Columbia International Affairs Online
CIAO DATE: 3/5/2008
A Contemporary Challenge to State Sovereignty: Gangs and Other Illicit Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) in Central America, El Salvador, Mexico, Jamaica, and Brazil
December 2007
Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College
Abstract
In this monograph, Dr. Max Manwaring builds on his 2005 SSI monograph, Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency, and illustrates gang and Transnational Criminal Organization (TCO) linkage to instability and its aftermath. He explains that gang-generated instability leads to threats to national, regional, and global security, nation-state sovereignty, failing and failed states, and a “clash of civilizations.” Thus, whether a gang or another TCO is specifically a criminal or an insurgent type organization is irrelevant. The putative objective of all these illegal nonstate entities─taken together, the analytical commonality that directly links gangs, TCOs, and insurgents─is to neutralize, control, or depose governments to assure their own commercial or ideological expectations. In this connection, gangs and their various possible allies (the gang phenomenon) are attempting to ensure that they have maximum freedom of movement and action within and between “sovereign” national territories. These objectives translate into more than an implicit political agenda.
