The rapid improvement of information and communication technologies has contributed to the globalization of threat posed by transnational organized crime. Such a development has influenced the paradigm of international relations, as the “war on Mafia” now constitutes a significant agenda for both national security and international cooperation in many countries. The empowerment of transnational crime is widely recognized as a threat to national sovereignty and human security. As their tentacles reach beyond national borders, the cross-border activities of criminal network are increasingly difficult to counter at individual state level. Against this backdrop, many regional groupings have determined to promote regional cooperation against transnational crime. This article attempts to clarify the case of Southeast Asia where ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) has endeavored to establish its regional governance against transnational crime.
We first discuss the post-Cold War reshaping of national security discourse in which the war on Mafia has emerged as a “new” security agenda, replacing the old war on communism. This article suggests that securitizing the war on Mafia requires a perspective to identify the non-state actor as the legitimate subject of national security operations, and the difficulty to do so may create a discursive space to interpret “national threat” in arbitrary and manipulative ways by political elites.
We then analyze the situation in Southeast Asia where the spread of poverty in many societies and enduring corruption at different levels of government have contributed to the expansion and regionalization of transnational crime, particularly since the Asian economic crisis in 1997. By examining six types of cross-border criminal activities, we elucidate the impact of transnational criminal activities in Southeast Asia. ASEAN leaders have shown their commitment to promote regional cooperation against transnational crime as a “common security threat.” We argue, however, that these commitments have not always been transformed into effective policies, thanks largely to the gap in institutional capacity among member countries in dealing with transnational crime. Consequently, the gap has effectively prevented ASEAN from consolidating the interpretation of “new security threat” and it has significantly provided a political space to manipulate the security discourse.
To explore this dynamism, we examine two cases of Indonesia and Thailand. In these countries, political elites have reinvented such a space to promote an authoritarian agenda in a democratic polity, and the elite capture of “global security norm” has resulted in an apparent setback of democratic reform. We argue that these examples are embedded in the dilemma of securitizing transnational crime in Southeast Asia, thus it is important to bring the analysis of domestic politics into the study of regional security cooperation which has a tendency of paying less attention to the aspect of power politics.
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