Customs control over illicit international trade: The impact of different forms of illegality
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-1873
L'articolo si concentra su un processo fondamentale per la comprensione antropologica dello stato, cioè la maniera in cui il contrabbando persiste nonostante il dirottamento di una grande quantità di ricavi utili al funzionamento dell'organizzazione statale. Sviluppando una precedente tipologia centrata sulle ragioni fondamentali della persistenza delle pratiche illegali, l'articolo sostiene l'esistenza di cinque tipi distinti di contrabbando, relativi a fattori legati tra l'altro alla legittimazione sociale. La legittimità sociale di certe pratiche illegali rende il loro controllo particolarmente difficile, ma la facilità di ricavare profitti rappresenta comunque un fattore chiave che può operare in assenza di legittimazione sociale e può contribuire alla corruzione dei funzionari statali. Anche l'aumento della repressione produce risultati in relazione alla tipologia proposta, incidendo sulla dimensione organizzativa delle pratiche di contrabbando. Concludo sostenendo che lo studio della diversità delle pratiche di contrabbando dimostra l'utilità di evitare di affrontare l'illegalità in termini generali, pluralizzando il concetto per comprendere le motivazioni e le diverse forme che le pratiche illegali posso assumere.
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Customs control over illicit international trade: The impact of different forms of illegality
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Customs control over illicit international trade: The impact of different forms of illegality
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                                                   2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 1, GIUGNO 2015: 42-65




Customs control over illicit international trade: The impact of
different forms of illegality
Alan SMART
University of Calgary




ABSTRACT: This article examines a process central to the anthropological understanding of
the state, how smuggling persists despite diverting a large portion of the revenues critical to
the operation of state organizations. Developing the author’s prior typology of basic reasons
why illegal practices persist, the article argues that there are five distinct types of smuggling,
related to factors such as the social legitimacy of the activity. Legitimacy appears to make
control much more difficult, but the availability of profits is also a key factor that can oper-
ate in the absence of social legitimacy, and which can contribute to the corruption of state
officials. The result of intensified enforcement crackdowns also differs between the types,
affecting the nature of the organization of smuggling practices. I conclude that the explora-
tion of diversity among smuggling practices demonstrates the advantages of avoiding a treat-
ment of illegality in general terms, and to pluralize the concept to understand the diverse
motivations and forms that illegal practices can take.

KEYWORDS: ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE STATE, SMUGGLING, CUSTOMS, ILLEGALITIES, LEGITIMACY.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alan Smart
Custom control over illicit international trade: The impact of different forms of illegality
2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 1, GIUGNO 2015: 42-65.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-1873
ALAN SMART                                                                          43




Introduction
    Why is it so hard to prevent smuggling? While apparently a rather mundane, or
purely practical, question I will suggest that an exploration of this issue will offer
some key insights into the anthropological understanding of the state. States, by
which I mean a polity with authoritative leadership and at least a rudimentary bur-
eaucracy, cannot operate without revenues. For many states, a major part of their
revenues derive from the collection of custom payments for the movement of goods
across borders (particularly national/imperial borders but often also including in-
ternal boundaries between different territories within the polity). The failure to stem
smuggling, then, would seem to tell us something important about how states oper-
ate, and the conditions under which they may fail to achieve some of their core in-
terests. While this paper was prepared for a conference on informality organized by
the World Customs Organization, my concerns here are not with improving the ef-
ficacy of border surveillance, but rather with drawing out what smuggling has to tell
us about actually existing states and their practices.
    In earlier work (Smart, 1999), I developed a typology of the basic reasons why il-
legal activities persist. Here, I apply this typology to the processes by which Cus-
toms authorities attempt to control cross-border movement of illegal products.
While drawing in part on my research on the Hong Kong/China border, I draw on
the work of other scholars to explore how the different kinds of illegalities affect
Customs enforcement. This is perhaps not the most conventional approach for an
anthropologist, who is usually expected to be able to rely on their own fieldwork to
provide remarkably apt or apposite examples for any key issue they feel is worth ad-
dressing. Whether this expectation is reasonable for our discipline or not, it creates
major challenges for comparative or synthetic projects, and particularly so for work
on the anthropology of the intersection between the state and illegality. Gaining ac-
cess to frank and useful ethnographic accounts from either government officials or
illegal practitioners requires time and patience, and obtaining the right kind of in-
formation in the wide range of situations that I want to be able to compare in this
article would take considerable investment of both. Instead, I have “outsourced” the
collection of data, drawing on the best studies of the various kinds of smuggling that
I could find.
    A second way in which this synthetic examination of smuggling can be seen as
anthropological, if not ethnographic, is that it shifts emphasis from the formal ac-
counts of what the state does, and redirects it towards to what people do and how
they do something other than what states want them to do. When people (sometimes

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CUSTOMS CONTROL OVER ILLICIT INTERNATIONAL TRADE                                      44


including Customs officials) think that a product is socially or informally legitimate
despite being illegal (a situation I refer to as ambiguous persistence), is it harder to
control than when the product is both illegal and illicit but trade continues due to the
high profits available (market persistence)? For example, screening of border-cross-
ers often involves selecting those who appear nervous or afraid. If smugglers (of
banned religious texts, for example, or traditional food products) feel justified in
their actions, do they tend to show fewer visible signs of guilt and fear? Behavioral
analysis, screening for characteristics that may fit a smuggler profile, is an important
part of the customs enforcement process (Newsome, 2003), but much of the nuance
remains to be carefully examined in the academic literature. Erving Goffman (1959)
distinguished between the impressions that people try to give, and those that they
unconsciously “give off”. Whether signs that are given off and point to a guilty per-
son can be identified independently of the social/psychological processes of feeling
guilty is a key question here.
    In contexts where restrictions on imports and exports are maintained in part to
create the potential for extortion or other benefits to the state or agents of the state
(managed persistence), another set of dynamics will apply. In such cases, it is com-
mon that informal ideas of social legitimacy may also be operating, complicating the
situation, since multiple forms of illegal persistence can co-exist, and when they do,
the difficulties of eradication are multiplied. The final two forms of illegal persist-
ence, rebellious and subversive, respectively supported by internal and external polit-
ical opposition, are illustrated here primarily through historical research, particularly
Peter Andreas’ Smuggler Nation (2013). These latter two varieties may still have
particular importance in certain Customs contexts, particularly in an era of war on
terrorism, as well as civil war within “failed states” (for a critique of the notion of
failed states, see Kabamba, 2010).
    My purpose in this paper is not to elaborate on my conceptual framework fur-
ther, but rather to explore whether it might be useful in thinking about some chal-
lenges of Customs enforcement and thereby make some contributions to the anthro-
pology of the state, a rapidly developing field of study (Heyman, 1995). The chal-
lenges vary, I suggest, depending on which of the varieties of persistence are operat-
ing in a particular context. In the next section, I discuss studies of Customs Services
which could suggest that the typology could be useful for understanding administrat-
ive experience. Following that, I briefly describe my conceptual framework, how the
types vary, and the nature of the consequences. The rest of the paper considers how
each type varies through informal practices. They may increase the difficulty to ac-
complish formal Customs procedures in conformity with legal and administrative
rules, although that might not be the intention. Studies show that it is even more
difficult than it looks.


