International Journal on Criminology Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2014

International Journal on Criminology ODC October 2008) and “The Globalization Of Crime: A Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment” (UNODC June 2010) highlight the impact of transnational crime on states. According to the 2008 report, both states and communities are caught in the crossfire of drug-related crime and the violence that it fuels in the Americas and across the Atlantic to Europe and Africa. The resulting conflicts have been characterized as a battle for information and real power (Manwaring 2008; 2009). These state challengers—irregular warriors/ non-state combatants (i.e., criminal netwarriors)—increasingly employ barbarization and high order violence, combined with information operations, to seize the initiative and embrace the mantle of social bandit (Hobsbawn 2000) in order to confer legitimacy on themselves and their enterprises. Sovereignty is potentially shifting or morphing as a result of these challenges. Mexico and Latin America as Laboratory for New Media in Contested Zones Mexico and Latin America are currently experiencing a serious onslaught from organized crime (cartels and gangs) that challenges and erodes state capacity to govern, negates the rule of law through endemic impunity, and drives humanitarian crises through high-intensity violence and barbarization. In Mexico, ~50,000 persons have been killed in the crime wars between 2006–2011 according to analysis by the Trans-Border Institute (Molzhan, Rios, and Shirk 2012). New media is central to this quest for power. In this essay, I will briefly summarize the interactive impact of violence, corruption, and information operations to sustain concerted assaults on state solvency (which I view as the net result of capacity and legitimacy). I view these assaults as criminal insurgency, a contemporary form of conflict where crime and politics merge. As such, cartel information operations are an expression of power-counterpower dynamics (Castells 2009). The role of new media in drug war and criminal insurgency includes: �� or chosen time, by all parties in the conflict; ��naling intent; �� ship; �� reportage, as well as an alternative to traditional media; �� and/or narcocultura. Violence, Corruption, and Info Ops It is no surprise that organized crime groups (gangs and cartels) use violence as a tool in the course of business. Threats, coercion, and instrumental violence punctuate their activities. That said, these enterprises usually seek to elude detection and prefer co-opting (corrupting) the instruments of state rather than engaging in direct confrontation. Organized crime usually operates in a state of what Sabet (2009) calls ‘collusive corruption’. Yet, as the current crime wars illustrate, these actors can directly confront the state when their interests are challenged (Bailey and Talyor 2009). Criminal insurgency is the mechanism of the confrontation with the state that results when relationships between organized crime and the state fall into disequilibrium. 64

International Journal on Criminology Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2014 | Page 66