Introduction: Trafficking as Transnational Crime

What is transnational crime, and what is trafficking? This chapter reviews prior literature on the main issues informing these questions, including informal economy, criminal markets, organised crime, ‘the underworld’, and the theory of the spectrum of enterprise. It is the latter that serves as a touchstone concept, linking illicit enterprise to legal business and bringing the theoretical tools of white-collar crime thinkers into the same analytical pool as those of organised crime theorists. Doing so, we come to see that the idea of business enterprise in its contemporary context can drive criminal market activities as well as legal markets. We review aspects of relevant social theory including ideas of globalisation, indifference, the banality of evil, and psychological writing on ‘compartmentalisation’, to develop a distinctively criminological approach to understanding the social drivers and facilitators of trafficking.