Traffick: The Illicit Movement of People and Things

231 Pages·2005·0.68 MB·English

by  Gargi Bhattacharyya

Traffick
The Illicit Movement
of People and Things
Gargi Bhattacharyya
P
Pluto Press
LONDON (cid:127) ANN ARBOR, MI
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First published 2005 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Gargi Bhattacharyya 2005
The right of Gargi Bhattacharyya to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 2048 1 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 2047 3 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Acknowledgements
Writing books can be a painful business – by the time you are able to
piece together the narrative, you are all too aware of how little you
know. At the same time, getting to write as part of my job can feel
like a privilege, particularly when the world is so troubling. The last
few years have been distressing times for many of us, so I have been
pleased to have this chance to have a think about things.
While writing this, I benefi ted from discussions with colleagues
and students at the universities of Jadavpur and Dhaka. I thank
both institutions for their hospitality. Thanks also go to everyone
at Pluto Press, for their encouragement and patience throughout
this project.
As always, I am indebted to a whole host of people. Especial thanks
go to my students at the University of Birmingham, with whom I
fi rst discussed many of these ideas; to Matt Waddup, who won’t
remember, for a conversation about the left’s addiction to conspiracy
theories that is in the background of much of this work; to Khademul
Haque for our discussions of the impact of globalisation on various
parts of the developing world; to Stanheed Butt for our ongoing
debate about global events and local political choices; to Manju who
reminded me that the moment when the powerful are most insistent
about asserting their absolute power may be the moment when that
power is crumbling; to Sonali for all of our shared horror at what
has been happening around us and our discussions about how this
could be explained and linked to other recent events; and, most of
all, to Dilip who kindly and diligently read the draft of this work,
despite his antipathy to extended prose. I hope you feel like I fi nally
learned something worth knowing.
vi
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 How Did We Get Here? 1
2 Underbelly of the Global 31
3 Winning the Cold War: The Power of Organised Crime
in the Global Economy 61
4 Drugs, Territory and Transnational Networks 90
5 Nuclear Holocaust or Drive-by Shooting? Arms in the
New World Economy 122
6 Circulating Bodies in the Global Marketplace 153
Conclusion: Violent Endings and New Beginnings 189
Bibliography 197
Index 214
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1
How Did We Get Here?
When I fi rst started to plan this project, in the summer of 2001, few
people I met seemed to agree with my suggestion that we were living
through a step-change in the rhythm of globalisation. I wasn’t yet
confi dent about the parameters of the book, and the account I could
give of the tangled interconnections between the trades in arms,
drugs and people seemed as old as human trade itself. Nothing new
in that seedy world, certainly no sign of a new phase of globalised
relations. Then, from September 2001, everyone started to talk about
the need to regulate global movements, of the dangers of untraceable
transnational transactions, of the urgent need to put a break on
globalisation. It has since been hard to escape the suggestion, made
by all kinds of people in a whole range of places, that we are in a new
era where we must learn to regulate and contain the excesses of our
insistently interdependent world (for some examples see Amin, 2003;
Brennan, 2003; Mertes, 2004). We may not have agreed a method
for doing this, or a membership for this imagined regulatory body,
or even an ultimate goal – but that fi rst shift in consciousness, the
one that says that there are dangers in leaving global processes to
regulate themselves, has hit home hard. What follows is an account
of how we come to this place.
Sometimes, when reading famous attempts to narrativise the
tumultuous events of the nineteenth century that seek to register what
it felt like to be alive in this best and worst of times, I have wondered
what it must have been like to live through these world-changing
processes without any sense of where things are going or how they
might end. We present-day readers approach these documents – the
novels and the political treaties, the famous essays, the diaries, the
amateur investigations that form the basis of social science as we
know it – with the lazy seen-it-all-before of our hindsight. We have
no doubts about how it ends. Of course, it ends with us.
