Expert Workshop Report: Research on Criminal Governance Trends in Cape Town & Dakar

Date: 2012-04-18 to 2012-04-19

Venue: Cape Town

ATTENDEES

• DrEtannibi Alemika, University of Jos, Nigeria
• Major General Arendse, Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (DPCI), South African Police Service (SAPS)
• Dr Daryl Balia, Institute for Security Studies (ISS)
• Dr Stephen Ellis, Leiden University, Netherlands
• Mr Charles Goredema, ISS
• Dr Peter Kagwanja, African Policy Institute, Nairobi, Kenya
• Mr Irvine Kinnes, University of Cape Town
• Ms Anine Kriegler, ISS
• Colonel Magagamala, DPCI, SAPS
• Major General Matakata, DPCI, SAPS
• Dr RamataMolo-Thioune, International Development Research Centre, Canada
• Ms Nobuntu Mtwa, ISS
• Brigadier General Maissa Niang, Ministry of Armed Forces, Senegal
• Colonel Retief, DPCI, SAPS
• Dr Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán, Scientific Vortex Foundation, Colombia
• Ms Erin Torkelson, ISS
• Mr Hennie van Vuuren, ISS

INTRODUCTION

This report summarises the discussions and outcomes of the workshop titled Research on Criminal Governance Trends in Cape Town and Dakar, held in Cape Town, South Africa on the 18^th and 19^thof April, 2012.

The workshop provided an opportunity to showcase the project framework and adopted research methodology to peers and experts in the field of criminal governance. The Institute for Security Studies (ISS) began work on the project in the second half of 2011 with funding and logistical support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The research focuses on the relationship between organised crime and governance within large African urban centres.The purpose of the project is to explore how criminal governance structures embody distinct forms of authority that, on the one hand, flourish in spaces of weak or ineffective governance, but on the other hand, are still connected to and dependent upon the legitimacy of the state. Participants were asked to offer their expert advice on the project, to review its methodological shortcomings, raiseissues for exploration, and present their comparative research.

WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS

Opening Remarks

Mr Charles Goredema, who leads the project, welcomed participants to the workshop and introduced the project, Mapping criminal governance in African cities. He pointed out that, as a result of previous research by the ISS, it had become clear that little was known about the relationship between criminal markets and the spaces in which these markets tend to be centred. Even less was known of the dynamics of the ways in which criminal networks exercise authority and legitimacy, sometimes in the place of the state, and occasionally instead of legitimate business. The initial phase of the project, which comprised extensive literature review on the effects of organised crime on governance, revealed that there is scanty academic work on this dimension of organised crime. More generally, the literature review has suggested that:

The subsequent field research, which is in its early stages, is informed by the literature review and was expected to benefit from suggestions at the workshop. It would be conducted initially in areas where criminal market activity has been identified to be concentrated, and supported with data from research on money laundering, which is expected to direct research to areas beyond the informal sector, and to embedded public sector bureaucrats that have become part of criminal governance structures. Significant attention will be devoted to the question of legitimacy, specifically where drug-lords or community gangs have come to be considered more loyal to community interests than official structures. Furthermore, this research will examine the efficacy of some of the responses to the encroachment of criminal governance into urban public spaces. Ultimately, the goal will be to derive analytical insights on issues of importance to development policy and academic communities.

Dr Ramata Molo-Thioune introduced participants to the mandate of the IDRC, which is “to initiate, encourage, support and conduct funding research into the problems of the developing regions of the world and into the means for applying and adapting scientific, technical and other knowledge to the economic and social advancement of those regions.” This mandate is partly fulfilled through its Governance, Security and Justice (GSJ) programme initiative. This programme is concerned with governance arrangements, which establish the “rules of the game” by which power is exercised, as well as security and justice, which are both survival functions of the state and the expected functions demanded by citizens. It supports research that explores these issues within the context of co-existing formal and informal institutions, and the ways in which they may act as either complements or substitutes. The project, Mapping criminal governance in African cities, in seeking to promote democracy, human rights and good governance in developing nations, fits squarely within the mandate of both the IDRC and its GSJ programme. It is expected that this project will contribute to the understanding by all authorities of the emerging risks and challenges linked to the increase of criminality in African cities, and of its underlying dynamics and hidden actors, including women. It is also expected to help strengthen the capacity and skills of researchers, civil society networks and mandated authorities to respond effectively to criminal governance, and decrease urban violence in Africa’s mega-cities. To this end, Dr Molo-Thioune wished the participants a fruitful workshop.

