Progress in Human Geography

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Book Review: The illicit global economy and state power

Michael Watts
Prog Hum Geogr 2001; 25; 492
DOI: 10.1177/030913250102500314
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492

Book reviews

Durkheimian perspectives on socio-spatial

exclusion, especially in Britain and France if not
elsewhere. Despite these criticism, this is a particularly rich text and I remained sympathetic to
its arguments. Byrnes work should prove
compulsory reading for any critical and
nuanced view of social exclusion.
Michael Samers
University of Liverpool
Freire, P. 1977: Cultural action for freedom. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

Friman, R.H. and Andreas, P., editors, 1999: The

illicit global economy and state power. New
York: Rowman and Littlefield. viii + 207 pp.
US$65.00 cloth, US$22.95 paper. ISBN: 0 8476
9303 1 cloth, 0 8476 9304 X paper.
In 1999, two researchers at the University of
California, Berkeley, founded Berkeley Organs
Watch, an independent human rights
orientated research and documentation centre
devoted to the study of the growing global
market for organs, tissues and other body
parts (http://sunsite, berkeley, edu/biotech/
organswatch). The fact that human kidneys are
sold to settle a debt in Bangladesh, or that
organs are smuggled out of China, taken from
prison inmates, for use in organ transplant
operations in Dallas, is indicative of a now
massive illicit trade in body parts. Yet, as
Andreas and Friman show, this is simply the
edge of a vast global criminal economy (the
Economic and Social Council of the United
Nations has already held several World
Ministerial Conferences on organized transnational crime and the International Labor
Organization attempts to monitor some aspects
of illegal trade). Illegal drugs alone account for
over US$500 billion in sales each year, but the
inventory of commodities embraces a wider
array of illicit activities including weapons,
nuclear and other wastes, children, illegal
immigrants, money laundering and endangered
species, and prostitutes. Friman and Andreas
define the illicit economy in somewhat narrow
terms, and tend to focus less on the historical
precedents of specific trades, services and
production systems than on the contemporary
politics, international relations and, to a certain
extent, the networks of criminal activity. Most of

the contributions to the volume speak to

political and regulatory question, and do so by
engaging with the question of so-called state
retreat and whether and how the global
criminal economy and the power of its non-state
actors (drug cartels) is a threat to state
regulatory power, authority and stability.
Chapters focus empirically on hazardous
wastes, narcotics, money laundering and crime
networks. Shelley argues in Chapter 2 that
transnational crime groups have displaced the
state to the extent that widespread non-state
authoritarianism as a form of governance is in
the offing. Eric Helleiner examines illicit
financial dealings to show how the state retreat
hypothesis is problematic and how states
with international regulatory agencies have
responded institutionally to money laundering.
Similarly, Jennifer Clapps interesting account of
toxic dumping explores differing regulatory
regimes and identifies several actors (the role of
non-state actors, structural position in the global
economy, the power of industrial capital)
shaping the patterns of regulation. The final
three chapters explore the contradictions of neoliberal reform and the capacity of the state to
police the new sets of illicit activities which
appear in their wake. Andreas explores this
question for Mexico, Walker details the failings
of the Colombian drug policy (and how drugs
become wrapped up with domestic civil violence on the one side and international relations
on the other), and Friman shows how Japanese
crime networks have actually blocked the
development of certain markets and of foreign
competition in key sectors of the economy.
There is now a vast literature on criminality of
various sorts, much necessarily of a journalistic
nature. Friman and Andreas make no attempt to
review or integrate such work into their book,
but rather focus on the quite limited (and to my
mind rather uninteresting) question of
criminality and state retreat. Some of the better
case studies Clapp, Walker, Friman both
provide interesting ethnographic details and
move toward other more compelling questions
(the nature of criminal networks, the intersection of crime and domestic politics, and the
hybrid entities which emerge as state, capital
and crime syndicates link up). A more powerful
and better introduction could have anchored the
chapters in a more useful way. This is a solid
contribution, but more than anything else it
points to the need for a more sophisticated

