Human Security, Transnational Crime and Human Trafficking

Asian and Western Perspectives

Shiro Okubo, Louise Shelley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415437011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136832932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years, drug use, illegal migration and human trafficking have all become more common in Asia, North America and Asia: the problems of organized crime and human trafficking are no longer confined to operating at the traditional regional level. This book fills a gap in the current literature by examining transnational crime, human trafficking and its implications for human security from both Western and Asian perspectives. The book:

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• Provides an outline of the overall picture of organized crime and human trafficking in the contemporary world, examining the current trends and recent developments

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• contrasts the experience and perception of these problems in Asia with those in the West, by analyzing the distinctive Japanese perspective on globalization, human security and transnational crime

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• examines the policy responses of key states and international institutions in Germany, Canada, the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Korea.

This book argues that any effort to combat these crimes requires a response that addresses the welfare of human beings alongside the standard criminal law response. It represents a timely analysis of the increasingly serious problems of transnational crime, human trafficking and security.

Part I

Transnational crime and human security

1 Globalization, human security, and the right to live in peace

Shiro Okubo

Introduction

At the turn of the new century, unexpected events occurred one after another. We have to realize that we are in the midst of a historical transformation, a global structural change named “globalization.” People, goods, capital, information, and technology move and spread across borders with a scale and speed that have never been experienced. Globalization causes many, sometimes serious, changes in politics, economics, society, and culture in individual countries, communities, and regions as well as on the international level.

Along with globalization, people face new types of risks, insecurity, and large-scale threats: civil war and internal armed conflicts; famine, poverty, unemployment, and disease; natural disasters and global environmental change. Expanding transnational organized crime and human trafficking are also part of the negative consequences.

Among various opinions and debates on the features of contemporary globalization, we think the following three perspectives allow us to analyze the chaotic situations surrounding globalization clearly. First, the multifaceted and multidimensional aspects of globalization should be considered in a structural context as a whole. Second, a historical approach would give a useful perspective of developments of globalization. Third, and most important, globalization should be analyzed from the perspective of people whose lives, human rights, and safety are often most vulnerable.

This chapter consists of six sections. Sections 1 and 2 cover present situations: three events at the turn of the century; globalization of the free market; and globalization of democracy. Section 3 follows a “human security” approach to people’s life and safety and traces the emergence and evolution of the “human security” concept in the United Nations and in Japan’s foreign policy. Section 4 argues “freedom from fear and want” as the historical origin of both “human security” and “the right to live in peace” in the Japanese constitution. Section 5 analyzes the emerging process of “the right to live in peace” in post-war Japan and the judiciary.

Three events at the turn of the century

A series of important occurrences that took place at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century surprised us by their scale, rapid pace of development, and the magnitude of their consequences.

The first occurrence was the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, followed by the collapse of socialist states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It gave us a sudden end to the Cold War confrontation with nuclear arms. It appeared at the time that humankind could finally be liberated from fear of the total destruction of the world by a nuclear war. In a longer time perspective, it also appeared to be a decisive turning point in modern history, putting an end to the ideological and regime conflicts between capitalism and socialism that swept over the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹

What actually transpired in the “post-Cold War” era, however, was a chaotic and unstable world; a mono-polar military dominance by the United States was constantly undermined by destabilization in various regions of the world. We have witnessed civil wars and internal conflicts brought about by regional, ethnic, or religious causes—widespread poverty, hunger, refugees, diseases—as well as transnational organized crimes and human trafficking. In addition, we face global environmental changes, contributing to far more serious and larger scale natural disasters than in the past.

The second occurrence of importance was the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, on the United States and the subsequent events. Having been alarmed by the unprecedented assault on its mainland, the United States declared “war on terror” throughout the world. After attacking Afghanistan in retaliation, the United States, together with a “coalition of willing” countries, invaded and occupied Iraq. Brushing aside worldwide objections and protest against the invasion, the United States waged war. The subsequent occupation led to untold suffering by Iraqi citizens, quickly turning into a bottomless pit of confrontations between occupation forces, a resistance movement, and an armed insurgency.

By this invasion, the United States lost the legitimacy and credibility that it had accumulated during and after World War II and by its dedication to establishing freedom and democracy in the world.² The wartime mobilization by the Bush administration went beyond the enforcement of an anti-terrorist strategy to include the abrogation of international agreements such as the ban on nuclear tests, the global warming Kyoto Protocol, and approval for the International Criminal Court. The oppressive pressure against “axis of evil” countries induced them to further nuclear proliferation. The military hegemony and unilateral behavior of the United States did not contribute to peace and stability in the world, but rather caused serious cracks even in U.S. public opinion.

The third occurrence was the economic and financial crisis in fall 2008. The width and the depth of its repercussion cannot yet be determined. Each country adopted its own ad hoc measures. A G-8 summit financial meeting was not sufficient, so a G-20 summit was called. The crisis obviously means a failure of the neoliberal economy spearheaded by global financial firms since the end of the 1970s, but, more profoundly, it reflects a failure of the U.S.-led international financial system since World War II, the Bretton Woods regime. The crisis calls for far more than ad hoc policy interventions. What must be considered is a kind of total strategy to rectify current worldwide poverty and disparity and to deal with global environmental change caused by modern industrialization.