Presentation of the ISS Criminal Governance Project

Ms Erin Torkelson,drawing on an extensive literature review, began by identifying some of the major gaps in and challenges to the existing research on organised crime. Chief among these are:

This project hopes to address these issues through a focus on five regional political and economic powerhouses: Cape Town, Dakar, Nairobi, Lagos and Kinshasa. Although organised crime is ubiquitous, this focus on cities is justified by the observation that the changing social geography in Africa is such that its cities continue to undergo massive urbanisation, are becoming concentrated sites of both capital and unrest, and are becoming increasingly linked up with global crime networks and forms of authority that skip over the nation-state level.

In this context, some organised crime groups have come to provide certain governance functions traditionally associated with the state, such as the enforcement of a monopoly on violence, the collection of “taxes” and the provision of welfare, in order to secure loyalty from their communities. As the state becomes increasingly informalised and some crime increasingly formalised, the concept of legitimacy becomes fractured. The reality is that most organised crime exists neither entirely within nor entirely outside the state, but is the outcome of the activities of a broadly constituted network of powerful people.

The suggestion is that this project will use the concept of “criminal sovereignties” in order to map claims of authority. This may be a more useful term than “criminal governance”, which is relatively narrow, revolves around the state, and excludes groups that are anti-social in nature. Sovereignty, on the other hand, refers quite broadly to the ability to exert one’s will through power over some form of territory. Sovereignty is not an absolute, but must be constituted through the exercise of certain functions, a performance rooted upon force. The concept of sovereignty is thus applicable to a broad range of actors, including organised political actors, mobs, terrorists, churches, community leaders and organised criminals.

Sovereignty is a particularly useful concept for capturing criminal claims to authority in the modern context, in which state sovereignty is declining in favour of market sovereignty, as contended by Hardt and Negri. In a context in which the market is sovereign, garnering part of the market garners you sovereignty (e.g. an important drug smuggling network has dominated the global drug market, and can claim sovereignty over that portion of the market). Of course, there are many spaces, particularly in post-colonial countries where the global market has not yet assumed sovereignty. In these places, plural sovereignties have been constituted based on a number of historical factors.

The responses to these criminal sovereigns often perpetuate their authority and fail to account for what empowers and sustains them, as well as their transnational character. Stronger state policing is ineffective if the rest of state capacity is eroding, while citizen policing often turns to vigilantism. The question, then, is how can these emerging sovereignties be tracked and responded to.

Ms Torkelson asked participants to reflect on a number of questions throughout the rest of the proceedings, namely:

• To what degree does the abdication of the state of certain of its functions facilitate the emergence or legitimacy of criminal sovereigns? 
• How are criminal sovereigns taking advantage of globalization and new economic practices to link into extra-territorial commodity or supply chains, and power networks?
• How do criminal sovereigns establish authority over a given territory (physical or not) and constituency? How is this authority sustained over time? What forms of reciprocity and allegiance are demanded? What access to participation, welfare and protection is offered?
• How should the relationship between criminal sovereigns and the state be understood – competitive, supportive, mutually reinforcing? What factors determine which of these relationships will emerge? How are criminal sovereigns used as state proxies, how are state officials used as proxies for criminal sovereigns? What power struggles and negotiations take place between them?
• What is the nature of the relationship between criminal sovereigns and the so-called ‘licit’ private sector?
• How do youth, ethnicity, religion and gender factor into criminal sovereignties?
• How do new information communications technologies support the development of criminal sovereignties, or increase the ability of the state to respond?
• What options exist to restore order without excessive police violence, the provision of private security, or community policing (which occasionally leads to vigilantism)? How could a real politic of civil society actors combat criminal sovereigns?
• The World Development Report of 2011 implies that development is the solution to organised crime. Does this mean that the phenomenon in developed countries is somehow essentially dissimilar?

