Wanted: crime in International Relations

Abstract

This article aims to understand the politics of the criteria through which crime has come to be constructed as a legitimate object of knowledge within the field of International Relations (IR). First, we show that discussions on “new wars” and “transnational organized crime” take up crime as an object of IR only insofar as it crosses national borders. Next, we go through approaches on global policing and on the security-development nexus, showing that these analyses remain wedded to border-crossing as a criterium of objectification. The article then turns to literatures exploring the war/crime boundary and the work of transnational technocracies to pose questions both to the inside/outside boundary organizing IR and to the set of agents involved in processes of criminalization. By reading the interconnectedness between State, penal apparatus, and the international, we argue that the control of populations is a condition of possibility of the international – and vice-versa. Thus, the article confronts the erasure of the “domestic” work of the penal apparatus as not concerning the discipline of IR and encourages engagements with critical studies on criminology as an entry point to interpret processes of criminalization and their connection with practices of inclusion/exclusion in global politics.