Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 236
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4422-4757-4 • Hardback • July 2016 • $87.00 • (£67.00)
978-1-4422-4758-1 • Paperback • July 2016 • $40.00 • (£31.00)
978-1-4422-4759-8 • eBook • July 2016 • $38.00 • (£29.00)
Paul Rexton Kan is professor of National Security Studies and former Henry L. Stimson Chair of Military Studies at the US Army War College. In February 2011, he served as the Senior Visiting Counternarcotics Adviser at NATO Headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Preface
Chapter One: The Scope and Scale of the Issue
Chapter Two: Patterns of International Drug Trafficking
Chapter Three: Narco-States
Chapter Four: Fragile States
Chapter Five: Intrastate Conflict and Terrorism
Chapter Six: Transnational Organized Crime
Chapter Seven: Human Security and Global Health
Chapter Eight: Cyberspace and Cybersecurity
Chapter Nine: Ways Forward
Kan surveys the threats that drug trafficking poses to international security. Individual chapters show how drug trafficking creates narco-states, undermines fragile states, abets intrastate conflict, facilitates the spread of transnational criminal organizations, and harms global health. Chiding the international relations discipline for sidelining the study of ‘deviant globalization’ and ignoring the non-state actors that participate in drug trafficking, Kan adopts an interdisciplinary perspective focusing on flows across borders and limits to state sovereignty. The book summarizes a range of insights from the literature on the drug trade, such as the unintended consequences of prohibition, differences between narco-states, and impediments to interstate cooperation. In the concluding chapter, Kan lists a number of questions for future scholarly research and advises policy makers to focus on managing and mitigating drug trafficking and related security problems rather than trying to eliminate them…. This accessible book will appeal to those seeking a broad overview of the global implications of drug trafficking.
Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals.
— Choice Reviews
An intellectual tour de force related to drug trafficking as a prominent feature of deviant globalization and durable disorder and its analysis of the international implications of the new ‘drug-security’ nexus that has emerged. The work exposes the inadequacy of traditionalist perceptions related to the state-centric security environment in an age when the number of narco and fragile states are ever growing and violent non-state actors and organized crime groups are ascendant.
— Robert J. Bunker, Claremont Graduate University
Focusing on the convoluted but powerful intersection between drug trafficking and international security, Paul Kan emphasizes the changed nature of security and elucidates the role of drug trafficking in creating insecurity and disorder. Informative, perceptive, and far-reaching, this volume is not for the faint-hearted: it will greatly appeal to some and irritate and provoke others. Is drug trafficking no more than a hyped up threat or is it a genuine and enduring security challenge? Read this book and decide for yourself.
— Phil Williams, Wesley W. Posvar Professor of International Security in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, and Director of the University’s Ridgway Center for International Security Studies
• Explores global drug trafficking as a national and international security issue.
• Each chapter is an examination of how drug trafficking is connected to a specific international security issue —this makes the book unique in the literature.
• Challenges traditional understandings of how to adequately address threats to national and international security.
• Winner, Colonel John J. Madigan Award for Outstanding Faculty Writing (2017)