Getting a foot in the door. Spaces of cocaine trafficking in the Port of Rotterdam.

As an important gateway to Europe, the Port of Rotterdam is known for its high-quality facilities and efficiency, but also attracts organised crime groups who use the transatlantic legal trade flows to traffic cocaine. Based on a qualitative study, consisting of 73 interviews with public and private actors, an analysis of 10 criminal investigations and field visits to public and private organisations in the port, this article examines how organised crime groups involved in cocaine trafficking take advantage of or adapt to the socio-spatial relations in the Port of Rotterdam. First, we pay attention to which physical spaces in the port of Rotterdam provide opportunities for cocaine trafficking. Second, we examine how the occupational and legal environment in which people, private companies and law enforcement agencies in the port work and interact provide opportunities for cocaine trafficking. Our findings demonstrate that increased security measures by both public and private actors directed at physical spaces result in a displacement to new spaces in and around the port of Rotterdam. Furthermore, the current socio-spatial relations in the port of Rotterdam also make the role of people on the inside – referring to a whole range of public and private employees – increasingly indispensable

Culpability for Violence in the Congo: Lessons from the Crisis of 1960–1965

During Congo’s emergence from colonization in the mid-twentieth century, coups, political assassinations, and ethnic massacres took place that exacerbated inequality and insecurity in the region then and ever since. Some Western literature has essentialized these events, implying that they were a product of African people’s innate disorganization, divisiveness, leftism, and violence. Many of the writings keep to surface appearances rather than probing behind-the-scenes causalities. Evidence from archives, images, memoirs, and interviews, however, reveals a counterintuitive complexity in both the representation and perpetration of the direct and structural violence of the Congo crisis. Very different cultures, financing, technology, and interactions were characteristic of the western state agents who sponsored, organized, took part in, and often wrote about the coups and killings in Congo as opposed to the African functionaries with whom and against whom they worked. This chapter illustrates some of the evidence for these complex and contrasting patterns, offers alternative explanations, and outlines some lessons to be learned from the crisis