Legalize it? – An International SWP Project Examines How Legal and Illegal Commodity Flows Intersect

Drugs, art, humans, gold – organized criminal networks smuggle illegal products into legal supply chains to then sell them on the European market. Roman Kern and Anne Kathrin Thüringer speak with experts of an international SWP project that takes a closer look at some of these illicit supply chains. Timestamp: 2:55 Mark Shaw, Director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime and renowned expert on international organized crime, talks about the origin and evolution of illicit trade and financial flows and the ways in which both are shaped today. Timestamp: 6:26 Daniel Brombacher, head of the project »Global Partnership on Drug Policies and Development« at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) analyzes the visible and invisible stages of the global drug trade. Timestamp: 11:51 Jan Schubert is currently seconded to the Federal Foreign Office as Desk Officer in the field of international cooperation against Drug Trafficking, Organized Crime, Human Trafficking, Piracy and Corruption and as liaison officer to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). He describes how the civil wars and instability in Iraq and Syria have created attractive spaces for organized criminal networks to engage in the illicit trade of art works. Timestamp: 17:59 Dr Judith Vorrath is a Senior Associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) with a focus on transnational organized crime linked to armed violence and fragility. As she investigates illegal human trafficking, particularly of women from southern Nigeria, she sheds light on the connection to local traditions and spiritual rituals, as well as the colonial slave trade and even current migration movements. Timestamp: 25:14 Dr Melanie Müller is a Senior Associate with a focus on Southern Africa at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) and the head of the research project “Approaches for Transnational Governance of Sustainable Commodity Supply Chains”. Her research examines illegal gold mining in South Africa and the resulting transnational illicit trade and financial flows. Publications Mark Shaw Mark Shaw, Give us more guns. How South Africa's Gangs were Armed, Johannesburg/Cape Town/London: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2021, https://www.jonathanball.co.za/component/virtuemart/give-us-more-guns-how-south-africa-s-gangs-were-armed Tuesday Reitano and Mark Shaw, Criminal Contagion: How Mafias Gangsters and Scammers Profit from a Pandemic, C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd., 2021, https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/criminal-contagion/ Daniel Brombacher: Daniel Brombacher and Sarah David, From Alternative Development to Development-Oriented Drug Policies, Graduate Institute Geneva, 12, 2020, https://journals.openedition.org/poldev/3711 Daniel Brombacher, Jan Westerbarkei, From Alternative Development to Sustainable Development: The Role of Development Within the Global Drug Control Regime, Policy Commentary, Journal of Illicit Economies and Development 1(1), 2018: 89–98, https://jied.lse.ac.uk/articles/10.31389/jied.12/ Melanie Müller: Melanie Müller, Armin Paasch, When only the coal counts: German co-responsibility for human rights in the South African coal sector, Johannesburg: ActionAid South Africa, 2016 Judith Vorrath: Judith Vorrath, Verena Zoppei, Africa–EU relations on organized crime: between securitization and fragmentation, In: Ariadna Ripoll Servent/Florian Trauner (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Justice and Home Affairs Research, Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 323-335 Judith Vorrath, Organized Crime and Development, Challenges and Policy Options in West Africa’s Fragile States, SWP Research Paper, 2015, https://www.swp-berlin.org/en/publication/organized-crime-and-development This podcast was created as part of a workshop funded by the German Foreign Office.