convergence

Deviant Globalization
of (at least relative) poverty. What liberals and Marxists agree on, however, is that the sorts of
illicit economies encompassed by deviant globalization represent a form of economic parasitism
that diverts developmental energy, capital accumulation, human assets, and other valuable
resources away from more productive uses; instead of providing a platform for self-sustained
growth, such deviant markets appear merely to line the pockets of gangsters.
But the role of the deviant entrepreneur in the development of the Global South is more
complicated than this view would suggest. Simply put, deviant entrepreneurs are some of the
most audacious experimenters, risk-takers, and innovators in today’s global economy. In their
relentless search for competitive advantage, they engage in just about all of the activities that
other entrepreneurs do—marketing, strategy, organizational design, product innovation,
information management, financial analysis, and so on. In many cases, they create enormous
profits that meaningfully contribute to local development while also extruding inefficiencies
from huge markets.
In other words, what both liberals and Marxists fail to appreciate is that many people
living in poor nations in the Global South are already engaged in radical experiments in actual
development through deviant globalization. Moreover, participating in the production side of
deviant globalization—one hopes as an entrepreneur, but at least as a worker—is a survival
strategy for those without easy access to legitimate, sustainable market opportunities, which is
to say the poor, the uneducated, and those in locations with ineffective or corrupt institutional
support for mainstream business. 7 Behind the backs of, and often despite, all those corporations
and development NGOs as well as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund,
the poor are renting their bodies, selling their organs, stealing energy, stripping their natural
environments of critical minerals and wildlife, manufacturing drugs, and accepting toxic waste
not because they are evil people but because these jobs are often the fastest, best, easiest, and
even in some cases the most sustainable way to make money. Even for the line workers in deviant
industries, the money accumulated over a few years can often form a nest egg of capital
to start more legitimate businesses. 8
To make the claim that deviant globalization is a form of development is not to deny the
awfulness and oppressiveness of many deviant industries, or the significant social and environmental
externalities that deviant globalization often imposes, or the fact that many of the
participants in deviant globalization are coerced into their roles. No doubt there are better and
worse ways to improve one’s lot in life, but it is rare that participating in deviant globalization
is the worst available choice. Mining coal in China, for example, may be a more “legitimate”
profession than pirating ships off of the coast of Somalia, but it is debatable whether the
former is a better job than the latter. Most important, whatever our normative feelings, both
professions contribute to a kind of development.
Indeed, in many cases, states that host deviant industries recognize and embrace their
developmental benefits. Consider the importance of sex tourism to the economies of countries
such as Thailand, the Philippines, or Cuba. Except for sporadic crackdowns when international
scrutiny grows too intense, these governments knowingly wink at sex tourism—it has been
the foundation of much of their draw on the international tourism scene, and it is the source
of significant quantities of hard currency. In practice, sex tourism is a tacit part of their developmental
strategy. Just as many countries are willing to tolerate physical pollution as a way to
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