Spirits of Governance is an experiment.

I don’t really care about Higher Ed anymore. It’s been almost 20 years. I quit the doctoral program in 2017. Thousands of dollars spent, countless hours, blood, sweat, and tears invested over 17 years, and I have yet to see any actual ROI. Why am I doing this? Because my computer is on its last leg. And all my data is on my computer lol. So. I’ll also probably regret it one day if I don’t. Maybe if I do this, it will help me get over my entrenched resentment and intense disdain for the Ivory Tower and everyone who upholds it as some sort of gold standard in the metaphysical quest of ‘bettering’ oneself (i.e., getting an education in the humanities). Somehow I doubt it will, but I remain open. Who knows.

This website and the idea behind it is inspired by my doctoral research, fieldwork, and findings, but also by my time before and away from all of that (which provided a welcome and much-needed respite). My hope is that this site will function both as a conduit for information gathered about the field (that some researchers have been waiting patiently for), and as a platform to inspire dialogue and change in the structures and operations of governance generally. People in positions of power and governance need to start voicing their inner dialogue and interacting with each other in ways that will allow researchers and journalists interested in the failures of governance to better understand why policy seems to ‘fail’ when it should in fact (and theory) succeed.

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A Critical Inquiry into Multi-Stakeholder Governance in the Transnational Criminal Antiquities Market: Contrasting Realities and Policies of Practice (working title of my unpublished doctoral dissertation)

General Overview

Once upon a time, this project examined the realities of multi-stakeholder governance and control in the criminal market of transnationally trafficked archaeological antiquities. There is a large body of literature that examines this market, but little has been done in the way of critical inquiry into the ways governance and control actually work on an international level. There’s been a lot of attention and focus over the years on trying to understand ‘how to better regulate the market’; this usually takes the form of a bunch of white people sitting around in board rooms chatting about it for days, or academics talking about it from a significant distance at national and international conferences, or bloggers blogging about it from a significant distance from the actual ‘problem.’ These approaches fail miserably in trying to answer the deeper and more important questions around whether the market can actually ever be regulated – not in a superficial policy-way, but in a real-time on-the-ground operational control way. One or two or three big busts don’t mean the market is actually being effectively controlled. A dozen papers speculating why the the market doesn’t seem to be controlled effectively don’t help when those papers are written from the periphery of the actual problem and the actual control of it. What does it even mean to control or govern the market? Who really governs the market? Who bears the burden of responsibility to control transnational criminal activity? Is international governance a smooth process? Could problems in the international governance framework be a leading factor for the persistence of the criminal market in transnationally trafficked archaeological antiquities?

In order to answer these and other questions, I identified multiple stakeholders in international governance and created a framework of analysis using a post-Foucaultian governmentality approach. In this framework, there are several types of governance stakeholders that can be divided roughly into two categories:

1) Observational actors (academics, policy-makers, et al. who observe things from a distance) and

2) Operational agents (law enforcement) who operationalize policy put into place and actually control criminal trafficking ‘on the ground’.

I chose to focus the majority of my fieldwork on learning about the individuals and agencies of the latter (operational agents) category because they enjoy a proximity-privilege to real-time information, to the reality of the crimes actually taking place in a transnational context, and they are literally engaging in control activities on a daily basis and at various levels. This research therefore assumed that operational agents know more about what is really happening in the transnational context than other observational actors in the governance framework by virtue of their proximity to the problem and, because of this, their viewpoints and experiences are of paramount importance for constructing new theories about the market, how it functions, how bad it is, and operational practices to control it. This assumption was made in part due to my prior academic study and knowledge of the field of illicit antiquities crime, coupled with my previous experience working more generally in the physical security industry in various capacities which included daily briefs, perimeter patrols, surveillance, authoring criminal incident reports, regular interfacing with various law enforcement agencies and other institutions and businesses, etc.

Fieldwork

Obtaining access to Federal law enforcement agencies, border police, mainports (air and sea), and government offices is known to be very difficult, if not often impossible for researchers interested in talking to people about crime. However, over the duration of 2013-2014, I negotiated access to and developed working relationships with Operational participants representing 28 high-level Federal law enforcement agencies, private security firms, and government offices in a rage of 27 countries (12 of which I visited in order to meet personally with interview participants and conduct research). I also negotiated access to several private companies, academics, international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Inter-Governmental Organizations (IGOs) concerned with observing the market and the policy aspects of controlling illicit traffic; I secured several interviews with high level individuals whose roles were to observe, draft, inform and advise both law enforcement and politicians working within various ministries. In addition to these, I also negotiated access with customs officials and port police in 4 of the largest mainports in the world. Obtaining and securing this access allowed to me conduct in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observation in a variety of operational settings where the criminal cultural goods market is investigated regularly and control activities are conducted on a daily basis. I conducted interviews with over 40 people in a range of different capacities working toward actively observing and controlling the market in some considerable tactical way.

Some of the Findings

There were several general observations that I made (that include but are in no way limited to):

• Practices of governance vary among the different stakeholders I identified, and have particular influences on the multi-stakeholder governance and control in the criminal market of transnationally trafficked archaeological antiquities.
• There are several contrasting but integrated ‘realities’ of governance at work in this transnational market
• When policy is constructed, operational agents responsible for legal enforcement experience limitations to their activities that limit the amount of control they are able to actualize on the market
• On an observational level, the concept of ‘experts’ and ‘specialized expertise’ is challenging and deserves more critical attention than it has received thus far

Significance of the Work

Against the contextual background (the corpus of scholarly material that has lead up to this point) in the academic study of so-called ‘illicit antiquities’, this research is significant because it represents the very first radical criminological inquiry into how this transnational market is governed and controlled on an international level. The critical and radical schools of criminology are where this project found its audience in 2012-2017 – something that was very helpful to this point by presenting my work and obtaining vital feedback. Besides the field of academia, there is also genuine governmental and commercial interest in this research that has so far resulted in several knowledge exchanges and ideas for practical implications of my project. Studying the nature of the relationships between governance stakeholders provides a window into the empirical reality of transnational criminal market governance and exposes the challenges that may inhibit ‘effective’ governance and operational control. This work seeks to enhance our collective understanding of a poorly understood aspect of transnational crime generally and antiquities trafficking specifically, and will hopefully inform and enrich future theory and operational practices constructed around various international markets.

Affiliation & Funding

This work was partially funded by the University of Glasgow College of Social Science’s Illicit Antiquities and Global Criminal Markets Scholarship and was, once upon a time, affiliated with the larger ‘Trafficking Culture’ project which was directly funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC Grant agreement n° 283873.

Currently, in 2021, I am unfunded, have no institutional affiliation, and am providing this data to the public in my spare time, if and when spare time exists.