Bad Company: Conversations about the New Global Underworld with Mark Galeotti

Crime pays, and criminals are actors on the world stage whose powerful (if often hidden) role in the modern world has yet to be fully understood. Criminals run globe-spanning businesses that supply narcotics, trafficked people, and illegal services. They arm insurgents and destabilize governments. They bypass national and international regulations on everything from financial transactions to environmental standards. Mark Galeotti, CGA clinical professor and an expert on transnational and organized crime, hosts a series of conversations with scholars and security analysts that illuminate the workings of the global underworld: what it does, how it does it, and what this means for us all.

The Illegal Cigarette Trade
Monday, March 4, 6:30–7:45 p.m. Klaus von Lampe, Associate Professor, John Jay College

What connects street vendors in the Bronx to a global criminal market? Cigarettes are essentially a legal commodity. Nonetheless, in many parts of the world, including New York City, an illegal trade in cigarettes is flourishing, with both counterfeit and untaxed tobacco making up approximately 11 percent of the global cigarette market. Join Klaus von Lampe, a criminologist who has studied cigarette black markets in Europe, China, and the U.S., as he sheds light on the structure and dynamics of the illegal cigarette trade and explains why this underworld business matters in the big picture.

Warlords: Strongmen, Weak States, and the
International Order
Tuesday, April 9, 6:30–7:45 p.m.Kimberly Marten, Professor of Political Science, Barnard College; Acting Director, the Harriman Institute, Columbia University

Professor Kimberly Marten, author of Warlords: Strong-Arm Brokers in Weak States, explores how today's generation of warlords should not be considered state-builders but instead forces able to provide short-term stability at the cost of long-term security. From Afghanistan and Iraq to the post-Soviet Caucasus, governments have often tried to ally with and use these figures, but her view is that this is a dangerous option that fails to understand the new relationship among states, sovereignty, "local power brokers," and stability and security in the modern world..