convergence

Deviant Globalization
tale. Today’s deviant globalizers are not proto-revolutionaries aiming to remake society in
an inclusive and collectively progressive fashion. Rather, they are opportunists whose public
personae and brands are built around unbridled capitalist spirits—living fast, dying hard, and
letting the rest of the world go to hell. The form of development they are enacting, ironically,
is in many respects an ultra-libertarian one—one that tacitly rejects what liberal political
economy defines as “the public good,” and denies the need for any sort of state.
The second major reason why deviant globalization matters follows directly from the
insight that this phenomenon is really the truest manifestation of libertarianism: deviant globalization
degrades state power, erodes state capacity, corrodes state legitimacy, and, ultimately,
undermines the foundations of mainstream globalization in ways that are only now being fully
recognized. More specifically, deviant globalization is creating a new type of nonstate political
actor, what John Robb calls a “global guerrilla,” 10 the sort of super-empowered individuals
whose geopolitical importance is only likely to grow in the coming decade.
Deviant entrepreneurs wield political power in three distinct ways. First, they have
money. As we have seen, deviant entrepreneurs control huge, growing swathes of the global
economy, operating most prominently in places where the state is hollowed or hollowing out.
Again, corruption fueled by drug money on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border exemplifies
this point. 11 Second, many deviant entrepreneurs control and deploy a significant quota of
violence—an occupational hazard for people working in extralegal industries, who cannot
count on the state to adjudicate their contractual disputes. This use of violence brings deviant
entrepreneurs into primal conflict with one of the state’s central sources of legitimacy, namely
its monopoly (in principle) over the socially sanctioned use of force. Third, and most controversially,
deviant entrepreneurs in some cases are emerging as private providers of security,
health care, and infrastructure—that is, precisely the kind of goods that functional states are
supposed to provide to their citizens. (However, since they are provided privately, to the deviant
entrepreneurs’ personal constituents, they are not “public goods” in the sense of goods equally
accessible to all citizens.) Hizballah in Lebanon, criminal syndicates in the favelas of Brazil,
the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, and narcotraffickers such
as the Zetas in Mexico are all deviant entrepreneurs who not only have demonstrated they can
shut down areas of their host states’ basic functional capacity, thereby upsetting global markets
half a world away, but are also increasingly providing social services to local constituencies.
What makes these political actors unusual is that, rather that seeking to build or capture
institutionalized state power, they thrive in (and indeed prefer) weak-state environments, and
their activities reinforce the conditions of this weakness. Deviant entrepreneurs generally do
not start out as political actors in the sense of actors who wish to control or usurp the state. In
the first iteration, deviant globalization represents an entrepreneurial response to the failure
of mainstream development: an effort by bootstrapping individuals to get ahead in a world
where the state is no longer leading the way. Once these deviant industries take off, however,
they begin to take on a political life of their own. The state weakness that was a permissive
condition of deviant globalization’s initial local emergence becomes something that the now
empowered deviant entrepreneurs seek to perpetuate and even exacerbate. They siphon off
money, loyalty, and sometimes territory; they increase corruption; and they undermine the
rule of law. They also force well-functioning states in the global system to spend an inordinate
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