Finally, Ms Torkelson encouraged participants’ comments and contributions, especially regarding the proposed framework for research.

Responses to the ISS presentation

Dr Ettanibi Alemika expressed his enthusiasm for the project, especially praising its focus on cities. He argued that, in Africa, local rather than national government is often a more relevant and dynamic site of change. Criminal groups often enjoy local support, and locality is a crucial relationship for legitimacy. It should also be remembered, however, that cities are not autonomous units.

Dr Stephen Ellis said that he found the project very interesting, and that nothing like it was being conducted, to his knowledge, anywhere else. He suggested that, although the focus on empirical studies in a small number of cities was correct, the task of finding a useful analytical framework was more crucial. This is because of the growing gap between theory and reality, which leaves researchers to struggle with out of date concepts, because the language of diplomacy doesn’t reflect reality. This is made all the more difficult because of the challenges to gathering data on organised crime. Dr Ellis said that it remains to be seenwhetherthe concept of sovereignty can fill the theory gap. He also pointed out that, in law, sovereignty refers partly to the right to mint currency. This is interesting in the light that the world’s currency is now based on nothing at all, and is an ephemeral concept.

Mr Irvin Kinnes was not convinced by the sovereignty argument. He argued that the concept of governance was preferable, and that it neednot be referential to the state. Still, what the concept of sovereignty captures well is that the sustainability of organised crime is based on the contestation of power.

Brigadier General Maissa Niang agreed with Mr Kinnes that the concept of gangs as claimants of sovereignty could be difficult to accept.

Dr Peter Kagwanja stressed that the concept of criminal sovereignty may be problematic in the many cases where state sovereignty remains intact. He rather argues that criminals are transforming the civic space and its engagement with the state. The relationship between the informal sector and the state is not necessarily competitive, and neither necessarily has any aspirations regarding the sphere of the other. Criminal sovereignty may still be useful for thinking about state behaviour, but it does not capture the changes being observed in the non-state sector.

Ms Torkelson replied that the concept of criminal sovereignty does is not imply that these actors are contesting legal sovereignty or acting in opposition to the state. She conceded that the word sovereignty was thus being used ina slightly new way, and essentially intended to link to the concept of power.

Mr Goredema added that criminals themselves redefine sovereignty in their behaviour. While criminals ignore or circumvent territorial boundaries, state structures continue to base their observance of sovereignty on out-dated ideas, that stress political and jurisdictional competence over territory. Practices based on these ideas cause recurrent difficulties in dealing with transnational organised crime,The concept of criminal sovereignties will enable state authorities to better understand how criminal organisations define themselves.

Dr Alemika countered that a group that doesnot recognise legitimate sovereignty does not necessarily constitute a sovereign. The concept of criminal sovereignty may well be usefully applicable to local dynamics and to those pockets that the state does not control and where people’s first loyalty is to the gangs, but it should not be generalised to the entire concept of sovereignty over an entire state territory.