These three occurrences involved and will involve changes across the realms of politics, economies, societies, and cultures, even extending to biological and ecological issues, and may take generations or even centuries to address. They may suggest that we are in the midst of global structural change at the beginning of the new century. What do we need in order to understand the meaning and the characteristics of such a total change? Two tentative viewpoints should be considered.

The first viewpoint is related to our understanding of the multifaceted and multidimensional structure of globalization. There are various opinions but no single definition or theory can explain it. We should consider globalization as a historically dynamic process with inconsistent motion and frictions. In this chapter, we will discuss two aspects of globalization—the free market and democracy—and very briefly analyze their characteristics, historical background, and driving factors.

The second is related to what happens in people’s consciousness in a period of such total change. The unprecedented speed, scale, and multifaceted nature of the changes often leave us struggling to digest each change, unconscious of our place in history.³ As a result, people have an “identity crisis,” not knowing what, why, and where we are heading. To understand the various aspects of contemporary globalization as a whole, we need some basic, original idea or at least a frame of thinking to acknowledge our existence as human beings. I think one possible option is the concept of “human security.”

Two globalizations and the “security” concept

In understanding globalization as a multidimensional and structural formation, there are two underlying driving forces: globalization of the free market and globalization of democracy.

Globalization of the free market

Contemporary globalization has been led by the spread of the free market across borders. Globalization of the free market was accelerated during the late 1970s and 1980s by the policies of “neoliberalism,” Thatcherism in the United Kingdom, and Reaganomics in the United States, which propelled not only privatizations and deregulations within their economies but also global liberalization of trade, investments, and information services. As a result, financial markets and investors came to dominate the world economy. Then, the collapse of the socialist regime decisively designated this free market economy as a global economic system.

Main actors in the global economy are global multinational corporations that have aggressively conducted speculation, mergers and acquisitions, restructurings and reorganizations on a global scale. Susan Strange argued that globalization of the free market caused a structural power shift in security, credit, knowledge and information, and production. She characterized transnational non-state actors as those with “authority beyond the state.”⁴

In developed countries, globalization of the free market started a never-ending pursuit of both more free markets and improved efficiency. By dismantling “welfare states” created after World War II, neoliberalism eventually succeeded in redistributing wealth and power to favor the upper class and increased social inequality and disparity, disturbing the “law and order” of the state.⁵

Developing countries were forced into the world’s market economy through consolidation of accumulated debts and the structural adjustment loans of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Disparity and poverty were spread throughout the world, as evidenced by repeated famines in Africa and accelerated deterioration of the environment in the 1980s. Some states were driven into bankruptcy. On the other hand, countries such as South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan joined the world free market in the 1980s and then China and India emerged as new powers in the 1990s. The uneven economic development and the instability in the world economy impact not only economies but also politics, society, culture, and religion.

The most striking impact of globalization is the transformation of the power structure among nation-state and non-state authorities—in other words, the decline of sovereign nation-states. The balance of power between nation-states with political and military capacity versus multinational corporations and international markets with rapidly expanding social and economic power is tilting toward the latter. Not only multinational corporations but also various non-state organizations, including transnational organized crime, are now powerful actors in international relations. In fact, transnational criminal organizations have grown most rapidly in the process of globalization.⁶ Those non-state authorities have their own raison d’être and various functions that have brought about the “decline” of sovereign nation-states.

Still, the “decline” of nation-states does not necessarily mean the “retreat” of nation-states from international relations, because globalization grows through the concurrent process of rearrangement of national infrastructures and legal systems, including denationalization of governmental institutions. For example, multinational corporations as the main actors of economic globalization are concentrating their vital functions within particular nation-states, asking for and adjusting to governmental policies and regulations. Accordingly, it could be said that while nation-states are maintaining political and military powers, they have to reconfigure their waning traditional powers of sovereignty, and they also must add new roles in the globalization process.⁷

Globalization of democracy

Another globalization force is that of democracy. The globalization of democracy started during the late 1970s and the 1980s when people resisted the oppressive governance of authoritarian regimes. In Asia, despotic rule of the Philippines ended in 1986, and the single-party governance by the Kuomintang in Taiwan collapsed between 1986 and 1989. The Korean military regime finally collapsed in 1987 and moved to democratization in the 1990s, while many Central and South American countries swept away military governments in the 1980s. In South Africa, after a series of popular uprisings and protests, governance by and for whites was finally replaced by majority rule. Then, starting in fall 1989, socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union collapsed one after another.

Although the concept of “democracy” is controversial and multidimensional, we define it as a form of governance in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised substantially by them. Although globalized democracy during the 1980s through the 1990s was mostly pitted against military or authoritative regimes, democracy has been one of the main driving forces of modern history.⁸

Second, the globalization of democracy was realized not only in the form of “governance by the people” but also in the form of constitutional democracy, in which freedom and rights of the people and human dignity are essential components.⁹ The quality of democracy came to be evaluated by the quality and extent of protection of human rights in governance. In the 1990s, an “overlapping consensus”¹⁰ that not democracy in general but...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Transnational crime and human security
• Part II: Transnational organized crime and the legal response
• Part III: Human smuggling and trafficking
• Part IV: Responding to human smuggling and trafficking
• Index