The massive social changes that swept across Europe in the
nineteenth century seem to us to be no more than the building
blocks of our everyday reality. The transitions to becoming urban,
industrial, literate, governed by the state, internationally networked
1
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2 Traffick
and nationally identifi ed – all of these cataclysmic changes now
represent no more than the most tedious and predictable components
of contemporary life in the West. For the contemporary reader, it is
hard to imagine that the world has ever been anything otherwise.
But something is lost in that easy acceptance of what is. Certainly,
our imaginative grasp of the process of change is dampened by an
unwillingness to consider that things could have been different,
and, by all accounts, once were so. How can we understand epochal
change unless we have some way to access that breathless uncertainty,
the mixture of fear and anticipation, the jitters and rejiggings that
come from things being as yet undecided? This work argues that we
are all living through some wondrous and horrifi c world changes
– and that attempts at understanding what is happening must make
space for both the wonder and the horror of our times.
When I fi rst read Marshall Berman’s groundbreaking account of
cultural change, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I was struck by the
sense of high excitement that pervaded this study of the cultures
of modernity. Although this cultural production emerges from the
most turbulent times, and runs parallel to immense and intense
barbarism, there is something important about acknowledging that
sense of excitement. Most of all, I took that elation as a sign that
things were not yet decided. Berman himself writes in this vein of
the modern voice:
It is a voice that knows pain and dread, but believes in its power to come
through. Grave danger is everywhere, and may strike at any moment, but
not even the deepest wounds can stop the fl ow and overfl ow of its energy.
It is ironic and contradictory, polyphonic and dialectical, denouncing modern
life in the name of values that modernity itself has created, hoping – often
against hope – that the modernities of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow
will heal the wounds that wreck the modern men and women of today.
(Berman, 1982, 1988, 23)
That heightened sense of simultaneous possibility and danger is
Berman’s chosen subject. His argument that modernity, in all the
many varied processes that this term includes, at once renders us
hopelessly broken and endlessly powerful, always torn between
mourning what has been lost and welcoming what could be, embodies
the doubleness of modern experience. The suggestion that all that is
solid melts into air is both a threat and a promise. Everything known
and certain in the world, the good, the bad and the indifferent, drifts
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How Did We Get Here? 3
away leaving us without any of the comfort of knowing where we
are or of being at home. Yet that uncanny sense of rootlessness also
promises that the shape of the world and our destiny in it are yet to
be written. Anything can happen and there is no way of knowing
whether that anything will be good or bad – only that our modern
consciousness tells us that it is ours to shape:
To be modern is to fi nd ourselves in an environment that promises us
adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world
– and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have,
everything we know, everything we are. (Berman, 1982, 1988, 15)
We are now passing through a time of similarly tumultuous change.
I am not making a case here for the end of modernity, and neither is
this a belated addition to the fractious debates about postmodernity
(see for example Bauman, 1997; Crook, Pakulski and Waters, 1992).
Rather, the parallel I wish to draw is with that feeling of living
through huge and unpredictable change. Perhaps this is an extension
of the same long process, with all that is solid still melting into air.
It is certainly arguable that the multiple processes that are gathered
together as globalisation represent a continuation of the seemingly
endless refi nement of modernity. That long discussion is beyond the
scope of this project. Instead, my interest is in our ability to register
and understand these changes as we live through them. I hope that
what follows goes some way towards registering this moment, and
offering some clues towards its understanding, while recognising
that its end is not yet decided.
Inevitably, this work shows the infl uence of the anti-capitalist
movement, and especially of the intellectual renaissance that has
emerged in resistance to globalisation (Gills, 2000; Klein, 2000;
Mertes, 2004). However, the present study is not quite in the tradition
of these anti-corporate critiques. There is a resonance with this other
work, and some points of political agreement, but my primary
goal here is to construct a framework for understanding. There is
something uncomfortable about identifying your enemies too easily
and too quickly. The teacher in me is concerned that we register the
complexity of the situation, even as we line up in our respective
teams. In the end, I want to argue that understanding needs to be, in
part at least, distinct from political allegiance, although I hope that
there will also be some informative relation between the two.
