Criminalized power structures (CPS) are illicit networks that profit from transactions in black markets and from criminalized state institutions while perpetuating a culture of impunity. The book articulates a typology for assessing the threats of CPS and for implementing appropriate strategies to achieve sustainable peace effectively and efficiently. The international case studies address interventions undertaken either to support the implementation of a peace agreement (i.e., a peace operation) or to stabilize a country entangled in an internal conflict in the context of a power-sharing agreement among key protagonists (i.e., a stability operation). In each of these cases, at least one of the parties to the agreement was a criminalized power structure that was a leading spoiler. The final chapter identifies strategies that are most effective for each type of CPS, including the ways and means (or tools) required for effective conflict transformation. A companion volume, Combating Criminalized Power Structures: A Toolkit, provides practitioners with the means of coping with the challenges posed by CPS.

Criminalized power structures (CPS) are illicit networks that profit from transactions in black markets and from criminalized state institutions while perpetuating a culture of impunity. These criminalized power structures are the predominant spoilers of peace settlements and stability operations. This volume focuses on the means available to practitioners to cope with the challenges posed by CPS along with recommendations for improving their efficacy and an enumeration of the conditions essential for their success. The means range from economic sanctions and border controls to the use of social media and criminal intelligence-led operations. Each step of this toolkit is detailed, explaining what each tool is, how it can be used, which type of CPS it is best suited to address, and what is necessary to ensure success of the peace operations. The effectiveness of the tool is also assessed and its use is illustrated through real life situations, such as international supply chain controls to prevent the looting of natural resources in Western Africa or the intervention of international judges and prosecutors in Kosovo. A companion volume, Criminalized Power Structures: The Overlooked Enemies of Peace, articulates a typology for assessing the threats of CPS illustrated by many case studies.

From the Foreword by General H.R. McMaster: Strategies that weaken illicit power structures and strengthen legitimate state authority are vital to national and international security. As Dr. Henry Kissinger observed, we may be "facing a period in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future." Because threats to security emanate from disorder in areas where governance and rule of law are weak, defeating terrorist, insurgent, and criminal organizations requires integrated efforts not only to attack enemy organizations, but also to strengthen institutions essential to sustainable security. Successful outcomes in armed conflict require confronting illicit networks. A failure to do so effectively frustrated efforts to consolidate gains in Afghanistan and Iraq, and after more than a decade of war and development, the international community and the governments of those countries, continue to contend with the violence and instability that are the result. In Afghanistan, corruption and organized crime networks perpetuate state weakness and undermine the state's ability to cope with the regenerative capacity of the Taliban. The failure to counter militias and Iranian proxies that infiltrated the government and security forces in Iraq led to a return of large scale communal violence and set conditions (along with the Syrian Civil War) for the rise of a terrorist proto-state and a humanitarian catastrophe that has adversely impacted the entire Middle East. These and other cases illustrate how governments and international actors struggle to establish security and rule of law, and reveal incomplete plans and fragmented efforts that fail to address the causes of violence and state weakness. While challenging, success in confronting illicit power structures is not impossible. While still works in progress, successful efforts, such as those in Colombia and Sierra Leone, are the result of integrated diplomatic, military, economic, development, informational, intelligence, and law enforcement efforts directed toward well-defined political outcomes. The case studies and analyses in this volume make clear that understanding the dynamics associated with illicit power and state weakness is essential to preventing or resolving armed conflict. These case studies also point out that confronting illicit power requires coping with political and human dynamics in complex, uncertain environments. People fight today for the same fundamental reasons the Greek historian Thucydides identified nearly 2,500 years ago: fear, honor and interests. They further remind us that that illicit power structures often depend on the perpetuation of violence and the conflict economy. Crafting effective strategies to address the challenge of weak states must begin with an understanding of the factors that drive violence, weaken state authority, and strengthen illicit actors and power structures. Terrorist, insurgent, and criminal networks exploit fear and anger over injustice, portraying themselves as patrons or protectors of a community in competition with others for power, resources, or survival. Thus military and law enforcement capabilities provide only one component of what must be comprehensive, civilian and military approach to confronting illicit power.

This book investigates the history, development, and current state of anti-corruption agencies in Latin America. In recent decades, specialized anti-corruption agencies have sprung up as countries seek to respond to corruption and to counter administrative and political challenges. However, the characteristics, resources, power, and performance of these agencies reflect the political and economic environment in which they operate. This book draws on a range of case studies from across Latin America, considering both national anti-corruption bodies and agencies created and administered by, or in close coordination with, international organizations. Together, these stories demonstrate the importance of the political will of reformers, the private interests of key actors, the organizational space of other agencies, the position of advocacy groups, and the level of support from the public at large. This book will be a key resource for researchers across political science, corruption studies, development, and Latin American Studies. It will also be a valuable guide for policy makers and professionals in NGOs and international organizations working on anti-corruption advocacy and policy advice.

This book analyzes the innovative international intervention instruments against corruption in Central America called Hybrid Anticorruption Agencies or HACAS. The author aims to disclose and explain the decision of the United Nations and the Organization of American States to promote, separately but with a similar rationale, a new strategic approach to fighting corruption through the creation of two HACAS. Specifically, the book examines the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) and the Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH). The CICIG and the MACCIH represent unique cases of anti-corruption hybrid commissions because they combine resources, participants and/or national and international institutions which, in a coherent and integrated manner, strengthen the investigation, prosecution, and punishment of corrupt and criminal acts. The book also studies the HACAS as international instruments not free from risks and limitations.

This book develops a novel approach to peace and conflict studies, through an original application of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida to the post-conflict politics of Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Based on new readings of the peace agreements and the post-conflict political systems, the book goes beyond accounts that present a static picture of ‘fixed divisions’ in these cases. By exploring how formal electoral politics and the informal political spheres of artistic, cultural, judicial and protest movements already contest the politics of division, the book argues that the post-conflict political systems in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina are in a process of deconstruction. The text adds to the Derridean lexicon by developing the idea of a ‘deconstructive conclusion’, which challenges historical understandings of conflicts at the same time as challenging their consequences in the present. The study provides a critical contribution to peacebuilding and International Relations literature, by demonstrating how Derridean concepts can be utilised to provide fresh understandings of conflict and post-conflict situations, as well as allowing for political interventions to be made into these processes.

This book explores the prospects and limits of international intervention in building peace and creating a new state in an ethnically divided society and fragmented international order. The book offers a critical account of the international missions in Kosovo and traces the effectiveness of fluid forms of interventionism. It also explores the co-optation of peace by ethno-nationalist groups and explores how their contradictory perception of peace produced an ungovernable peace, which has been manifested with intractable ethnic antagonisms, state capture, and ignorance of the root causes, drivers, and consequences of the conflict. Under these conditions, prospects for emancipatory peace have not come from external actors, ethno-nationalist elite, and critical resistance movements, but from local and everyday acts of peace formation and agnostic forms for reconciliation. The book proposes an emancipatory agenda for peace in Kosovo embedded on post-ethnic politics and joint commitments to peace, a comprehensive agenda for reconciliation, people-centred security, and peace-enabling external assistance.