Presentations by Workshop Participants: Comparative case studies and responses

Mr Kinnes presented on his experience with the gang problem in Cape Town, the forms of governance it embodies and its impact on the police. He drew a number of parallels between the police and the gangs in terms of institutional values and behaviour. The two groups make use of similar strategies for sustaining power, including the use of violence, symbolism and the co-optation of informers. Policing has undergone broad changes since 1994, and that many roles and spaces have come to be contested by gangs. Gangs have been so successful at corruption that they have taken over whole communities, and they have also in the last 10 years become involved in a broader range of activities, including property development, entertainment and the sex work industry. There are on-going contests for legitimacy and power in communities,in which police are expected to perform their duties, but which gangs have come to occupy. It is unclear exactly how much involvement there is in formal politics, but there have certainly been stories of gangs funding politicians. These links may no longer be as strong, however, in the wake of police reorganisation and the emergence of a new gang leadership that is younger, less organised and more brutal.

Major General Arendse’s presentation focused on the challenges to effective police work against organised crime in South Africa. He explained that the first problem is thatpolice performance assessments are linked to statistics. The result is that police are incentivised simply to make arrests, even of peripheral criminal actors, with little regard as to the overall impact of their operations. There is an inadequate understanding of criminal networks and their connectivity to communities in which they operate. A second problem is that police targets are driven by timelines. The latter are connected to electoral time frames. Results generally tend to be expected within 5 years, in time for the next election. While criminal networks and gangs have the luxury to plan long term; the police do not. This means that police information may be superficial, often resulting indisproportionate or inappropriate responses. A third problem is the lack of social cohesion within communities. Poor South African communities are wracked by rapid urbanisation, resulting in unsettled living and creating conflict. Gangsters are able to exploit this lack of social cohesion, both in targeting victims and recruitment. There is a need for much more detailed research into criminals, freed from the impossible constraints of short timeframes and selective statistics.

Dr Kagwanja added that research done over the long-term research could quickly lose its usefulness. Good knowledge acquisition takes a great deal of time. This is why, although the police may not have the luxury of researching broader trends in crime,they need to stay in touch with researchers who do have that knowledge. It is important to merge these sites of theory and practical policy implementation into a symbiotic relationship.

Brigadier General Niang based his presentation on research for his dissertation on criminality in Senegal from 1981 to 1991. The research was separated into three main parts: characteristics of criminality,explanations for criminality, andtheories of controlling criminality. The research found that criminality was derived from youth unemployment, the failure of social control and the failure of family control. In the urban environment, crime took the form of murder, armed robbery, theft, assault, hijacking, physical assault on women, counterfeit documents, fraud, and drug trafficking.In the outlying areas and suburbs, the crime typologies mainly included physical assault, hijacking, and cannabis and amphetamine trafficking. The two arms of the gendarmerie responsible for crime are the armed forces and the internal affairs police. These two forces, in an attempt to reduce crime in this period, sought better collaboration with chiefs in villages, who were used to gather intelligence and prevent crime. A hotline was also established so that the entire citizenry could provide intelligence to police services. Some of the major obstacles in fighting crime include a lack of political will and poor allocation of resources to police. Dakar is a very large city, which, in Brigadier General Niang’s opinion, suffers from amoderate level criminality.

Dr Stephen Ellis gave a presentation that was primarily historical. One of the challenges of the research on criminal governance is that the whole conceptual field of sovereignty and crime is quite new, especially in the post-colony. After decolonisation, many of the old colonial institutions of power, wealth and organisation were replicated into new networks of corruption, to be exploited by multinationals in search of “offshore” havens. A crucial shiftoccurred in the 1970s, when the US delinked the dollar from gold, and money became an abstract concept, leveraged as a concrete element of policy pressure. This was related to a qualitative change in the nature and scale of corruption, linked into currencies, and a deepening of the relationship between politics and crime. This was exacerbated by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the 1980s, which spread its criminal elites globally.The standard political concepts have thus been left increasingly at odds with reality. An interesting aspect of this is the fact that the vastly increased cost of elections may be partly behind the increasing connection between crime and politics. Our system of sovereignty, which dates from 1945, is starting to show its age and might not work so well anymore. New powers, of a new kind, are emerging. The potential impact of China on Africa may be to make it a space where people from all over the world do illicit business. It is unclear that the current concept of international rule of law based on sovereignties is going to be continued.

