Gangland killings: Violent nonstate actors and naive policies are destabilizing the globe
A constant stream of news headlines illustrates the wave of rising global instability, from the descent of Haiti into gang rule and rising cartel violence in Mexico and South America to the war in Gaza and unrelenting attacks by Houthi rebels on global shipping.
Global instability is clearly on the rise. Among the principal culprits are criminal organizations and other violent nonstate actors. Gangs and violent groups are seeing a resurgence across much of the world, bringing terrorism and even collapse both to historically stable nations and to countries with long-standing security challenges.
Transnational criminal organizations number in the thousands and span the globe, controlling illicit industries that combined exceed most European economies. The global illegal drug trade alone represents upward of $650 billion a year in illicit value, while human trafficking is estimated at over $150 billion. This revenue has enabled many criminal groups and other violent nonstate actors to expand dramatically, equipping themselves with weapons and technology sufficient to outgun most police forces and rival a well-resourced military.
The threat of gangs and transnational organized crime is not new. Even factors like their sponsorship by corrupt officials and rogue authoritarian states are not novel developments. What, then, is driving the apparent wave of global instability? Of course, countries across the world all have their own unique context, and many face materially different challenges when it comes to violent nonstate actors.
However, there are also some key, shared factors underlying the recent wave of violent nonstate actors. A mix of policy decisions, a changing and more interconnected global environment, and the onset of uncontrolled migration crises are empowering violent nonstate actors and driving a new period of crisis. To regain control, policymakers in the U.S. and around the world will have to recommit to defending the rule of law and confronting criminal threats.
Policy choices: From enforcement to enabling
A primary driver of the outgrowth of organized crime is a fundamental shift in the way many governments approach criminality. In the recent past, tough-on-crime policies that favored proactive enforcement against everything from street crime to cartel drug trafficking were the norm. However, governments around the world are increasingly abandoning these policies as a mix of ideological, misguided, and even corrupt motivations.
Progressive activists, academics, and politicians in the West and beyond have long pushed an effort to change policing and security policy radically, often attacking the legitimacy of police, counternarcotic initiatives, and the so-called war on drugs. Instead, they call for treating even organized crime as an economic development issue at its core, to which the only appropriate response is to deliver economic and humanitarian aid. In large part, many nations are now seeing the consequences of the success of these advocates as governments enact policies that de-emphasize law enforcement and imprisonment and dismantle the international counternarcotic consensus.
Most people are aware of this effort’s latest manifestation in the United States, where progressive prosecutors and legislators have cut funding for police forces, implemented bail reform, and reduced sentences even for violent crimes. However, similar approaches and policies have also become increasingly prominent abroad, including in countries that face far more dire criminal threats.
In Colombia, the world’s top producer of cocaine, far-left President Gustavo Petro has called for ending the so-called drug war and implemented an aid-centric approach to combating cocaine production and trafficking. At the same time, Petro has severely restricted the offensive operations of the Colombian military against the country’s powerful narco-terrorist guerrillas.
In Mexico, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, another critic of the “war on drugs,” has pursued a “hugs, not bullets” approach to the country’s drug cartels over the last six years. This largely empty strategy relies on increasing social spending in the country while limiting military operations against the cartels and actively dismantling U.S.-Mexico security cooperation.--->READ MORE HERE
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