MW Lecture with Professor John Braithwaite, March 2023

Crime-war as a cascade phenomenon
The Peacebuilding Compared project led by John Braithwaite since 2004 has completed preliminary fieldwork and coding on 68 armed conflicts since the end of the Cold War. Causal process tracing reveals that particular kinds of crime are often a spark of war. War also tends to cascade to elevated rates of homicide and suicide in combatant countries and in countries bordering the country at war. Braithwaite’s Macrocriminology and Freedom (2022) argues that crime and war are cascade phenomena and that domination is a cascade phenomenon that cascades to crime and war. The history of slavery looms large in the geopolitical trends that shape cascades among domination, crime and war. After the ban on the slave trade consolidated in the nineteenth century, major powers shifted interest from establishing new African colonies to chipping away at non-European Empires, first China, then the Ottoman Empire, with the 1911 war in Libya a particularly devastating war that was quickly followed by Balkan wars and then World War I to end the Ottoman Empire. The current Libyan wars are traced as part of a trajectory of crime, slavery, post-colonial genocide, and the contemporary cascade of Islamic State across Africa. Crime prevention might have prevented this Libyan cascade of crime, war and terrorism; greater reticence of escalation from a peaceful Arab Spring to a NATO-armed Libyan Liberation War might have prevented it.