Countering Illicit Trade: The Politics of Criminal Information Sharing

• In Event: Poster Session: International Collaboration & Canadian Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: International Collaboration

Abstract

Border control — a quintessential territorial state function — is no longer border-bound. Rather, states increasingly exchange information to police inbound goods and people long before they arrive at national borders. This paper focuses on one important manifestation of this little studied global transformation: criminal information sharing between customs agencies to secure international trade from transnational threats. Agreements formalizing this exchange of criminal information have proliferated from 37 in 1990 to nearly 800 as of 2022, and their dramatic spread has often occurred across geopolitical fault lines. Yet criminal information is not ubiquitous. China’s customs agency, for example, only shares criminal intelligence with 15 percent of the world’s countries, including minor trade partners like Argentina, Uruguay, and Albania but not larger trade partners – and regional neighbors – like Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand. The United States has agreements in force with 77 countries, including China and Russia, but over half of the world remains outside its orbit, including so-called valued counter-terrorism partners like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. What explains these puzzling patterns of cooperation? When do states sign criminal information sharing agreements to police global trade, and why do they partner with some countries and not others?

I answer this question by combining a large-N observational study using original dyadic panel-data with cross-national semi-structured interviews with law enforcement and intelligence officials. I show that demand for cooperation deriving from the prospect of joint gains does not foretell an adequate supply of trust: the expectation that cooperation will not be exploited to secure the gains of one state at the expense of the other. I argue that states use “relational cues” — information deduced from the structure of relationships in which an actor is embedded — to make judgements about the trustworthiness of potential partners, which helps explain the timing of criminal information sharing agreements.

Author

• Isabella Bellezza, Brown Univeristy