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Book reviews

theorization of crime, and what in an African

context has been called the rise of the felonious
state. Some of the complex relations between
crime, organized syndicates, illicit trade and
war require an approach which combines the
best of investigative journalism, ethnography
and comparative political economy. There is
little of this on offer in this book or indeed
anywhere and one awaits the sort of ambitious
study that Manuel Castells sketched in his End of
the millennium volume to provide the sort of
account of the global illicit economy that this
book aspires to.
Michael Watts
University of California, Berkeley
Gallent, N. and Tewdwr-Jones, M. 2000: Rural
second homes in Europe: examining housing
supply and planning control. Aldershot: Ashgate.
x + 166 pp. 37.50 cloth. ISBN: 1 84014 582 X.
Back in the 1960s, when disposable incomes
were rising rapidly, British rural planners
expressed concern at the growth of second
homes. Farmhouses were being converted into
secondary residences at an alarming rate and
weekend cottages were mushrooming in
cherished coastal areas and countryside. Official
statistics in France and Scandinavia enabled
patterns of second-home growth to be charted.
No such data existed for the UK, but investigations were undertaken by several county
planning authorities and the Countryside
Commission launched an enquiry which would
rely heavily on case studies. All these investigations noted both advantages and disadvantages
of second homes. Ruined cottages were restored
and some expenditure benefited local traders,
but landscapes were degraded by intrusive construction and most purchases were made in
urban shops. Rates and local taxes on second
homes generated only a slight income. In
weekenders country, house prices rose far
beyond what young rural couples could afford.
Local cultures were eroded and especially so in
Welsh-speaking Wales where some activists
resorted to arson. Planners contemplated ways
of curtailing mass development of second
homes through tax controls or change-of-use
restrictions.
In 1977, the late Professor Terry Coppock
assembled a set of essays covering all these

493

points and offering a reasonable international

perspective. His edited volume, Second homes:
curse or blessing? (Oxford: Pergamon), also
included a note on the implications of economic
downturn. The meteoric rise of second homes
that was anticipated in the UK simply failed to
materialize following the oil crisis of 1973.
Further European publications exploited a
wider bibliography, distinguished various
rationales for acquisition (in terms of short-,
medium- and long-term use), and identified the
importance of inheriting farmhouses for
conversion to secondary use and of cultural
factors to explain spatial patterns of second
homes. Since 1977, publishing on this topic has
quietened down, perhaps because there is little
new to say; however, two new avenues may be
recognized. Researchers in the UK explored
second homes in the total structure of local
housing markets and traced the opportunities of
various housing classes. Other investigators on
both sides of the English Channel noted the
importance of foreign (essentially British and
Dutch) purchasers in boosting second-home
numbers in the Dordogne, Normandy and other
districts.
Against this background, Gallent and
Tewdwr-Jones have produced their book. It
began as a desk-study review commissioned by
Gwynedd County Council which seeks to
explore problems of data deficiency, to review
past studies, to highlight conditions elsewhere
in Europe, and to consider ways to
accommodate or to control second-home
development. Ten chapters trace the origins of
second-home growth, ownership and demand,
economic costs and benefits, environmental and
social impacts, European perspectives on policy,
responses in the UK, and case studies of local
rural change. Of course, this book is fundamentally a review, but the reader is constantly asking
how the findings of previous scholars are being
enhanced. Regrettably, I found little that was
new and I was surprised that some of the bibliographical items listed in Coppocks collection
appear not to have been followed up. For
example, Chapter 6 on European perspectives
summarized some but not all available material;
neither did it seek out information on Italy or
Ireland. Chapter 7 was more promising, in that
it clearly identified a sequence of housing policy
options and development controls, as was
Chapter 8, which traced two unsuccessful
attempts in 1981 and 1988 by Welsh Members of

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