Book Review
| Author | Robert J. Currie |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/20322844211012897 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews: Research Handbook on Transnational Crime |
Research Handbook on Transnational Crime, Valsamis Mitsilegas, Saskia Hufnagel and Anton Moiseienko (eds.)
(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019), ISBN 9781784719432, 544 pp., £195
Reviewed by: Robert J. Currie, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, Canada
DOI: 10.1177/20322844211012897
Transnational crime is big business, literally. Its global profits (both wholly illegal and spin-off
“legitimate”earnings) are conservatively valued in the multiples of billions per year. Cross-border
money laundering siphons untold billions out of the tax bases of states, while crime-engineered
corruption threatens political and economic stability in numerous developing states. Human
beings—predominantly women and children—are trafficked across borders, exploited for sex and
labour, and often murdered. Trafficking in wildlife, illegally-caught fish and endangered timber
threatens ecosystems. Terrorism and cybercrime represent real and even existential threats.
The onslaught of disruption and destruction wrought by transnational crime, then, is a pressing
threat to the social, economic and cultural fabric of the global community, as well as to international
peace and security. The United Nations Security Council said so in Resolution 2482 (19 July 2019),
and in March 2021 the 14
th
United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice
expressed “deep concern”over the “unprecedented challenges”posed by “increasingly trans-
national, complex and organized”criminal activities, which it noted represent a threat to the rule of
law. Both of these bodies have called for active cooperation between and among states to combat
transnational crime, building on decades of pre-existing treaties and formal and informal co-
operative networks among states, prosecutors and police.
At such a time, it is vital that there be good sources and methodologies for studying transnati onal
crime, as well as the legal and enforcement regimes that seek to suppress it. The international
cooperative machinery referred to above exists in some fairly complex and obscure manifestations,
and is poorly understood. While it has been more than four decades since the idea of “transnational
crime”was first bandied about at high levels, both criminological and legal study of the relevant
phenomena have evolved slowly. It was only in 2003 that Professor Neil Boister, building on earlier
prototypical work by Philip Jessup, Roger Clark and Ethan Nadelmann, posited that “transnational
criminal law”(TCL) had developed into an identifiable regime, even a discipline, capable of study.
Boister’smeisterwerk on the subject, An Introduction to Transnational Criminal Law, is now in its
second edition, but overall resources remain scanty. The important criminological work on the
subject has depth and breadth, but is often focused on organized crime, mostly phenomenological in
its ambit, and often not integrated with the legal landscape. The murky world of police cooperation
has seen some serious scholarly attention only lately, at least outside the European context.
Against this backdrop, the publication of the Research Handbook on Transnational Crime is of
significant interest. It would be a welcome addition to the literature if it was an even passable
volume, given the current paucity of serious scholarly resources on this most pernicious and
pervasive subject. However, it is a strongly-formed and substantively mellifluous text that makes
a significant scholarly contribution in the transnational crime space.
I use the phrase “transnational crime space”deliberately, for while the book deals with conduct
amounting to “crime”in the legal sense, is edited by three legal scholars and has a great deal of legal
content, it is not simply a book on transnational criminal law. The unique and effective contribution
of this book is its tri-partite organizational structure, under which transnational crime is studied and
surveyed from three distinct perspectives: as the editors label them in the introductory chapter,
498 New Journal of European Criminal Law 12(3)
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