Yuliya Zabyelina, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Political Science at John Jay College, has spent the vast majority of her career researching and examining transnational organized crime, including its increased involvement in mining activities since the 1990s. In the forthcoming book Illegal Mining: Organized Crime, Corruption, and Ecocide in a Resource-Scarce World, Zabyelina, and co-editor Daan von Uhm, help shine a light on some of these criminal acts. With insight and research from leading field experts, the book zeros in on illegal extraction, trafficking in mined commodities, and ecocide associated with mining, with contributions from the perspectives of organized crime theory, green criminology, anti-corruption studies, and victimology. “I’m really excited about this forthcoming book,” says Zabyelina. “Illegal mining is a topic that hasn’t really been discussed in the international criminal justice field, so we were happy to put it in the spotlight.”

John Jay’s Office for the Advancement of Research (OAR) spoke with Zabyelina to learn more about the book and her research on organized crime.

How are transnational organized crime groups involved in illegal mining?
Organized crime and terrorist groups have discovered that illegal mining is a lucrative business—obviously, they’ve been attracted to gold. We cover the Latin American region quite densely in the book; Colombia and Peru feature as countries with the risk of organized crime infiltration of gold mines. In those countries, there is informal, or artisanal, mining. This is all about regular people going out and trying to find gold, and nobody regulates them. It’s not a crime per se, but some countries obviously want to regulate it because they want to make sure that the procedure is legal and environmentally friendly. Informal mining is quite common, and because it’s not regulated, it’s somewhere far away from civilization and law enforcement, organized crime groups have tried to regulate those territories and control informal mining. That’s been done for several reasons.

First, obviously gold is expensive so it’s good income. Second, gold can be used for money laundering purposes. Also, human trafficking is part of this business. It’s like an infrastructure. You have emerging, informal mines, and miners have to live somewhere, they have to eat, they have to get water, and women are brought to them, because there’s demand on the part of miners. They also need mercury provided for gold production which raises a number of environmental concerns. There’s tax evasion, and security concerns, because illegal mining and trafficking in precious metals and minerals can be used as a source of funding for terrorist groups or rebels. So, it’s not just the crime of illegal mining, it’s all of the other things that are relevant and connected to each other.

What are some of the environmental consequences of this type of mining?
It’s difficult to answer that question because the environmental consequences of illegal mining could be very different where different types of products are mined. For gold, it’s the issue of mercury and deforestation; many communities are displaced because of mining activities, and mercury can contaminate water, leaving local communities without freshwater access. In the book, I wrote a chapter on amber, and in it I discuss how in certain parts of the world, like Ukraine, they use high-capacity pumps to put water under the earth and flush out the stones—it’s very bad for the environment. Deforestation is also an issue there, and the pump method makes the soil infertile.

You said that in areas where this activity is occurring, governments often lack the capacity to enforce bans, creating opportunities for criminal groups to come in and evade legislation and law enforcement. What are some policy solutions governments can use to curb illegal extraction and trafficking in these commodities?
Again, answering that question requires looking at each specific region. There is not just one answer to all different types of mining. But it’s all about transparency and making sure that local communities have access to practices that are environmentally friendly, regulated, and protected by the state. It’s about the state providing security, economic assistance, and perhaps education to miners. In order to operate complex, environmentally friendly technology, they need to be educated and trained.

Obviously, there needs to be transparency in the supply chain. When gold is mined in Peru or Colombia, there’s little demand inside the country. So, it goes to gold refineries in the United States or Dubai, and those refineries are responsible for making sure that the sourcing of their gold is legal, and that it’s not funding terrorist groups. The same goes for diamond cutting centers, like Antwerp or New York—there were several big cases in New York involving illegal diamonds, and how they were used for cleaning dirty money from Colombian cartels.

How do you make the outcomes of your research more readily available to policymakers?
That’s a tough one. The problem of non-communication between academics and policymakers is a long-term issue. The best way, I think, is to organize events in which policymakers and academics and practitioners can come together and discuss these problems. We planned to have the book launch at the United Nations Crime Congress in Japan in April 2020, and we were expecting UN experts as well as academics and NGO representatives, but it was postponed.

The UN has been trying to raise awareness about the topic of illegal mining and trafficking in precious stones and metals. We have connections with the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC); the forward of the book was written by someone from the UNODC, and they will be using this book for their own purposes. We’re trying to build a partnership with them to raise awareness about the importance of this topic, and we’ve had a number of events at the UNODC over the years. In my individual capacity as a John Jay professor, I attend UN Crime Congresses every five years, and the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ), another annual UN event. I’m part of a professional academic organization that’s registered as an NGO, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS), whose representatives regularly attend UN events, so that’s part of how I established the partnership and moved it forward. In the past two years we’ve been talking a lot about emergent crimes, and illegal mining fits wonderfully under this larger umbrella of organized crime.

It seems that global terrorism has dropped out of the national discourse recently in the face of so many other global issues taking up our attention, like climate change or the global pandemic. How do these issues overlap?
Global crime exacerbates all those problems. Whether you’re speaking about climate change or pandemics, organized crime is there. It’s a global issue, and it’s not a standalone topic—it needs to be looked at together with other problems, from the point of view of different disciplines, so we can cross-fertilize solutions. Pandemics aren’t only an issue of health. Associated with pandemics are fraud and cybercrimes, counterfeit masks and medicines that are being sold. Everything is connected.

When you’re putting together a large text like this, how do you decide which perspectives are most important, and which theories and disciplines to include?
You want to be working with the people who are experts in their respective regions or subfields, and via the trust you have, let them guide the process. We were looking to collect chapters from the most well-known experts in specific areas. Using their intellectual discretion, these experts decided what data to use, or the theoretical framework that would best guide their research.