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ALAN SMART                                                                               45


Customs enforcement and illegal practices
   At any busy border crossing or port of entry there are conflicts between careful
scrutiny of mobile goods and people, and the need to reduce the delay and cost of
such scrutiny . Technology can reduce, but not negate, such conflicts . Ultimately,
there are trade-offs to be made between enforcement and speed of processing, and
this results in the use of both formal and informal processes to identify situations
where more careful scrutiny should be applied. Another issue that complicates
things is that sometimes the formal rules are seen as illegitimate or foolish by the
general public, and even by the enforcement officers, so that strict enforcement may
undermine goodwill towards the Service or Government generally. When popular
opinion sees bringing certain kinds of items as legitimate rather than illegal smug-
gling, high rates of infraction may make stringent enforcement impossible.
   At the El Paso entry to the United States from Mexico, primary screening for
Immigration and Customs purposes takes an average of less than thirty seconds:
within this time a decision is made to send a person or vehicle to secondary screen-
ing or not. Josiah Heyman (2009: 369) argues that we “must be attentive to discre-
tionary non-actions and the reasons for them” not just the actions taken by those re-
sponsible for border enforcement. He concludes that in addition to formal proced-
ures and training, informal processes of trust are central to these dynamics. Discre-
tion is a crucial part of such rapid processing. An interaction can be formally ana-
lyzed in accordance with screening procedures and protocols put in place, yet the
assumption about who can be trusted or not “is so common and so completely un-
stated that it is almost completely unmarked within officers’ decision-making pro-
cess” (ibidem: 383). Similarly, in Brenda Chalfin’s (2010: 209) study of Ghana’s
Customs Service, the adoption of a new risk management system based on security,
facilitation, and selectivity (the replacement term for “profiling”) was modified
through its implementation in which the selection was centered on the traveler’s pro-
fession. An officer told her that:
      ‘You can’t treat all passengers the same. The question of discretion comes up
      all the time [...] [take a] lawyer, medical officer [who] [...] goes out of the
      country once in two years, buys three pairs of shoes and twelve shirts. You
      don’t treat him/her the same as someone who travels once a month and has a
      boutique’. Another officer reiterated, ‘If a man who lists his occupation as the
      executive director of a company has a suitcase full of twelve three-piece suits,
      he is likely to get away without paying duty on them. On the other hand, a wo-
      man or man listing her or his occupation as a farmer who has these same items
      in her or his suitcase will be asked to pay tax on them’ (Chalfin, 2010: 211).




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CUSTOMS CONTROL OVER ILLICIT INTERNATIONAL TRADE                                               46


    While many decisions are based on formalized criteria and risk-assessment pro-
cedures, Heyman found that formalization does not remove discretion from the bor-
der-control system. Usually it is only displaced. One result of the use of discretion
in contexts of selective trust is that in a survey of border crossers in El Paso, only
24% of Spanish speakers saw the inspection process as fair, compared to 65% of
English language respondents. Racial profiling is most often discussed in the aca-
demic literature, but of comparable importance are behavioral characteristics such
as visible nervousness (Dudley Ward et al. 2008). Questioning by Border Patrol of-
ficers is often drawn by “tense expressions and body stances, avoiding looking at the
officer, looking too often and too much at the officer, halting speech or too much
speech, and so on” (Heyman, 2009: 386).
    The Customs Service 1997 Personal Search Handbook listed over 40 criteria that
inspectors should use to decide which airline passengers to subject to personal
searches. Quite a few of these fall under the category of “behavioral analysis” and
Newsome (2003: 46) argues that:
      criteria may single out African American women because of cultural practices. […]
      Walking styles and attire are greatly influenced by culture. Ethnocentric Customs in-
      spectors may perceive the distinctive gaits of some African Americans as abnormal
      and indicative of hidden contraband carried on or inside the traveler’s body. In addi-
      tion, wearing long-sleeved outfits is normative for some African Americans whose reli-
      gious tenets hold that covering one’s extremities reflects sexual modesty among wo-
      men.

    Robert Kraut and Donald Poe tested the ability of Customs inspectors and lay-
men to detect people lying about carrying contraband in a mock customs inspection
at an airport. The role of smuggler was randomly assigned. Participants were monet-
arily rewarded for successful lying. Surprisingly, both Customs inspectors and lay-
men were less suspicious of those who carried the contraband than those who didn’t.
They raise the question of whether the mock inspection, even though undertaken at
a real Customs post and with real officers, might not have felt the nervousness that
would be associated with real smuggling. As well, since the officers knew that the
assignment of contraband was random, they couldn’t rely on their usual demograph-
ic indicators. However, the authors provide evidence that those inspected were
nervous and inspectors followed their usual practices of screening. The other crucial
finding of the study was that although the identification of lying flyers was poor,
there was a high degree of consensus among the judges, both Customs officers and
laymen. Three out of 21 variables measured accounted for 49% of the variance in
judges’ search decisions: apparent nervousness, postural shifting, and length of an-
swers (Kraut, Poe, 1980: 791). They found that demographic characteristics did cor-
relate to a degree with suspicion, but that characteristics like age and social status


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ALAN SMART                                                                            47


“influenced custom inspectors’ and laymen’s decisions to search them by influencing
the travelers’ comportment in the interview, rather than by directly triggering the
judges’ stereotypes. Judges were “likely to search travelers who appeared nervous”
(ibidem: 792). It should be noted that this is an old study, and training procedures
and technology may have improved the ability to pick out lying smugglers. More
central to my issues here is the question I raised earlier: does a belief in the legitim-
acy of bringing illicit goods across borders reduce behaviors like nervousness and
postural shifting? The black and white distinctions between smugglers and non-
smugglers may differ greatly from social legitimations, and it would be useful to in-
corporate more nuance into models of behavioral profiling. I have been unable to
locate studies that undertake this kind of analysis.
    Customs enforcement has very large impacts on illegal practices, but they are not
always the consequences that the agencies would desire. Unintended consequences
are endemic in this field, particularly when success undermines itself (Andreas,
2013, Yang, 2009), or provides the resources to corrupt the agents in charge of the
enforcement efforts. Ultimately, the attractions of illegality undermine many efforts
to curb them, but the source of the attraction varies, ranging from profit to indignant
feelings of legitimation. Untangling these complex mixtures was one of the goals I
wanted to address with my typology. So far, I have alluded to the varieties of illegal
persistence. The next section explains what I mean by these terms. Then, I explore
their utility, using detailed ethnographies and histories to interrogate how enforce-
ment is influenced by the different types of persistence.