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4 Traffick
The other characteristic that distinguishes this work from much
other related literature is my wish to register something of the
excitement of the globalising process. The chapters that follow
focus on various extremes of human hardship and danger. The
underbelly of globalism is not a pretty thing, except in the terms of
the exploitative anti-glamour that gets off on death and suffering. But
there is something missing from any account of the global integration
of the shadows that does not make space for the sense of adventure
and possibility that is also apparent. For this reason the discussion
to come tries to register both the horror and the elation of what we
are living through.
CHAOS AND ORDER
The strange and exciting processes of globalisation can be characterised
as an ongoing and irresolvable battle between forces of chaos and
forces of order. Of course, the discussion of globalisation has more
often concentrated on the apparently chaotic aspects of this era. So
we learn, with some sense of relief, that the era of increasing global
integration decentres us all. No more master subjects of empire, now
even the rich and powerful have become vulnerable to forces beyond
their control (Sardar, 1998).
This is the account of globalisation as ‘accidental’. Here the
economy grows in unexpected and unplanned ways and we have no
choice but to live with the consequences of this cultural earthquake.
Here globalisation has not been subject to planning or conscious
development by any party; it is portrayed as an anti-human force,
resistant to control or intervention. In this telling, the various
attempts by human beings to co-operate at an international level
– be this in terms of political agreement or economic contract – come
to be seen as the antithesis of globalisation.
Against this, I shall argue that the globalisation we encounter
today is a product of earlier and ongoing international aspirations.
The chaos has been a byproduct of one style of ordering. In fact, the
chaos ensures that the order can be maintained.
Many of the debates about globalisation have seemed to assume
that it is akin to a natural disaster, a strange event that happens to us
and which we can only hope to survive. Although some brave souls
have attempted to suggest that perhaps these happenings are not
inevitable, the notion that globalisation could be halted or turned
back has been ridiculed as unrealistic and Luddite.
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How Did We Get Here? 5
My interest is not in halting or reversing these processes. Whatever
the many and extreme deprivations that have resulted from
movements within the global economy, it is not the case that the
poor were better served by what happened before this. There is no
state of grace to which we can return, as usual. Instead, along with
many others, my interest is more in the possibility of adapting and
reshaping globalisation in order that it might better meet the needs
of ordinary people all over the world. This is one of those pesky
lessons of modernity – any better tomorrow must come out of the
debris of today.
However, the main focus of this book is the notion that the global
structures we inhabit have not emerged spontaneously, inevitably,
and without historical context. In fact, others have argued quite
the contrary, namely, that globalisation represents a plan for world
domination. Mark Rupert, for instance, argues that the whole debate
about globalisation and its emergence has been conducted in deeply
ideological terms that mask the political project of a particular neo-
liberal vision of global integration:
There is no reason to believe that liberal globalization is ineluctable. Contrary
to much of the evolutionary imagery or technological determinism which is
often invoked to explain it … globalization has been neither spontaneous
nor inevitable; it has been the political project of an identifi able constellation
of dominant social forces and it has been, and continues to be, politically
problematic and contestable. (Rupert, 2000, 42)
While I agree with some aspects of this account, in that the formal
institutions and processes of economic integration have been part of
an explicit plan instigated by a self-proclaimed interest group, the
implication that the multi-layered processes of globalisation can be
explained away as a conspiracy by the powerful is problematic, to say
the least. Technology may not be determining, but technology has
played an important role in shaping the manner of global integration.
It may be true that the metaphor of an unstoppable evolution
has formed part of the propaganda of neo-liberalism, but global
integration has been shaped by more complex and contradictory
forces than this embodiment of capitalist will. Even if the powerful
have a plan, history will always complicate its implementation. We
have been living through a time when the forces of globalisation
have seemed to belong exclusively to the rich and powerful. As the
world changes, it can feel as if ordinary people everywhere have
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