convergence

Deviant Globalization
lots of choices that governments and other transnational actors can make use of to advance
their objectives. Our goal here is to illuminate the real stakes in the tough choices that deviant
globalization presents.
What Is Deviant Globalization?
Deviant globalization, in the first place, is an economic phenomenon: it is that portion of
the global economy that meets demand for goods and services that are illegal or considered
repugnant in one place by using a supply from some other part of the world where morals are
different or law enforcement is less effective.
Seen through this economic lens, a reasonable first question to ask is what creates the
market opportunities for deviant globalization. The answer is we do. When we codify and
institutionalize our moral outrage at selling sex by making prostitution illegal, for example,
we create a market opportunity for those who kidnap women and smuggle them into sexual
slavery. When we decide that methamphetamine is a danger to public health and prohibit
it, we create opportunity for drug dealers who delight in the high profit margins as they fill
illicit orders. When we ban the sale of organs in our domestic market, we create incentives
for entrepreneurs to act as brokers or facilitators between physically desperate patients and
economically desperate donors in poor countries. Every time a community or a nation, acting
on the basis of its good faith and clear moral values, decides to “just say no,” it creates an
opportunity for arbitrage.
Deviant globalization is thus an economic concept, but it is also a moral and legal one.
Deviant globalization grows at the intersection of ethical difference and regulatory and law
enforcement inefficiencies. Wherever there is a fundamental disagreement about what is right
as well as a connection to the global market, deviant entrepreneurs pop up to meet the unfulfilled
demand. In meeting our collective desires, they see the differences in notions of public
good, morality, and health as bankable market opportunities. Neoliberalism’s wide-open, market-oriented
rules may govern globalization, but the game gets played on a morally lumpy field.
In contrast to some mainstream theories of globalization, which depict it as a process that
annihilates differences across space, 5 the concept of deviant globalization highlights the continued
importance of spatial differences in the structure of the global economy. The pathways
of deviant flows are determined by not only border security and state authority but also the
particular factor endowments (that is, the amount of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship
that a country possesses) that generate comparative advantage and arbitrage opportunities for
deviant entrepreneurs. Appreciating the geographic particularities of deviant flows is therefore
crucial. Deviant flows move through cities—in a de facto archipelago that runs from the
inner metropolitan cities of the United States to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the banlieues
of Paris to the almost continuous urban slum belt that girds the Gulf of Guinea from Abidjan
to Lagos. They move through towns and villages—along the cocaine supply route that links
the mountains of Colombia to São Paulo and the waterways of West Africa to noses in the
Netherlands. And they move through the “global nodes” that make up the world’s financial
infrastructure—from Wall Street to London to Tokyo’s Nihombashi District. In sum, it is
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