OPEN PERSPECTIVES EXCHANGE NETWORK (OPEN)
African continent and into West Africa, particularly into Guinea and Mali, where it then joins with large-scale cocaine shipment from South America and locally-synthesised methamphetamine and moves northward into Europe via land and sea routes. Figure 2 Map of Migrant Heroin Trafficking Routes
Source: UNODC, World Drug Report 2016.
Indeed, the nexus of drug trafficking into European NATO member states – like a growing proportion of migration – increasingly revolves around West Africa, according to a 2016 Brookings Institution report. The Brookings report noted that ‘since the mid-2000s, [West Africa] has emerged as an important transhipment point through which international drug cartels move cocaine and heroin from South America and Asia to Europe and North America’. Brookings, along with an article in the journal Stability, point to West Africa’s rise as a trafficking hub given high rates of endemic poverty as well as corruption among the political and security establishments.
3.1. Challenges and Opportunities Like migration, illicit trafficking points to challenges as well as opportunities. The following section first reviews the costs of trafficking to NATO states, particularly those in Europe, and notes the opportunity that illicit trafficking flows signal for Alliance members and states in the Greater South.
NATO’s Greater South
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May 2017