October 2026
Research Paper 49
Adam Blanden (University of Birmingham), Dr Mayya Konovalova (Birmingham Business School) and Prof Sami Bensassi (Birmingham Business School)
SOC ACE Project: Smuggling along the new Silk Road: The role of Global Trade Hubs (GTH)
PUBLICATION SUMMARY
Amid rising geopolitical competition and the emergence of powerful export hubs outside the Global North, the global trade system is increasingly framed as a source of security concern. In this context, governance actors in the Global North widely discuss what is termed ‘illicit trade’, which the OECD has described as the ‘dark side of globalisation’: a global network of criminal organisations exploiting open and free trade regimes. Yet there has been little reflection on whose voices shape this discourse, or on how action against illicit trade is defined and pursued.
This research paper examines how ideas and governance practices have shaped the emergence of illicit trade as a distinct policy category. Drawing on 52 semi-structured interviews with representatives of international organisations, government agencies, private firms and non-governmental organisations, alongside documentary and media analysis, the authors show that this discourse developed incrementally and largely below the radar of national politics, well before recent geopolitical tensions intensified attention on global trade.
The paper combines the literature on polycentric governance with organisational stigma theory to show how the ideas and practices of powerful actors influence wider perceptions of what counts as illicit. It traces three empirical threads. First, it examines how multinational tobacco corporations reframed cigarette smuggling as a matter of organised crime. Second, it analyses how counterfeit goods governance rose in prominence alongside the growth of export capacity in China and the Global South. Third, it explores the use of data-driven risk profiling in enforcement against trade-based money laundering.
The paper makes two main arguments. First, by seeking to distinguish ‘good’ trade from ‘bad’ trade, anti-illicit trade discourse raises the rhetorical and enforcement stakes around discrete activities such as smuggling, rather than directing policy attention towards the systemic drivers of globalised economic criminality. Second, by privileging some voices over others, the discourse risks disproportionately stigmatising particular trade actors, undermining the scope for concerted action on the underlying problems.
The authors suggest that these dynamics may inadvertently contribute to the growing securitisation of the global trade system. Rather than strengthening efforts against illicit finance, the polycentric governance of illicit trade may in fact constrain the political will needed to tackle globalised economic criminality at its roots.
The paper argues that effective responses require greater reflection on how illicit trade is defined, by whom and with what consequences. Policymakers seeking to address illicit financial flows need to look beyond enforcement against individual smuggling activities and stigmatised trade actors, and engage with the structural conditions that enable economic crime within the global trading system.
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