convergence

The Geography of Badness
But surprisingly, given the central role these hubs play as both engines and enablers of
illicit global commerce, there has been little rigorous empirical scholarship on how a city,
country, or region becomes a black market mecca. 15 While there is hardly room here for the
kind of sustained, methodical inquiry that is ultimately required, I will seek in this chapter to
initiate a discussion of the geography of the illicit global economy by exploring what features
make some places congenial to underworld actors and others not.
The Role of Hubs in a Networked World
It took a while for observers to grasp the revolution that has transformed global crime over the
last few decades, but the study of globalized crime and illicit networks has gradually come into
focus. One of the bedrock notions at the heart of this emerging field is the idea that a new breed
of illicit, transnational, nonstate actors has been very busy in recent years, and that whether
they are ideological terrorist groups or profit-driven criminals, they share certain characteristics
at the level of their organizational DNA. They are networks. 16
A decade ago, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt described a new kind of nonhierarchical
adversary: “dispersed organizations, small groups, and individuals who communicate, coordinate,
and conduct their campaigns in an internetted manner, often without a precise central
command.” 17 In the language of networks, each criminal actor came to represent a node in a
dispersed associational map. The associations between these nodes can be described as links. 18
Much of the early scholarship on illicit networks focused on the democratic character of
these structures. Whereas traditional mafias, like nation-states, were entrenched and hierarchical,
networks often had a flatter, more fluid, and adaptive leadership structure. This quality
made them especially robust and difficult to attack because the removal of any one node in a
criminal or terrorist network might have only a limited impact.
Still, even in a decentralized network, all nodes are not created equal. Physicist Albert-László
Barabási has shown that some nodes serve as points of connection for a disproportionate number
of links. These nodes come to function as hubs. Imagine the difference between a map of the
highways in the United States and a map of the air traffic routes. On the road map, cities are
the nodes and the highways connecting them are the links. Each major city has at least one
link to the highway system, but there are no cities served by hundreds of highways. So most of
the nodes are fairly similar, with roughly the same number of links. But an airline map looks
different. In order to operate efficiently, airlines route flights through certain hubs. So on a
map of air traffic, a few specific nodes, such as Houston, Denver, or New York, will stand out
with an exponentially larger number of links as they connect the vast majority of the airports
around the country. 19
In the same way Continental Airlines, Amazon.com, and United Parcel Service construct
their delivery routes around a handful of critical hubs, black marketeers come to rely on some
locations more than others. In some instances, this may simply be a matter of cultivating a few
contacts on the ground in the jurisdiction in question who can make the relevant payments to
ensure that a shipment of contraband passes through unmolested. But in other cases, criminal
actors will come to base a large part of their business in these hubs, staging their shipments
there, sourcing otherwise hard-to-come-by documentation, or laundering their money.
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