Persistence of illegal economic practices and customs (non)enforcement
    Illegalities, like poverty, are ubiquitous, and some kinds of illegal practices per-
sist even when massive amounts of state resources are devoted to preventing them,
such as illegal migration to the United States. One dimension of my doctoral work
explored the operation of the property market in squatter dwellings in Hong Kong,
where most of the 800,000 squatters in 1982 had bought their homes, despite the
Government’s insistence that no one could have legal rights to illegal dwellings. In
explaining this anomalous real estate market, I concluded that we had to acknow-
ledge the division between formal legality and informal legitimacy, and that social
processes legitimated and supported such property transactions despite denial by the
Government.
    I later compared the squatter property market to organized crime, where I en-
gaged with the literature then emerging on economic analysis of illegal economies
(Smart, 1988). Economists argued that emphases on the “visible hand” of violence
among mafias could benefit from more attention to Adam Smith’s invisible hand,
market forces. Rather than concentrating on the reasons for deviance as sociologists

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CUSTOMS CONTROL OVER ILLICIT INTERNATIONAL TRADE                                                 48


tend to do, political economists applied a rational choice model in which the exist-
ence of demand for illegal goods and services created incentives which attracted en-
trepreneurs, made the enhanced risks of illegal enterprises worthwhile, and served
to undermine governmental efforts at suppression. Critical political economists em-
phasized the ways in which organised crime is inextricably linked to capitalism
(Block, Chambliss, 1981: 7) and stressed that it is “that part of the business system
operative in the illicit segment of American life” (Ianni, Ianni, 1972: 67). The gen-
eral conclusion is that there is an “iron law of capitalism” that “where there is a de-
mand there will be a supplier if the profit is high enough” (Block, Chambliss, 1981:
32). I criticized this argument, which I labeled the extensionist hypothesis, the as-
sumption that somehow a market can be conjured out of nothing. If there were no
legal supports, there had to be adequate social supports for transactions. How such
support is accomplished varies from one situation to another. There is no guarantee
that regulatory regimes affording successful interaction on a sustainable basis will
emerge. They may emerge if profits or plunder are large enough, but rely on the ac-
tions of groups and networks cooperating and contending.
    While seeing illegal economies as economies and not just as deviance was a cru-
cial step forward, I concluded that this only took us partway to understanding how
and why illegal practices persist, even when states strenuously attempt to eradicate
them, which they don’t always do (Smart, 1988). Even where the volume of poten-
tial profits would seem to provide sufficient reason for persistent production and dis-
tribution of illegal goods, much more is involved. As Tullis (1995: 2) says in re-
sponse to the question of how people are able to produce and traffic illegal drugs:
      one might suppose that the large amount of money made in servicing consumer de-
      mand is solely responsible. Surely, money and the power that goes with it account for
      trafficking and much production. But other answers must be found in society. These
      relate to how a society is structured, how political power is accrued and wielded within
      it, how economic policy is applied, how the economy performs, and how resistant the
      cultural fabric is to the use of public office for private gain.

    Demand for illegal goods and services creates opportunities for extremely high
profits. Whether and how such opportunities are exploited vary (Heyman, Smart,
1999). Market analyses offer important insights, but without an accompanying the-
ory of the state, and of the political and social processes which may substitute for
the legal basis of conventional market relations, we inevitably miss much about the
dynamics of concrete situations.
   Rulers, by which Levi means the executive authority, whether king, president or
Cabinet, try to maximize their revenue. This can be productive if they do so by in-
creasing the pie rather than just increasing their share of it. Rulers need chains of
support to do any governing. They have more bargaining power to the extent that


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ALAN SMART                                                                             49


they monopolize strategic coercive, economic, and political resources. When others
control resources that the ruler needs, their bargaining power increases and deals or
contracts may be made with these groups (Levi, 1988: 12). This can lead to tacit
tolerance of the wealthy criminal entrepreneurs in illegal arms or drugs trades who
support election campaigns or guerrilla suppression efforts. The more decentralized
activities are, the higher the transaction costs tend to be, which encourages rulers to
collude in offering tacit monopolies to certain groups in exchange for keeping the il-
legal trade under control. What Levi (1988: 13) refers to as “quasi-voluntary com-
pliance” can reduce the costs of monitoring and enforcing government revenues.
Conversely, though, if such compliance is eroded, as when taxpayers doubt the fair-
ness of the system and feel justified in evading taxes or customs duties, transaction
costs soar. The lack of quasi-voluntary compliance, or legitimacy, with excise duties
can lead to very high rates of smuggling (MacGaffey, 1991).
    Possible profits are only one explanation of the persistence of illegal practices, al-
though it is certainly an extremely important one. When I searched for a conceptual
framework that could identify not just one, but all the possible general reasons for
illegal persistence, I found that it did not exist, and set out to develop one (Smart,
1999). Briefly, I have only been able to find five, which I called “varieties of illegal
persistence”. It’s important to recognize, though, that these basic explanations are
not mutually exclusive, and that multiple reasons can coexist, which makes control
even more difficult.
    The first, and best known, reason for illegal economies to survive is what I call
market persistence, that is cases where the continued demand for supply of a good or
service create economic incentives that undermine state efforts to control the mar-
ket. Persistence occurs despite efforts to eradicate the activity. The Prohibition of al-
cohol in the United States is one example, contraband drugs another (Woodiwiss,
1988). Widespread acceptability of the good or service, despite its illegality, pro-
duces some overlap with the second type. Market forces allow persistence even
when the vast majority of the population disapproves of the activity. Legitimacy of
the activity may make control harder, but is not a precondition for market persist-
ence, as suggested by reviled trades such as slavery and animal poaching.
    Ambiguous persistence is particularly important for the question of informality. It
includes cases where an activity is illegal, but tolerated, or only occasionally and
situationally repressed. There is a significant degree of informal legitimacy of the
activity, despite formal illegality. Such practices can have large costs for states in
lost revenue, including duties, income taxes, property taxes, and the loss of control
over government land. We can see this with the large informal sector in postcolonial
cities. The capacity of squatters to resist clearance can cause a variety of inconveni-
ences for the state, sometimes including international disapproval. Where squatters


