...understood trigger state responses, this article reverses that common-sense assumption. It foregrounds the "response" and suggests that the construction of transnational crime threat provides a productive fiction, establishing a rhetorical platform for the transformation and extension of the coercive capacities of states. Changes in state coercive capacities have occurred incrementally in the three decades preceding 2001, but escalated markedly after the September 2001 attacks on the United States.

Critiques of transnational crime responses tend to focus on their ineffectiveness or costs. For example, Margaret Beare's (2003: xi) introduction to an edition of critical reflections on transnational crime advises that the collection "most plainly" asks the reader to judge "at what cost" the various enforcement strategies are being applied. A focus on costs is useful for describing and understanding the negative impacts of countermeasures. It cannot, however, explain the resilience of the countermeasures in the face of evidence, often overwhelming, of their failure. While acknowledging that countermeasures are ineffective, often counterproductive, and costly both in human and financial terms, this article focuses instead on the ways that notions of transnational crime, particularly terrorism, have successfully developed, maintained, and extended social, political, and economic hierarchies between and within states. This essay looks not at what the countermeasures cost, but at what or who benefits from them.

Transnational Crime and the Border

Transnational crime necessarily implicates a border between national states (Reichel, 2005: xiii-xv). The border breach that is part and parcel of transnational crime conceptually mirrors the blurring and blending of the borders between the functions of the police and military. In liberal democracies such as Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the national border has served as a dividing line between the police and military functions. Traditionally, the former has been associated with internal issues of crime and disorder and the latter with defense against external enemies (McCulloch, 2001; Hocking, 2003). The increase in concern over transnational crime in the past 30 years and the parallel rise in countermeasures has involved an incremental and progressive blending of military and policing functions. This blurring has not been subject to the sustained criminological attention it deserves. This is partly because the blurring of the internal and external functions of the state challenges disciplinary boundaries. Criminology has traditionally been concerned with projections of state power within borders through the operations of law enforcement and internal criminal justice systems. In contrast, international relations and security studies have been concerned with the external projections of state power in the form of overlapping issues of national security, foreign policy, and military operations and threats.

Despite the progressive and now well-established border breach between the two spheres, there is a tendency within criminology to think in terms of either national security or criminal justice. Writing about the contemporary response to terrorism in a chapter published in 2005, Jonathan White asks whether terrorism should "be handled by the criminal justice system or should it be considered with the framework of national security?" He states further that "many countries, including the United States, have yet to answer this question" (White, 2005: 68). This is not accurate. The response from the United States and other countries, like Australia, is loud and clear and it is not either-or but an increasingly indistinguishable and intermeshed combination of both. National security and criminal justice are increasingly blended in hybrid military and policing responses. The current "war on terror" has an inside/outside nature, with the result that "securitization" at home parallels closely war abroad, so that the war's two fronts simultaneously echo and foretell each other (Kaplan, 2003; McCulloch, 2004a). Although external wars have always had domestic consequences, the "war on terror" has accelerated and intensified to an unprecedented degree the blending and collapsing between inside and outside.

Consistent with this blending of domestic and foreign policy, like police and military functions are also intertwined and blended. In this context, criminal justice concerns are being used increasingly as a tool of foreign policy. Andreas and Price (2001), writing about this tendency before the September 11 attacks, comment on the "long arm" of U.S. criminal justice policy and how it had extended, particularly in relation to the "war on drugs," as a Trojan horse for foreign policy goals. Setting out the U.S. national security strategy in 2002, President George Bush (2002) argued that "today, the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is diminishing." Beare, commenting on post-September 11 transnational crime countermeasures, observes that "what we are experiencing is a hijacking of criminal justice ... to meet political and strategic ends" (2003: xii; see also McSherry, 2004). While there is no denying that the criminal justice system has always met political ends, Beare's comment alludes to a major shift in criminal justice under transnational crime frameworks from the "low politics" of managing internal relations of class, race, and gender toward the "high politics" of managing global power politics (see Andreas, 2003: 79, on the shift from low to high politics).

Criminology has been interested in policing and law enforcement as part of the criminal justice system, but has focused less on the military, which has largely been considered the remit of security studies or international relations. There are studies on the militarization of policing (McCulloch, 2001; Jefferson, 1990; Kraska and Kappeler,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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