Transnational Networks

Terror, crime, migration, finance — the parts of the world that do not respect borders.

The brief

The contemporary world is organized partly by states and partly by networks that ignore state boundaries. International terrorism (Al-Qaeda, ISIS). Transnational organized crime (Mexican cartels, the Russian mafia, the Italian camorra, Nigerian fraud rings, Chinese triads). Migration networks, legal and illegal. Diaspora communities that remit hundreds of billions of dollars a year — more than all official development aid combined. NGOs (Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the ICRC). Religious movements (the global evangelical network, transnational Salafism, the Tablighi Jamaat). Financial flows that move faster than any regulator can follow. The parts of the world that do not respect borders. They are not new in principle — the Hanseatic League and the Jesuit order were transnational networks centuries ago. They are simply larger, faster, and denser than they have ever been.

Transnational networks pose two structurally different problems. Hostile networks — terror, crime — operate in spaces no single state can fully police; their suppression demands international cooperation that has historically been fitful. Interpol works, the Financial Action Task Force works, but only inside countries that take them seriously, and a single non-cooperating jurisdiction can host the whole operation. Non-hostile but consequential networks — NGOs, multinationals, religious movements — shape political outcomes inside states without being accountable to those states' electorates. The Catholic Church operates in nearly every country on Earth; HSBC banks in some sixty markets; Greenpeace campaigns in dozens. State responses diverge sharply: liberal democracies generally tolerate transnational civil-society networks while regulating financial and security ones, whereas authoritarian states tend to suspect all transnational networks as foreign-influence vectors and respond accordingly. Russia's 2012 "foreign agents" law belongs to a broader family of restrictions that has spread from Cairo to Budapest. One of the most consequential transnational networks of the past century — Soviet-backed international communism, coordinated through the Comintern and later institutions — was hostile to liberal states and was eventually outlasted rather than defeated. The most consequential network of the next century may be transnational fundamentalist religious movements (Christian, Islamic, Hindu), climate activism, or something not yet visible on anyone's threat board.

Why nowThe securitization of transnational networks is one of the major political tendencies of the 2020s. Western states increasingly scrutinize foreign-funded NGOs, foreign-owned social-media platforms, and some foreign-linked student or religious organizations as possible channels for influence operations — the 2024 U.S. divest-or-ban law targeting TikTok, upheld by the Supreme Court in January 2025 and then subjected to repeated implementation extensions that year, is the emblematic case. Authoritarian states (Russia, China, Hungary, Iran) have gone much further, criminalizing or expelling much of their domestic NGO sector outright. Whether liberal democracies can still distinguish genuine influence operations from legitimate civil-society activity — without hollowing out the open society they are defending — and what the global civil-society architecture looks like after another decade of this, is genuinely unsettled.