Migrant smuggling: tentacular cartel or socially embedded networks?

The paper examines the modus operandi of the actors involved in the facilitation of irregular cross-border mobility. The field of migrant smuggling studies has been long dominated by data, concepts, and normative assumptions from law-enforcement agencies, depicting the phenomenon as a criminal enterprise organised hierarchically and with links to the smuggling of licit and illicit commodities. However, the proliferation of empirical studies drawing on ethnography, archival research and social network analysis has questioned this approach: the structuring role of organised criminal syndicates remains poorly substantiated, while horizontal coordination prevails. Shifting the focus from the economic to the social capital of smuggling actors, the paper engages with the recent literature highlighting the relationships of trust, kinship and reciprocity that often link smugglers and smuggled. The focus on actors’ agency suggests that the facilitation of irregular mobility, albeit formally criminalised, is deeply interwoven into the texture of ordinary social life of borderlands. The focus on the dynamics of protection and extraction, however, allows one to analytically disentangle smuggling and racketing, and to reintroduce the role of criminal organisation in the taxation of clandestine mobilities.