Introduction : migration, smuggling and the illicit global economy

Abstract

Widespread concern over the convergence of human smuggling with other illicit businesses – such as drug trade, human trafficking, and so on – has legitimized increasing restrictive migration policy in Europe as elsewhere. Our special issue counters the idea that the interaction of smuggling with other illicit trades is a case of top-down market convergence in a highly globalized context marked by the rise of increasingly sophisticated transnational criminal organizations and the demise of the state. We argue that these markets’ interactions constitute – more often than not – examples of the expansion of precarity amid limited capacities for mobility emerging from border and trade enforcement and control. In other words, we contend here that what strikes observers as instances of illicit market convergence can often be explained through the notion of “markets of dispossession” – socio-economic and cultural mechanisms that, while illicit, stigmatized or criminalized, allow for the mobility and survival of growing numbers of people around the world. In so doing, we acknowledge the increasing interaction between smuggling and other crimes, but we invite for a more complex understanding of the role of migrants in a highly unequal global word, where unprecedented numbers of people face increasing constraints to move on their own