Foundations: Understanding the Convergence Literature. As articulated by Admiral (Ret.) James Stavridis, convergence is the “dark side of globalization.”[1] This is where low-level illicit actors of all sorts make use of common global information and transportation architectures, and hence begin to emulate and even partner with each other. There are two key elements of this line of thought — 1) common infrastructure and the erosion of governance, and 2) the collision of illicit economics and radical ideology.[2] The latter will occupy the bulk of our time, and will lead us to a rudimentary general working theory of contested governance.

Material Elements: Criminal-Insurgency-Terror Infrastructure Overlap.To the first point, there are three levels where illicit markets and violent extremist organizations (VEO) can share infrastructure. The deepest level is explicit cooperation, which is the most involved and straight-forward, but not necessarily the most dangerous. The intermediate layer, shared knowledge and practices, may qualify for that distinction: knowledge of border holes, access to smuggling and safe house networks, etc. facilitates unscripted nefarious activity. It is the fluidity and unpredictability of this layer that makes it dangerous. Finally, on the least deliberate level, criminality erodes governance, which lowers the tide for all sorts of badness as well. We explore these three presently:

Explicit Cooperation. The simplest level is explicit cooperation — where terror groups are selling illicit drugs, or mafia are contracted by violent extremists to smuggle weapons, or groups are doing both political violence and illicit economics all at once. This level of cooperation is deceptively complex — the temptation is to assume that all bad things go together, the interaction between illicit actors depends on specific needs of both organizations and the governance context. These relationships are rarely as simple as they seem. For instance, while a smuggling ring could plausibly serve both terror infiltrators and human trafficking, a number of incompatible constraints would generally prohibit a ring that does one from doing the other. Human trafficking requires an invasive commodification and exploitation process, which involves a number of security vulnerabilities for the ring that might deter a terrorist. Similarly, a human trafficking ring most likely could not afford to weather the kind of heat that a terror association would bring.

These problems come to a head over terror-narcotics connections. Insurgent groups like the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the Taliban engage in illicit narcotic production. A simple model would attempt to eradicate these illicit crops in order to dry up the funding base for these groups, but such a policy often backfires. As Vanda Felbab-Brown argues, a state needs strong governance in an area if it is going to successfully conduct an eradication campaign, and the whole point of an insurgency is to weaken (and thereby eventually replace) state governance. Therefore, eradication campaigns in poorly governed areas are likely to aid the insurgents by alienating the population, which exacerbates the problem.[3] The relationship between terror, crime and governance must therefore be more complex.

Shared Knowledge. The second layer of convergence looks at shared practices and knowledge. To continue our trafficking-terror case, while one ring is unlikely to engage in both due to incompatible security concerns, knowledge of low-risk cross-border roots would be equally useful to both. Every time any group penetrates a border, some knowledge is generated about how to do so again in the future. Similarly, if a drug trafficker learns how to use ‘bit-coin’ as a virtual hawala to throw law enforcement money-chasers off his scent, that tactic is now a part of illicit corporate knowledge and plausibly accessible by terrorists. Sharing tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) does not require nearly as much commitment and does not impose the same degree of vulnerabilities, especially when shared across globalized information infrastructures. Do-it-yourself improvised explosive device (IED) websites speak to this point.[4] This ‘shared practices’ layer broadly parallels our previous insights about structural efficiency and ‘market-like’ forms from network theory.

Assertion: Shared practices and knowledge are key centers of gravity for illicit market suppression. Tactical learning and dissemination are functions of structural configurations, with ‘market-like’ structures performing best. The suppression regime has the lever of interdiction to de-optimize these structures.

Corrosive Anti-Governance. The third layer of convergence considers the corrosive effect of violent political and criminal actors on governance. Crime will tend to corrupt state officials, terror disrupts confidence, and insurgencies disrupt infrastructure; all of these are bad for the efficient provision of government functions. We will explore this point at length later, but it seems uncontroversial that illicit actors of all sorts reinforce each other in this third and most abstract layer. This broadly parallels our intuitions about the necessity of social support in illicit market suppression.

Assertion: Governance is a key center of gravity for illicit market suppression. Governance allows the suppressor to bring force to bear, and supports demand restructuring. Poor governance allows the illicit market to thrive by filling their coffers through illicit demand. The suppression regime must extend some form of governance into the spaces occupied by the illicit market; the illicit market will attempt to erode governance and thereby expand.

Altogether, these three points of logistical convergence illustrate that there are some natural equities shared between myriad criminal groups and violent political actors. This is common-sensical, but we can therefore discuss these overlaps while avoiding cheap rhetorical moves that place all the badguys in the same ‘league of evil.’ This is rarely true — just as in traditional states compete, cooperate and clash in conflict, illicit actors too have no permanent allies or enemies, but permanent interests. So human trafficking and terrorism might go together in one circumstance — for instance, ISIS engages in aspects of both, but is able to because of territorial control — but not in others, where the time and interaction required to exploit trafficked people presents more of a liability than an asset to a group.