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present easily purchased blocks of voters, and marginal votes are valued, they may
also be able to bargain for some collective benefits like water and electricity supplies
(upon which profits can be made). Some authors have argued that governments
profit from tolerating squatter communities by reducing pressure for government ex-
penditure on housing, and by cheaply reproducing labour power . But direct benefits
are more characteristic of the third variety of persistence: managed persistence.
    Managed persistence refers to cases where despite formal illegality, the state be-
nefits substantially from the activity and makes at most token or perhaps deliberately
self-defeating efforts to achieve control. The leakiness of illegal migration from
Mexico to the United States has been suggested as an example of this (Heyman,
1995). It has also been suggested that in a variety of states, bureaucracies profit
from the proliferation of costly red tape by using the regulations to extract bribes
and other concessions from economic agents (Blundo, 2006,). When managed per-
sistence operates, bad policies and practices may make perfectly good sense to act-
ors engaged in the processes. There are good reasons for bad policies. Such activit-
ies can be tacitly, or explicitly, sponsored by rulers in pursuit of increased revenues.
The important requirements are conditions that make it desirable to keep these
activities illegal.
    Political dynamics also structure the last two varieties. Both involve limits to state
control over their own territories. I distinguish two variants, but in empirical cases,
both are more often than not found entangled. The first of these is what I call rebel-
lious persistence, where internal political actors, such as guerilla groups or rebellious
localities, protect illegal practices despite opposition from the ruler to their persist-
ence. There must be spaces within the ruler’s territory with relatively autonomous
actors who control local politics, and choose to benefit from illegal practices such as
the FARC in Colombia and some splinter groups of the former IRA. Illegal eco-
nomies are nurtured for revenues or for its value as a nuisance or threat to their en-
emies. It is important to distinguish this reason for the persistence of illegal prac-
tices from the accretion of means of violence by illegal entrepreneurs such as the
Medellin cocaine cartel. Illegal practices are a means to the political ends held by
rebels, whereas achieving significant means of violence and command over local
areas are a means to the end of profits in the market persistence type. Resistance
from subordinate agents within nation-states obviously overlaps with rebellious per-
sistence, since local officials or provinces may start by adapting central rules in ways
that are disadvantageous to the ruler, but may end in rebellion or revolution.
    Subversive persistence refers to cases where support for illegal practices comes
from agents outside the state, particularly to undermine political control. Support by
the American government for drug trafficking by the Kuomintang, the former rulers
of China, in Burma is a good example (McCoy, 1999). Unlike managed persistence,


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ALAN SMART                                                                           51


the benefits are going to the rulers of another state, rather than the one in which the
activities are taking place. Admittedly, things become even more complex when the
practices cross national borders .
   Empirical cases almost always combine characteristics of two or more of the
varieties. For the purposes of this paper, I will not focus on case studies, but rather
draw on a number of them to explore how illegal practices underpinned by different
informal supports affect Customs enforcement.

Market persistence
    Dominating discussion of illicit markets and economies is the idea that the poten-
tial for high profits explains why such markets emerge and survive despite attempts
at repression. While not the whole story, it is certainly an important, perhaps the
most important part of the circumstances that make the eradication of smuggling
and related illegal industries so difficult. While profits play an important role in al-
most all illegal industries, we are considering purer forms of market persistence
when governments genuinely would like to see the trade controlled or eradicated. In
this case, the constraints on eradication are of the greatest importance. Generally,
key constraints include high transaction costs for monitoring and controlling decent-
ralized portions of illegal networks, and the ways in which the high profits under-
mine control efforts, both through the ability to suborn control agents and the re-
sources to purchase sophisticated technology to evade interdiction. Communication
and transportation technologies are rapidly incorporated into contraband industries,
particularly those that involve smuggling over national boundaries. In the case of the
US war on drugs, it seems to have led to a technology race between smugglers and
enforcement officials, which raises the costs of doing business, and hence the barri-
ers to entry for new operators. The result of technology in this case seems to be to
encourage a greater centralization of the industry.
    Smuggling in the past was primarily, but not exclusively, about evading customs
duties. The liberalization of trade “has sharply reduced incentives to engage in
smuggling practices designed to evade taxes and tariffs, which were historically a
driving force of illicit commerce. With the lowering of trade barriers as part of the
process of globalization, smuggling is increasingly about evading prohibitions and
bans rather than import duties” (Andreas, 2013: 334). Supporting the first part of
this claim empirically, Mishra et al. (2008) document a very substantial drop in cus-
toms evasion after tariff liberalization. The central problem of enforcing prohibi-
tions is that if demand for the product continues, then success in interdiction tends
to produce higher prices, enticing entrepreneurs to enter the business to capture the
profits, even at the expense of greater risk. High profits mean increased capacity to
corrupt enforcement officials. For example, in colonial America:

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      Customs officials, for their part, went through the ritualistic motions of inspecting
      ships and collecting modest amounts of duties (while routinely lining their pockets
      with payments to look the other way). Institutionalized corruption had a pacifying ef-
      fect; informal financial accommodation meant that violence between smugglers and
      customs inspectors was rare. For the most part, bribing trumped bullying, producing a
      win-win situation for the smuggler and the customs agent – even if not for imperial
      coffers. Corruption was in fact competitive: colonial ports competed with each other to
      attract shipping business, and those ports that offered the most laxity in inspections
      and most bribable customs houses enjoyed a competitive advantage (Andreas, 2012:
      17).

   If corruption can be justified as contributing to economic growth or other goals
that are seen as socially desirable, it is more likely to be implicated in what I discuss
below as ambiguous persistence. If legitimation is unimportant to the process, either
for enforcement agents or the smugglers, and profits rather than political goals are
foremost, then the situation fits best what I have called market persistence.