Dr Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán presented on his workin mapping criminal state capture, or, what is becoming a more accurate term in parts of Latin America, ‘co-opted state reconfiguration.’ The criminal learning process in Colombia, which experimented with contestation of presidential politics and confrontation with the state, has resulted in a situation where local, municipal and national legislative campaigns have been infiltrated to the point where they are thoroughly integrated into narco-paramilitary networks. The result of this incredibly sophisticated infiltration is that bribery and violence are no longer the primary means of co-opting state agentsinto criminal networks: they have been replaced by administrative agreements between increasingly indistinguishable actors.This has rendered the analysis of crime using legal/illegal, formal/informal, and state/non-state dichotomies useless. The concept of organised crime is thus becoming inadequate, and should rather only be thought of in terms of criminal networks, which encompass both state and non-state actors. The Colombian citizenry no longer see this processas qualitatively different from the normal political process and it is broadly tolerated for bringing relative peace. It has become so legitimised that agreements between criminals and state actors are even put in writing and signed.

Dr Alemika’s presentation was based on his experience in Nigeria, where the trend is to call crimes by name (e.g. trafficking), rather than group them together as “organised crime”. This draws the focus away from structural factors, like the connection between military rule and the lack of accountability. Corruption has become so organised and entrenched at the highest levels that people donot recognise it. A problem is that most research is not determined by the national interest, but by international pressure and donor popularity. Sometimes there is an over-emphasis on trans nationality, at the expense of taking note of locality and the local rationality in the context of historical patterns. The very concept of organised crime is problematic, poorly defined and understood, and often approached with unhelpful preconceptions. Compounding this bias in the basis of research are the difficulties involved in measurement, especially in the absence of police cooperation.

Dr Kagwanja presented his case study on politically sponsored violence in Kenya, most notably around the 2007/8 elections. Militias such as the Mungiki, supported and sometimes deployed by the top political elite as a means to deal with political challenges, have become increasingly salient in the changing political landscape in Africa.This may be partly because the state, left vulnerable after the end of the Cold War reduced levels of funding for dealing homogeneously with both criminal and political challenges, and in some cases decided to form informal cooperative relationships with criminal groups. It thus lost its monopoly on violence, opening the space for even more actors to emerge. The result is a network of semi-criminal, semi-political groups that are after protection, profit and power. Counter-intuitively, this has happened in what is a strong and fairly stable state. Criminality thrives not because the state is weak, but because of its changing relationship with society. The state has limited scope to control the civil space, while these groups hide behind a human rights discourse. Mungiki emerged in this context, as a reaction to failed agricultural policies and unemployment, and, once urbanised, became a cover for embedded criminality. The dominant discourse suggests that such groups will disappear with greater economic development, but the reality is that Kenya’s massive growth has done nothing to decrease youth poverty, and there has been no real transformation.There have been major efforts to reform the system in a way as to recognise and manage diversity, restore faith in the criminal justice system and move the focus towards stressing continental, rather than ethnic, national or global citizenship. These militias should not be banned; rather, they should be provided with non-criminal modes of subsistence, to allow them to return to their roots as social movements.

Stakeholder profile and analysis

Mr Goredema laid out a matrix of sources of information and possible beneficiaries of the research. Sources included police services, tax collection services, companies registries, estate agents, the private legal profession, civil society structures combatting crime, correctional services, churches, the media, formal and informal traders’ associations etc. Each source was matched with a brief description of its key repository of data, type of data and limitations. For police services, for example, the key repository of data was given as “Detectives, crime intelligence officers, senior officers familiar with predatory and market based commercial crime”; the type of data was “Historical crime statistics, crime patterns and trends, production and distribution of proceeds of crime, criminal network identities, case experiences and existing measures”; the limitations given were “Might not be comprehensive (will not record unreported crimes), limited penetration analysis – may overlook destination and downstream use of proceeds of crime, may be reluctant to divulge pending cases, may play down levels of crime.” Participants made numerous useful contributions to the matrix.

