foreign Policy, no. 105 (Winter 1996/97): 10. Back.

Note 82: Murphy, "Prospective Liability Regimes," p. 67. Back.

Note 83: "Toxic Shock," New Statesman & Society, 2 (August 18, 1989): 11. Back.

Note 84: Singh and Lakhan, "Business Ethics," pp. 893, 896. Back.

Note 85: "Muck and Morals," Economist, 336 (September 2, 1995): 61. Back.

Note 86: Allison, Cote, Falkenrath, and Miller, Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy, p. 11. Back.

Note 87: Kerry, The New War, pp. 116-17. Back.

Note 88: Shelley, "Transnational Organized Crime," p. 468. Back.

Note 89: Mandel, "Exploding Myths," pp. 10-14; William D. Hartung, And Weapons for All (New York: HarperPerrenial, 1995), 146; William W. Keller, Arm in Arm (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 11; and Michael T. Klare, American Arms Supermarket (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1984), 27. Back.

Note 90: "Chinese Yearning to Work Free," Economist, 328 (July 24, 1993): 38; "The New Trade in Humans," pp. 45-46; and Vagy, "Sometimes a Crime," p. 372. Back.

Note 91: Romm, Defining National Security, p. 9. Back.

Note 92: Perl, "United States Andean Drug Policy," pp. 25-29. Back.

Note 93: "Colombia's Drug Business," p. 22. Back.

Note 94: Luis Suarez Salazar, "'Drug Trafficking' and Social and Political Conflicts in Latin America," Latin American Perspectives, 20 (Winter 1993): 91. Back.

Note 95: Murphy, "Prospective Liability Regimes," p. 32; Singh and Lakhan, "Business Ethics," pp. 897-98; and "Uranium, Plutonium, Pandemonium," pp. 98-100. Back.

Note 96: "Old Horrors," Economist, 327 (May 29, 1993): 15-16; and Singh and Lakhan, "Business Ethics," 890. Back.

Note 97: "Deadly Secret," Economist, 333 (December 3, 1994): 46. Back.

Note 98: See, for example, Zeev Maoz, Paradoxes of War (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 9. Back.

Note 99: William J. Olson, "The New World Disorder: Governability and Development," p. 9, in Max G. Manwaring, ed., Gray Area Phenomena: Confronting the New World Disorder (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). Back.

Note 100: Max G. Manwaring and Courtney E. Prisk, "The Umbrella of Legitimacy," p. 90, in Max G. Manwaring, ed., Gray Area Phenomena: Confronting the New World Disorder (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). Back.

Note 101: Maoz, Paradoxes of War, p. 327. Back.

Note 102: William McNeill, "Winds of Change," pp. 163-203, in Nicholas X. Rizopoulos, ed., Sea-Changes (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1990). Back.

Note 103: National Strategy Information Center, The Gray Area Phenomenon (Washington, DC: National Strategy Information Center, July, 1992), 8; and Roy Godson and William J. Olson, International Organized Crime: Emerging Threat to U.S. Security (Washington, DC: National Strategy Information Center, August 1993), 18-19. Back.

Note 104: Renner, Fighting for Survival, p. 22. Back.