Ambiguous persistence
    Informality is particularly central to the category of ambiguous persistence, an il-
legal activity continuing because people, sometimes including those tasked with in-
terdicting it. Social legitimacy has a crucial but complex effect on formal illegality,
with official responses varying from insisting that “rules are rules” to using the in-
fringements as a source of income to “look the other way” since “no one is really
getting hurt”, to more or less formal versions of toleration without legalization , to
intermittent enforcement intended only to reduce the extent of infringement. The
last pattern resembles the occasional checks for passenger tickets on public transit
that relies on an “honour system”. Whenever people start using phrases like “well,
technically …” or “everybody knows what is really going on”, there is almost cer-
tainly a gap between formal rules and widespread informal practices, which are of-
ten indispensable in actually accomplishing the goals of the institution and imple-
menting those formal rules (Blundo, 2006).
    In van Schendel and Abraham’s Illicit Flows and Criminal Things (2005), they ar-
gue that we need to resist “seeing like a state” and that the “definitional problems as-
sociated with international crime show how important it is to relativize the state as
‘just’ another form of modern political authority so as to avoid using the state’s own
dominant categories for our analysis” (ibidem: 6). Tracing illicit flows highlights the
contingency of illegality. What “determines legality and illegality at different points
of the commodity chain is the particular regulatory scale the object finds itself in.
[...] we find it useful to distinguish between political (legal and illegal) and social (li-
cit and illicit) origins of regulatory authority” (ibidem: 17). Commodities, such as
qat or coca leaves, and practices, such as sex work, can be legal but illicit on one

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ALAN SMART                                                                                      53


side of a national border while illegal and licit on the other. Social boundaries can
have comparable effects. Informal working rules are often critical in resolving such
conflicts, as Brenda Chalfin’s account of how Ghana’s Customs Service dealt with
reforms, required by the Uruguay Round Agreement of the World Trade Organiza-
tion, to their established working practices. Tariffs were reduced, but a variety of
new fees, including a 1% inspection fee, were added to make up for lost revenue.
Dealing with these new fees, and their consequences, generated a “newfound solid-
arity among Customs officers, importers, and borderlanders” (Chalfin, 2010: 210).
As it became apparent to Customs officers that:
      the strict application of the new duty and tax schedule would force nearly every trader
      to smuggle goods through the bush tax-free or give up trade entirely, a system of dis-
      counts emerged. These concessions kept traders and Customs officers in business and
      fueled a shared sense of resentment of those in the Ministry of Finance responsible for
      the new charges (Chalfin, 2010: 110).

    She provides fascinating ethnographic detail on how the new circumstances were
managed and manipulated by different actors within the Government and among
traders. Since the new system made it impossible to waive taxes and fees, the discre-
tion remaining to frontline Customs officers in the realm of classification codes and
valuations was utilized instead. While obtaining modest “tips” was a significant mo-
tivation (suggesting market persistence), there was also a sense of sympathy, espe-
cially for small traders for whom the fees could jeopardize their means of liveli-
hood. She concludes that such strategies “are premised on a shared alliance with
travelers and traders from elsewhere in the country that is in many respects national-
ist in orientation. Built on common disdain for the unreasonable exactions of Cus-
toms and other executive authorities, Aflao Customs personnel use their official pos-
itions and knowledge to partake in and cultivate a form of popular sovereignty”
(Chalfin, 2010: 127). Frontline officers might collude with citizens “bending some
rules”, feeling more in common with them than with the central Government which
imposed a new system seen as more in the interest of powerful global agencies, and
of their bosses who were most likely to obtain benefit from ensuring its implementa-
tion.
    Anecdotal evidence from a variety of conversations provides another example of
a degree of toleration in the realm of prohibited foodstuffs, particularly when these
foodstuffs have sentimental or cultural significance. For example, a graduate student
in England told us that when a search revealed Chinese mooncakes (ceremonially
associated with the mid-autumn festival), the officer allowed him to keep them des-
pite the prohibition on imports of goods with eggs from China. Others had theirs
confiscated, but without any penalty imposed. In other cases of home-made cheeses
or sausages, we heard that officers allowed the contraband goods to be kept, but told


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the offender not to do it again. A degree of sympathy to the rule-breakers, and per-
haps a degree of antipathy to petty restrictions, seems apparent in this kind of case,
and represents another example of ambiguous persistence.

Managed persistence
    When and why might governments help to support the persistence of smuggling
in order to further their own interests? This is a particularly key issue for Customs
enforcement, since in many countries, particularly less-developed ones, duties can
be a very large part of total government revenues. For example, “in the West Afric-
an subregion alone, in 2000 Customs accounted for 40 percent of government rev-
enue in Senegal, 46 percent in Benin and 60 percent in Niger, with strikes of Cus-
toms officers in Niger threatening to bring down the whole state apparatus” (Chalfin,
2010: 246). In 1995, import duties accounted for an average of 23% of central-gov-
ernment tax revenue for developing countries (Yang, 2009: 2). Brenda Chalfin
(2010: 1) says that in many postcolonial states, including Ghana where she conduc-
ted her study, “bureaucratic orders such as Customs have long served as the ‘effect-
ive sovereign’ […] providing the bulk of state revenue, guarding territorial boundar-
ies, and covering the whole of the nation with a highly visible administrative web”.
Throughout the colonial era, Customs collected over half of Ghana’s government in-
come. Before the beginning of heavy reliance on income taxes in the twentieth cen-
tury, customs duties, or internal equivalents, were quite widely the mainstay of gov-
ernment finances.
    The category of managed persistence is focused more on the actions of “rulers”,
in Margaret Levi’s (1988) term: central authorities such as the president, cabinet or
governing party. When the persistence of smuggling is related to the actions only of
front-line officials unsupported by those close to the center of power (see for ex-
ample Cantens, 2012) , we are usually discussing cases that are closer to market per-
sistence (the bribes from smugglers corrupt the officers) or ambiguous persistence
(the officers sympathize with the smugglers of particular kinds of goods). Managed
persistence pertains when those who control policies or the allocation of resources
to enforcement ensure that illegalities persist in order to obtain certain personal or
governmental benefits, whether the extortion of bribes that funnel up the hierarchy,
political advantages, or that for various reasons may be to the advantage of govern-
ment revenues.
    One reason why a government might collude in allowing smuggling is because
the duties or prohibitions are adopted due to outside pressures when they might ac-
tually benefit in its occurrence. Good examples can be found in Hong Kong history.
The first example is one with global significance. The beginning of the Korean War
on June 25, 1950, which lasted until 27 July 1953, devastated Hong Kong’s prewar

