Dark Commerce: How a New Illicit Economy Is Threatening Our Future

Shelley (Human Trafficking and Dirty Entanglements), founder and director of George Mason University’s Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, acknowledges the inevitability of illicit commerce in this revealing study. The estimated annual revenue generated by criminal trade, at somewhere between $1.6 trillion and $2.2 trillion, constitutes a staggering 1.5% of global GDP, Shelley notes. Further, the modern dark economy possesses the potential to irreversibly damage the planet and human health: illicit trade in narcotics, human trafficking, and the sale of antiquities plundered in wartime support terrorist armies; and the illegal trade in rhinoceros horn—wrongly thought to have aphrodisiac and medicinal properties—may drive this endangered species to extinction. Shelley is less than sanguine about the prospects for eradicating illicit commerce, as doing so would require a degree of coordination and cooperation among nations that is seldom practically achieved, and larger economic and social problems—income inequality and corruption that foster criminal activity; corrupt officials and unscrupulous kingpins who exploit the desperation of the poor, the addicted, and refugees fleeing poverty, violence, and war—show no signs of abating. Nevertheless, Shelley sees hope in activist countries, companies, and communities that have creatively and successfully battled illegal trade, for example, by finding ways to identify and shame the perpetrators. This is an informative study of the vast and pervasive problem of criminal trade. [em](Nov.) [/em]