In general, following Shapiro’s Terrorist Dilemma, we should expect to see low-exposure criminality (clandestine laundering) for groups with high security concerns, and high-profit and high-exposure crimes (narcotics production, human trafficking) for groups with low security concerns. The most common way to reduce security concerns is by gaining some degree of territorial control, which means that we need to consider governance. In this, we find the greatest contribution of the convergence literature — crime is effectively illicit economics, which is low politics, and the violence deployed toward some ideological end, as in terrorism or insurgent shadow governance, is high politics. Together, these paint a mirror image of the state and civil society — in order to understand convergence, we must understand governance.

Legitimacy Elements: A Rudimentary Theory of Contested Governance. To explore this facet of convergence, we’ll use arguments from mafia scholar Diego Gambetta and Mao Zedong’s theories of revolutionary warfare.[5] Mao argues that guerrilla war takes three phases. First, the revolutionaries organize and prepare; second, they conduct terror attacks and transition to an insurgency; finally, they carry out a conventional war to consolidate control. Each phase increases the degree of the governance enjoyed by the revolutionary group. However, governance requires answering legions of practical, banal questions about service provision and the like. Accordingly, each phase adds more low-politics distributional concerns to the high-politics ideology-centric revolutionary group.

Max Weber’s work on legitimacy explains this centralizing, stabilizing tendency.[6] In a simplified version of his model, there are two forms of power — coercive and legitimate. Coercive power is the raw exercise of compulsion, which enables you to get exactly what you want, but at a high price. Legitimacy makes power go much farther by embedded it in a web of nested bargains. However, with each of these bargains, you promise to abide within certain restraints, which stabilizes things for everyone but limits your freedom of maneuver. Therefore, as the revolutionary group becomes more successful, it enters into these sorts of civil society bargains in order to efficiently extend its power. Accordingly, they lose some of their revolutionary fervor as they have to put it into practice. This results in a mix ideological high politics with distributional low politics that resembles statecraft.

The opposite process, low-politics group moving toward high-politics, is described in Gambetta’s analysis of the Sicilian mafia.[7] Describing the Mafia as a provider of private protection, he presents a model of organized crime that looks remarkably like statecraft. Channeling Charles Tilly’s “state as a protection racket,”[8] the various Italian organized crime groups perform protection and contract enforcement, which are core tasks of the state. Since illicit groups do not directly have access to these state resources, larger illicit groups can trade on their reputation to fill these functions.

Starting as a pure low politics group — solely about making money — these groups venture into higher politics in order to better make money. Contract enforcement and protection are cheaper mechanisms of conflict resolution than combat, but in order to provide these things, one must venture into ideology to explain why one group is authorized to perform these functions. Climbing even further into high politics, corruption provides an excellent means to hijack the state. This allows a criminal group to extract rents from the system, perform banking functions, and use legal protection strategies. At some point, the criminal network becomes indifferentiable from the state. As Mao’s model moves from pure high politics into a mix of high and low politics, Gambetta’s model moves from pure low politics toward a similar mix of politics.

This model provides two key assumptions that undergird a model of illicit market suppression. First, illicit market suppression is fundamentally about governance. To a very broad reading of regime theory, any place where people conduct business has some degree of governance. The problem with the West African coastal seas during late-phase Atlantic slave trade suppression was not so much a lack of governance, but governance of the wrong kind. Slave traders had strong expectations about how business was conducted in this space, and the British continuously struggled to supplant that governance with one more conducive toward their ends.

To this point, one key strategy debate in the British suppression centered on the relationship between sovereignty and governance. The British approach took a tack of increasing governance over the commons through shared sovereignty.[9] They did so through international courts and treaty networks.[10] The Americans, allergic to the idea of participating in any sort of shared sovereignty, preferred an approach that attacked slaver governance by removing from them the protections of sovereign flags. This piracy-based approach treated slavers as hostis humanis generis (‘enemies of all humanity,’) and therefore protected under no flag.[11]

Assertion: The core struggle in both COIN and Counter-TCO is about governance. Both sides need to build governance conducive to their ends, and their ends are mutually exclusive.

This model parallels an intuition from our building blocks: the natural advantage of the suppressor is the ability to marshal forces, but they are constrained in how they use them. The legitimacy bargains that underwrite the state allow it to achieve tremendous economies of force, but it comes at a cost of the limitations imposed by those bargains. Accountability, oversight and political constraints all dramatically reduce the suppressor’s ability to innovate and adapt, but they legitimacy it provides grants deep pockets so long as public support for the campaign remains. Conversely, the natural advantage of the illicit market is its adaptability, but it cannot win a pitched battle against the state because of the state’s ability to draw on incomparable reinforcements. Continuing the resource exchange ratios analogy, the state’s large-scale legitimacy advantage gives it an excellent ‘check-writing ratio,’ and the adaptability of the illicit market gives it excellent ‘check-cashing ratios’ on small scales. (These erode as the scale increases, which result in stalemates and nested bargains.)

Assertion: The suppression regime enjoys significant advantages in its ability to marshal forces (‘check-writing ratio’), but disadvantages in small-scale innovation (‘check-cashing ratio.’) The converse is true for the illicit market.