International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 44

Criminology, a Precursor to Criminal Law
been created, there was an uninterrupted emergence of low intensity conflicts and
polymorphic forms of modern criminality that were becoming less and less identifiable
and that were already foreshadowing the disorder of today’s world.
During the Cold War, we saw the emergence of guerilla warfare, 2 military
operations that did not respect the laws of war and that would come to be known
as unconventional warfare, used as much against hostile entities as they were within
wars of liberation, revolutionary wars, or civil wars.
In shifting away from the kinds of confrontations that make use of missiles,
tanks, or strategic bombers, let us introduce the concept of low intensity conflicts.
These consequently enable us to see how indirect strategies were created,
sponsored, and financed by the two blocs and used by groups furnished with different
liberation, resistance, or revolutionary labels that innocently, and more or
less everywhere, led guerilla operations.
In the context of this closed world, and as it had not really had need of nor
the possibility to develop geographically, profit-based criminality remained geographically
stable and relatively limited, despite the fact that organized criminal
entities had existed for a long time, with some having benefited from migratory
movements in order to settle in new territories.
A WORLD OPENING UP TO CRIME
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end
of the Cold War, and the bipolar order of the blocs, the world became
more open and the flow of traffic was freed up once again ... for a crucial
period of around ten years. The concept of threat was about to change form.
The regained freedom gave rise to globalization! The world changed: people
could travel around safely and work freely more or less everywhere. In a very short
period of time, we went from the Cold War and atomic anxiety to being part of a
global village.
States went into decline, companies freed themselves from the previous
constraints they faced; criminal groups grew in strength, moved about and developed
new markets; the children of the indirect strategies of the Cold War
became orphans .... What we saw appearing were what some people began to
call the new threats: a mixture of politics and criminality that made use of all
the means that globalization provided it with; vague, hybrid, versatile, effective
entities.
These criminal entities, like legitimate enterprises, have benefitted from the
same trends, the same technologies, from the process of simplification and, above
all, from the acceleration of all the means of exchange that the internet offers in
2 The term means “little war,” in Spanish, and appeared at the time of Spanish resistance to Napoleon
at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Its methods would be refined during the American Civil
War.
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