International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 7

International Journal on Criminology
provide two examples to illustrate this first level of analysis.
• The Sahel
In the Sahel, the terrorist threat does not exist in isolation. It is cultivated by the
fertile ground of demographic explosion and migratory pressures, climate change,
economic despair, trafficking of all kinds, and institutional fragility. Trafficking,
particularly of drugs, is a complex reality. Fed by the absence of economic opportunities,
it is cultivated by increasingly sophisticated transnational criminal networks,
with sometimes murky links to terrorist organizations.
To find a solution to the crisis in this region, we must therefore take a global,
integrated, and multidimensional approach, in which the security response to terrorism
and trafficking cannot move forward without action in the area of economic
and human development. Hence the launch of the Sahel Alliance by France,
Germany, and the European Union in July: this represents a civil and economic
complement to the security response led by the G5 Joint Force.
Here I would note that it is in order to promote the security-development continuum
as a response to the multidimensional nature of crises that France has decided
to increase government spending on development to 0.55% of national wealth by
the end of this presidential term.
These security and economic responses must be accompanied by a political response,
since there can be no solution to the crisis in the Sahel without restoring
confidence in its institutions, and above all in the capacity of the state to protect
its citizens. For the void left behind by government institutions is a political void
in which criminal and terrorist enterprises and the links they cultivate are able to
flourish.
• Syria and the Levant
My second example is the Syrian crisis: a distinctive amalgam of combat against
terrorist organizations and a civil war aggravated by its internationalization,
through the direct or indirect intervention of foreign powers, via foreign militia
present on the ground. It has resulted in the exodus of the Syrian population, of
which we are well aware. The Syrian crisis further demonstrates a very disturbing
aspect of current conflicts: the use of armed violence not only against combatants
but also, indiscriminately, against civilians, and humanitarian actors and their infrastructure,
in violation of international law.
There is also a risk of conflicts mutating. This is the case in the Levant, due to the
internationalization of the war in Syria and in Iraq: Turkey against the PYD, Arabs
against Kurds, Kurds against the regime—or Israel against Hezbollah, which is going
from strength to strength in the Syrian conflict, where its forces have toughened
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