Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations

by Peter Andreas, Ethan Nadelmann

In this illuminating history that spans past campaigns against piracy and slavery to contemporary campaigns against drug trafficking and transnational terrorism, Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann explain how and why prohibitions and policing practices increasingly extend across borders. The internationalization of crime control is too often described as simply a natural and predictable response to the growth of transnational crime in an age of globalization. Andreas and Nadelmann challenge this conventional view as at best incomplete and at worst misleading. The internationalization of policing, they demonstrate, primarily reflects ambitious efforts by generations of western powers to export their own definitions of "crime," not just for political and economic gain but also in an attempt to promote their own morals to other parts of the world.

A thought-provoking analysis of the historical expansion and recent dramatic acceleration of international crime control, Policing the Globe provides a much-needed bridge between criminal justice and international relations on a topic of crucial public importance.

Genres: Nonfiction, Crime, International Relations

347 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2006

About the author

Peter Andreas is a professor in the Department of Political Science and the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. He was previously an Academy Scholar at Harvard University, a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fellow on International Peace and Security. Andreas has written numerous books, published widely in scholarly journals and policy magazines, presented Congressional testimony, written op-eds for major newspapers, and provided frequent media commentary.

Reviews

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, well-researched guide to the growth of transnational crime control and international police cooperation over the last hundred years. Andreas presents a clear description of the development of extradition regimes and both bilateral and multilateral efforts (via organisations like Europol) to combat transnational crime. Andreas makes a clear point--- while some activities (e.g., smuggling or piracy) have traditionally been regarded as crimes extending past borders, the vast growth in transnational crime in the last fifty years is in no small part a result of defining more and more cross-border activities as crimes--- e.g. money laundering ---as part of the US-led "War on Drugs". Andreas argues that international attitudes toward criminalisation and crime control have been shaped to a large extent by American attitudes and American security needs and interests. Just as the EU has enforced a growing uniformity of criminal law and practice within the new Europe, it has been the US that has largely set the terms of what transnational crime is and how it is dealt with. Andreas presents a clear description of how police agencies cooperate, but devotes too little time to the far more intriguing issue of how effective transnational crime control efforts have been, and whether hard-line US attitudes toward control of crime have distorted a consideration of whether some activities should be criminalised.