Mr Goredema explained some of the potential ethical concerns involved, for example around confidentiality of information, obtaining the parental consent in the case of minors, and allowing some sources time to see the final result before publications.

Colonel Retief raised concerns about what would be done with incriminating information, especially regarding crime yet to be committed. General discussion then followed on the difficulty of balancing the interests of expanding knowledge and protecting society. One suggestion was to try to provide the police with general information about sites where danger could be expected, but to avoid incriminating any individuals named by sources. Concerns were also raised about the possibility of data being subpoenaed by courts,with another suggestion being that journalists, who in some countries are offered certain legal protections, could be employed for some sensitive research.

Analysing and connecting crime networks

Mr Goredema introduced the subject of the use of information and communications technology, and argued that its relevance to organised crimeis threefold: it can be of help to criminals, it can be a tool for combating criminal governance, and it can be a tool for research.

Dr Salcedo-Albarán gave a demonstration and explanation of his method of mapping criminal networks with computer software. He showed how the structure observed in a criminal organisation reflects the kind of questions asked and the kind of data being considered. A single network can be mapped in many different ways depending, for example, on whether you want to draw attention to the most connected or the most important individuals.What needs to be determined, however, is the type of agent, the type of relationship, the degree of centralisation, network resilience, and institutional connections. All have implications for enforcement. There are a number of useful ways of capturing the existence, type and intensity of relationships within criminal networks.

General discussion was held regarding the ways in which Dr Salcedo-Albarán’s methods might be adapted to South African and other African contexts.

Dr Ellis’s comment was that we live in a world that for historical reasons is structured around the idea that the basis of social and political order is the state. So the very concept of crime is referential to the state. This means that, in some sense, what the state does cannot be illegal. A few bad apples can be dealt with without bringing into question the whole structure. But when the state itself is deeply criminalised, this poses huge theoretical and methodological problems.

Conversation on research methodology

Ms Anine Kriegler gave a presentation on the role of gender in organised crime. She argued that explaining the overwhelming role of gender in determining criminality, once done along sexual essentialist or misogynist lines, has received increasingly sophisticated focus in the last 50 years. Organised criminal violence against and exploitation of women is common, both for economic reasons and because organised crime groups, especially gangs, are often a means of displaying masculinity. On the other hand, some women can receive protection and rewards from their association with gangsters. But there is also evidence that manywomen have long been either aggressively opting out of the criminal lifestyle or, increasingly, opting in in their own right. One of the difficulties in mainstreaming gender in crime research is that every one of the existing theories was developed with total blindness to gender. It may be that many of the same factors determine male and female criminality,but the “add women and stir” approach may be inadequateat capturing the different location of women within social power structures. Feminist research methods tend to emphasise qualitative, historical and subjectivist approaches. But the most obvious step to constructing a gender aware model of organised crime is to actually talk to women criminals, victims and community members in the course of research. Gender is still far from mainstreamed in organised crime research, and, given that it remains the single most powerful determinant of criminality, failure to engage with it seriously undermines the research exercise.

General discussion was held on the mainstreaming of gender in organised rime research.

Dr Ramata Molo-Thioune reiterated that what is necessary is integrating gender analysis in research, not just adding it on as an afterthought. This means that gender must be taken into consideration in theoretical frameworks, methodologies and outcomes.

CONCLUSION

The Expert Workshop was a place where researchers, practitioners and academic experts on organised crime met to contribute to the foundation of the ISS project, Mapping criminal governance in African cities, and to share theirperspectives in the area of organised crime research. The group was largely enthusiastic about the project and especially supportive of the paradigm shift away from dichotomies of state/non-state, legal/illegal, formal/informal, greed/grievance etc. The workshop ended with a brief statement on the way forward with respect to the field research. Research outputs will be evaluated by an advisory group, which was established during the workshop.