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ALAN SMART                                                                                       55


economic role as a hub for trade between China and the rest of the world. Chinese
entry into the war on behalf of North Korea resulted in American comprehensive
trade controls imposed in December 1950, followed by a United Nations embargo
on May 18, 1951. On 2 July, 1955, Governor Grantham wrote to the Secretary of
State for the Colonies that since 1950 Hong Kong had been called upon to “cut off,
at its own expense, a major part of its own livelihood” and asked how anyone could
expect “this dying city” to survive with its “swollen population and with a great part
of its normal trade sacrificed for the good, should the China embargo continue to
handicap Hong Kong’s much needed trade expansion in the region?” (quoted in
Zhang, 2001: 133). Hong Kong’s exports to China dropped from HK$234.8 million
in Jan. 1951 to HK$88.9 million in Sept 1951 (Zhang, 2001: 43). The total volume
of trade dropped by 13% in 1952, and China’s share of trade dropped from 56% in
1950 to 34% in 1952. By early 1955, trade with China was only 15% of Hong
Kong’s total (ibidem: 133). Despite this, Hong Kong was the People’s Republic’s
most important trading partner in Asia and was particularly crucial as a place where
the embargo could be circumvented through smuggling. Chinese trade officials felt
that as long as the Western embargo continued Hong Kong would be a “primary
base” to offset the pressure of economic sanctions. During this period, smuggling
provided one of China’s key ways to obtain foreign currency and scarce goods, but it
continued afterward for other purposes and other consequences. It is clear, at a min-
imum, that Hong Kong tried to expend as few resources as possible in stopping this
illegal trade, which was of great utility to the colony, both economically and in
terms of demonstrating its utility to China. Without Hong Kong’s role in these diffi-
cult early years for China, Chinese policies might have taken quite different forms
out of necessity. Hong Kong’s role in smuggling goods in and out of China has not
always been seen so positively by China, however, such as its central role in facilitat-
ing illegal art exports (Vagg, 1992: 312).
    It is not only in this case that colonial Hong Kong has been seen to tolerate, if not
facilitate, smuggling, while benefitting from its persistence. Leo Goodstadt has care-
fully documented that the “colonial administration tolerated gold and currency
smuggling” (Goodstadt, 2007: 7). He says that archival records reveal that:
      high-level decisions were made in both Hong Kong and London to facilitate illegal
      shipments of gold to the colony by restricting police and customs service surveillance
      of smuggling activities. Officials knew that narcotics dealers would be able to take ad-
      vantage of the tolerance shown towards the illegal movement of gold (ibidem: 14).

   Hong Kong became “the centre for gold smuggling in Asia. Official tolerance of
this illegal activity highlighted the conflicting attitudes towards financial regulation.
In the 1940s, exchange controls and the restrictions on gold dealing were still en-
forced. Customs officials showed some zeal in pursuing illegal movements of cur-


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CUSTOMS CONTROL OVER ILLICIT INTERNATIONAL TRADE                                                  56


rency and gold, despite the bribes on offer for cooperating with the smugglers”
(ibidem: 85). The illegal trade maintained its importance until the 1968 lifting of the
IMF’s ban on free markets in gold. The evidence for tolerance is quite clear in the
records, as is the potential consequences in other sectors. For example:
      In 1966, the official in charge of exchange controls discovered accidentally that banks
      were selling gold illegally in Hong Kong and asked for clarification of policy. He was
      told that ‘on the question of gold returning from Macao […] the [Hong Kong authorit-
      ies] had always turned a blind eye to it and intended to continue to do so’. […] The
      gold trade was not simply a matter of technical breaches of exchange controls and sim-
      ilar regulations, or of offshore illegality. It created the danger of widespread criminal
      contamination within the colony’s financial system. It is difficult, for example, to see
      how the banks involved could have kept full and accurate accounts of the business.
      Even if the gold transactions themselves were recorded openly, creative book-keeping
      would be necessary to cover the incidental but illicit payments for the smuggling oper-
      ations. Once bank owners and executives had embarked on accounting practices to
      conceal one category of transactions from external scrutiny, there was nothing to pre-
      vent these practices from contaminating the entire accounting system and enveloping
      the whole bank in a web of deceit to conceal fraud, as events were to demonstrate dra-
      matically between 1975 and 1984 (Goodstadt, 2007: 133-134).

    The “criminal contamination” also spread to the police and Customs officers,
since the resources denied them to protect gold smuggling “reduced the ability of
these agencies to capture drug consignments. Furthermore, narcotics were a major
source of corruption within the police. Consequently, an unintended but alarming
consequence of the gold trade with Macao was that Hong Kong operated as “one of
the most drug-ridden places in the world […] [and] the major centre for tranship-
ment of and financing of the narcotics business in the Far East” (Goodstadt, 2007:
134).
    As this example suggests, the impact of managed persistence may not only be to
allow the tolerated, or collusive, continuation of illegal trades, but may produce im-
portant spillover effects where government involvement in sheltering one desired illi-
cit industry can contribute to the protection of other, less favored, illegal industries.

Rebellious persistence
   Governments are never more likely to be threatened by illicit imports or exports
than when they serve the purposes of groups dedicated to revolution or secession.
When the illegal trade is in armaments to rebels, this is obviously the case, but in
many cases, other contraband goods, such as cocaine, opium or bootleg alcohol,
have become a key part of the economic basis for rebellion. Coca production for the
FARC in Colombia is one significant example, the role of opium in supporting Shan
minority independence movements in the “golden triangle” of Burma is another


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ALAN SMART                                                                                      57


(McCoy, 1999).
   There is a long history of such rebellious support for illegal trades, and Peter An-
dreas (2013) provides a particularly striking example in his examination of the role
of smuggling in the United States’ War of Independence. He notes that:
      it is striking how much of colonial outrage toward the British crown was directed at
      customs agents and their crackdown on illicit trade. The enforcement of trade laws was
      the most concrete, visible manifestation of imperial presence in the colonies. And the
      violation of these laws and the increasingly hostile reaction to their enforcement were
      the most concrete expressions of colonial opposition to imperial rule. Growing resent-
      ment toward the king’s customs became a unifying cause in the otherwise fragmented
      and loosely connected American colonies (Andreas, 2013: 29 ).

