Christian Leuprecht (Ph.D, Queen’s) is Class of 1965 Professor in Leadership, Department of Political Science and Economics, Royal Military College, Director of the Institute of Intergovernmental Relations, School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University, Adjunct Research Professor, Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security, Charles Sturt University as well as the College of Business, Government and Law at Flinders University, and Munk Senior Fellow in Security and Defence at the Macdonald Laurier Institute. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Military Journal and Canadian Defence Academy Press. A former Fulbright Research Chair in Canada-US Relations at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC (2020) and a former Eisenhower Fellow at the NATO Defence College in Rome (2019), he is an elected member of the College of New Scholars of the Royal Society of Canada and a recipient of RMC’s Cowan Prize for Excellence in Research. He latest book is Intelligence as Democratic Statecraft (Oxford University Press, 2021).
This special issue raises the prospect of trust-based determinants of security communities other than cultural similarity. The case studies in this special issue document the emergence of cross-border and transgovernmental policy and enforcement networks that facilitate policy development, implementation and alignment through coordination, cooperation, and collaboration: nascent communities coordinate, ascendant communities coordinate and cooperate but struggle to collaborate, while mature communities coordinate, cooperate, and collaborate. Specifically, pluralistic forms of communication and interactions away from the actual borderline seem to play a key role in the emergence of friendly and trustful relationships among border dyads that need not necessarily be contiguous.
Since Canada adjoins the largest weapons market in the world, it is unsurprising that guns used to commit criminal acts in Canada largely originate in the United States. But how are such weapons transported across the border: by individual entrepreneurs, by small networks, or by sophisticated cartels? This article analyzes six cases that resulted in prosecutions of 40 Canadian and American citizens implicated in Canada-U.S. gun trafficking networks between 2007 and 2010. This study is a plausibility probe that applies social network analysis-investigating networks that come into existence by the creation of pairwise links among their members-to analyze global structures, identify brokers and their roles, and discover patterns in the way guns are being procured in the United States, transported across the border, and distributed in Canada.