    The rallying cry of “freedom” for many meant “freedom to smuggle – or at least
freedom from harassment by overzealous customs inspectors. It was not so much
Britain’s burdensome trade and tax rules that provoked such outrage in the colonies.
Rather it was the attempt for the first time to strictly enforce the rules – and thus
threaten long-established smuggling activities” (ibidem: 30). Efforts to build effective
customs capacity in the colonies “provoked an intense backlash and ultimately back-
fired. […] When the empire suddenly tried to tighten the grip – putting a squeeze on
illicit trade and alienating colonists with heavy-handed enforcement tactics – Britain
lost it entirely” (ibidem: 30).
    There were unsuccessful attempts by colonial leaders to convince London that “it
was in its own self-interest to tolerate smuggling and return to the status quo ante.
Such candid pleas were an open admission of colonial reliance on illicit trade”
(ibidem: 39). The most important smuggling industry was molasses for the produc-
tion of rum. William Cooper wrote in 1768 that “You know what has been called an
illicit trade has been wink’d at by all former Administrations, it being eventually
more profitable to Britain than the Colonies” (quoted in Andreas, 2013: 36). The
crackdown failed in part because of ambiguous persistence: people felt that what
they were doing was perfectly legitimate, but it also helped to transform the situ-
ation into one of rebellious persistence. The head of customs in Philadelphia com-
mented that “In short, the truth of the matter is, the hands of Government are not
strong enough to oppose the numerous body of people who wish well to the cause of
smuggling […] What can a Governor do, without the assistance of the Governed?
What can the Magistrates do, unless they are supported by their fellow Citizens?
What can the King’s officers do, if they make themselves obnoxious to the people
amongst whom they reside?” (ibidem: 39). This quote illustrates what Thomas
Cantens (2012) refers to as the “law of numbers”, when practices that infringe cer-
tain laws relating to Customs enforcement, “normality” is a matter of statistics as
well as legislation, particularly when the law is subject to popular symbolic weak-


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CUSTOMS CONTROL OVER ILLICIT INTERNATIONAL TRADE                                                    58


ness. Pressure from outside authorities such as the WTO or IMF can create a situ-
ation of resentment against formal rules shared by enforcement agents and people.
Hardnosed enforcement in the face of beliefs in the informal legitimacy of practices
can create resentment that in certain conditions can flare up dramatically. The Bo-
ston Tea Party, recently reinvigorated as a political symbol of opposition to oppress-
ive government, was at its heart an action against Customs enforcement (Andreas,
2013: 41). Revolutionary leaders included many prominent smugglers, including
John Hancock, the first signer of the Declaration of Independence. Once the War of
Independence began:
      illicit trade not only contributed to the outbreak of the American Revolution; it also
      played a decisive role in the conduct and outcome. While at times subverting the Re-
      volution by prioritizing profits over patriotism, illicit traders defying Britain’s wartime
      embargo ultimately proved to be essential to its success. Colonial smugglers put their
      clandestine transportation methods, skills, and networks to good use supplying the in-
      surgency. Part of this simply involved building on previously well-established illicit
      trading relationships, such as in the West Indies. But it also involved fostering new
      commercial connections directly with Northern Europe, such as France and Sweden
      (Andreas, 2013: 45).

   Since the smuggled military supplies had to come from somewhere, we can also
see some elements of our next and final category, subversive persistence, in this
case. Governments that had reason to wish ill to the British Empire had more than
monetary reasons to facilitate smuggling to the rebellious colonies. While rebellious
persistence is not always paired with external subversion, it seems to be reasonably
common.

Subversive persistence
    In my own research, I discovered the potential impact of external political pres-
sure on the persistence of illegalities. The ability of the colonial Hong Kong Govern-
ment to eradicate widespread illegal squatting, which peaked at a population of
800,000 in the early 1980s and occupied expensive and urgently needed land for de-
velopment, was fundamentally constrained by the tendency of the People’s Republic
of China to exert pressure when squatters were treated too harshly. One of the tac-
tics was to send “comfort missions” to provide material assistance to the victims of
oppressive British imperialism, a practice that caused great irritation to Governor
Grantham in the 1950s. When he ordered one comfort mission turned back at the
border, it resulted in a protest that turned into a riot. Such confrontations threatened
to destabilize a delicate geopolitical situation, and the constraints ultimately resulted
in a squatter resettlement program that transformed into one of the largest public
housing programs in the world. This case has nothing to do with smuggling or Cus-


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ALAN SMART                                                                         59


toms enforcement, even though it involves attempts to prevent relief goods from
crossing the colonial border, so I need to turn elsewhere for an apt example.
    Smuggling has long played a role in subversion and rebellion. While armaments
are clearly important, we should also keep in mind the idea that the pen is mightier
than the sword. Smuggling of dissident literature has a long tradition, going back at
least to the contribution of the printing press to the Protestant Reformation and how
it made available cheaper versions of radical texts which could not be presented in
public. More recent examples include the contribution of smuggled audio cassettes
by exiled Iranian imams like Khomeini that were played in mosques, allowing ac-
cess even to those who were illiterate. The fax machine was important for the
protesting Tiananmen students to maintain contact with the outside world. The in-
ternet and social media are of course the current favorite distribution methods for
dissident literature, but responses such as the Great Chinese Firewall have been
more effective at controlling the flow of outside information and perspectives than
many had expected.
    For a more detailed case study of the subversive persistence form of smuggling, I
turn to the Iran-Contra affair because of how well it has been documented. The
complicated situation emerged initially out of CIA concerns about the role of
Nicaragua, after the Sandinista Revolution, in “exporting revolution” to El Salvador,
particularly through smuggling arms to support a leftist uprising (Woodward, 1987:
175). While diplomatic channels were used, moderately successfully, to try and curb
this arms flow, success was dependent on American aid to Nicaragua, which was
counter to dominant beliefs within the Reagan Administration. On this basis, there
developed an American effort to support paramilitary actions based in Honduras
against the Sandinistas, the “contras”. This initiative would build on a pre-existing
destabilization effort coordinated by the Argentine government, concerned about
Nicaraguan support for an insurgency in Argentina. This was justified to the Con-
gressional Intelligence Committee as involving the training of 500 contras “to inter-
dict the arms flow from Nicaragua to El Salvador” (Woodward, 1987: 187). By
1982, the numbers had grown to 4000 contras, resulting in an amendment to the In-
telligence Authorization Act prohibiting the use of funds to overthrow the Nicara-
guan government, although funding was still available for other covert actions by the
contras (Woodward, 1987: 226). In October 1984, all funding was ended, after an
inquiry into the mining of a Nicaraguan harbor. This financing problem created the
situation in which I diagnose subversive persistence, because the CIA broke a num-
ber of prohibitions on arms trades and engaged in other illegal activities to fund the
operations. A secret team was assembled, including CIA agents who had earlier fin-
anced in part another secret war in Laos through opium smuggling. Initially, third
country funding was obtained, with expectations of future quid pro quos, from


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Saudi Arabia, Israel, Taiwan and South Korea, but was inadequate to needs. A
secret scheme developed in which American arms, including missiles, would be
traded to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages, with the payments being
transferred to the contras. The intelligence oversight committees were kept in the
dark about these operations for eight months, until leaks made them undeniable
(Woodward, 1987). Fourteen Administration officials were indicted, and eleven of
them convicted. There are also claims that the “secret team”, “along with other mil-
itary and CIA officials, cooperated with narcotics smuggling in Latin America in or-
der to fund the Contras” (Chambliss, 1989: 193).
    In his discussion of this case, William Chambliss (1989: 195) asked “Why would
government officials from the NSC, the Defense Department, the State Department,
and the CIA become involved in smuggling arms and narcotics, money laundering,
assassinations, and other criminal activities”. His answer points to the “structural
contradictions that inhere in nation-states”. Specifically for my purposes here, he
notes that smuggling poses threats to “personal security and interests that makes
laws prohibiting smuggling essential. Under some circumstances, however, such laws
contradict other interests of the state. This contradiction prepares the ground for
state-organized crime as a solution” to the pursuit of contradictory goals (Chamb-
liss, 1989: 196). The overriding goal in this case was to fight the spread of commun-
ism, and if necessary to subvert governments that aligned themselves with the Soviet
Union, the People’s Republic of China, and Cuba. Thus, the desire to subvert “hos-
tile” governments in Central America and elsewhere, combined with political con-
straints on doing so such as prohibitions on spending money to overthrow the
Nicaraguan government, induced a coalition of political agents to engage in, sup-
port, or turn a blind eye to a variety of criminal activities, including arms and drug
smuggling. In a long tradition of similar efforts in the past tracing back at least to
the 19th century Opium Wars, once such illegal networks are established, they take
on a life of their own that is very difficult to effectively control, as the contemporary
opium trade from Afghanistan suggests.

Conclusions
   This paper drew upon my previously developed typology of fundamental reasons
why illegal practices persist. It used this model to consider some problems faced by
Customs interdiction of smuggling. After exploring some of the distinctive features
and uses of my typology, I used case studies to consider enforcement issues for each
of the five different types of illegal persistence. The examination of each variety of
persistence drew out implications for Customs enforcement, considering processes
that apply particularly to that variety, as well as those such as corruption that may be
involved in all five. While I hope that these discussions are of some interest, it would

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ALAN SMART                                                                              61


seem desirable in this conclusion to try and take the analysis some steps farther. In
particular, what can we learn by comparing the dynamics of the different varieties
of persistence of smuggling?
    First, a key lesson seems to be that the degree of social legitimacy, or seen from
the opposite side, the degree of stigma, of a particular kind of smuggling has influ-
ences on all dimensions of the process, from how many people are willing to at-
tempt it, to the extent of the penalties, the willingness of Customs officers to tolerate
the practice (or simply confiscate the contraband without imposing other penalties),
and the possibility of loss of credibility for Customs agencies when they enforce the
rules strictly. Socially legitimate but formally illegal practices of “smuggling” are
less likely to generate feelings of guilt in citizens, less likely to invoke anger or feel-
ings of justification for harsh treatment by frontline Customs officers, and may not
worry their supervisors. Senior Customs officials have limited resources to deploy
and would prefer that they be devoted to “important” or clear-cut kinds of smug-
gling, and may not want to undermine public support for their activities. Dangerous
pharmaceuticals or weapons are likely to generate completely opposite reactions at
all levels. Smuggling that only has profits for motivation, without the buttress of in-
formal legitimacy among the general population, and which is propelled by the dy-
namic that heightened enforcement leads to greater investment by smugglers in the
tools of violence and corruption, is likely to produce the most stigmatized cases, fol-
lowed by subversively motivated illegal trade without substantive domestic support.
Rebellious persistence starts to have greater legitimacy among at least parts of the
population, but may be the most threatening for the government, so that divergence
of perspectives may be most apparent in this type. Smuggling under the auspices of
ambiguous persistence is likely to have the least stigma, and thus the highest rates of
infraction and lowest effort put into enforcement, although high prevalence may res-
ult in many cases of interdiction.
    Second, the results of intensified enforcement crackdowns would seem to differ
between the types. For market persistence, intense repression is most likely to result
in the driving out of amateurs and the concentration of the illicit industry in the
hands of organized crime, with loose, informal networks replaced by more hierarch-
ical organization, or cell structures as in the case of revolutionary parties so that
members cannot reveal the names of more than one or two individuals outside their
cell (Smart, 1988). Crackdowns on smuggling of informally legitimate goods, on the
other hand, may result in increased public resentment against the agents and the
government (Chalfin, 2004), or even encourage stronger anti-government activism,
as Peter Andreas argues for colonial America. Under certain conditions, it is pos-
sible that crackdowns against ambiguous persistence can lead to rebellious persist-
ence.


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    The last point leads to the third general consideration, that there are situations
where one type can be transformed into another. The interaction between smugglers
and enforcement agencies can lead to changes in the main reason why the smuggling
persists. If enforcement is done in such a way as to undermine the legitimacy of
government agents while increasing the legitimacy of those who break the rules, one
possible result, as Andreas shows, is a shift from ambiguous persistence towards re-
bellious persistence. On the other hand, informal legitimacy of illicit goods may be
reduced when illegal entrepreneurs act in ways seen as unacceptable, for example as
independent sex work becomes replaced by sex slavery and human trafficking, or as
cocaine becomes more hazardous when converted into “crack”, or as fights over luc-
rative markets become violent and affect “innocent bystanders”.
    The most general conclusion is that there are both theoretical and practical ad-
vantages in avoiding a treatment of illegality in general terms, and to pluralize the
concept to understand the diverse motivations and forms that it can take. Illegality in
the singular accepts seeing like the state in black and white. Illegalities in the plural
form bring the dynamics out of the black letter of legal codes and court decisions,
and bring back people into the analysis of the processes that result in illegality being
both interminable and diversely variable in its informal realities (Smart, Zerilli,
2014).




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ALAN SMART                                                                              63




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 Alan SMART, (PhD, University of Toronto, 1986) is Professor at the Department of An-
 thropology, University of Calgary. His research has focused on urban issues, housing, for-
 eign investment, social change, and agriculture in Hong Kong, China, and Canada. He is
 author of Making Room: Squatter Clearance in Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press,
 1992), Petty Capitalists and Globalization (co-edited with Josephine Smart, SUNY Press,
 2005), The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in Hong Kong, 1950-
 1963 (Hong Kong University Press, 2006), and numerous articles in journals and edited
 volumes.




                                                                                           Alan SMART
                                                                                 University of Calgary
                                                                                  asmart@ucalgary.ca




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alan Smart
Custom control over illicit international trade: The impact of different forms of illegality
2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 1, GIUGNO 2015: 42-65.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-1873
