convergence

Deviant Globalization
3 Philip Caputo, “The Fall of Mexico,” The Atlantic Monthly, December 2009.
4 William Finnegan, “Silver or Lead: A Drug Cartel’s Reign of Terror,” The New Yorker, May 31, 2010.
5 Cultural analyses of mainstream globalization tend to highlight this “deterritorializing” aspect of globalization;
see, for example, John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and
Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity (New York:
Wiley, 2000).
6 Phil Williams, From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy (Carlisle
Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, June 2008).
7 Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006).
8 Jeremy Seabrook, Travels in the Skin Trade (London: Pluto Press, 2001), and Rachel G. Sacks, “Commercial Sex
and the Single Girl: Women’s Empowerment through Economic Development in Thailand,” Development in Practice
7, no. 4 (1997), describe the way that Thai “bar girls” use savings from their days in prostitution to start sewing or
hairdressing businesses back in their villages of origin. Another example is the way that rappers (legendarily) parlay
profits from drug dealing into starting a recording company; see the obituary by Jon Pareles, “Eazy-E, 31, Performer
Who Put Gangster Rap on the Charts,” The New York Times, March 28, 1995.
9 Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle (New York:
Routledge, 1999); and Vidyamali Samarasinghe, “Female Labor in Sex Trafficking: A Darker Side of Globalization,”
in A Companion to Feminist Geography, ed. Lise Nelson and Joni Seager (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publications, 2005).
10 John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken, NJ: John
Wiley & Sons, 2007).
11 See Judith Miller, “The Mexicanization of American Law Enforcement,” City Journal 19, no. 4 (2009), available
at , quoting Robert Killebrew, a retired U.S. Army colonel
and senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for a New American Security: “‘This is a national security
problem that does not yet have a name’ . . . The drug lords . . . are seeking to ‘hollow out our institutions, just as they
have in Mexico.’”
12 John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker, “Drug Cartels, Street Gangs, and Warlords,” Small Wars & Insurgencies
13, no. 2 (2002); Max G. Manwaring, Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic
Studies Institute, 2005); and Enrique Desmond Arias, “The Dynamics of Criminal Governance: Networks and
Social Order in Rio de Janeiro,” Journal of Latin American Studies 38, no. 2 (2006).
13 One critical misconception promoted by the liberal enthusiasts of globalization, most prominently by Thomas
P.M. Barnett in The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (Putnam, 2005) is that the
cause of poverty and insecurity and ultimately state fragility is “disconnectedness” from the world economy. In fact,
all of the most seriously “failed” states—Congo, Somalia, Afghanistan—are deeply connected to the global economy,
albeit in ways that are hard to see clearly from London, New York, or Washington. While it is true that they
remain weakly connected to the formal and legal parts of the global economy, such places are in fact highly deviantly
connected—via the illicit trade in minerals, via piracy, or via the global drug trade, and so on. The crucial issue, in
other words, is not connectedness or disconnectedness, but rather what kind of connectedness.
14 Diane E. Davis, “Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment, and fragmented sovereignty in the
developing world,” Theory and Society 39, nos. 3–4 (2010). Globalization, by undermining national political institutions,
also undermines the political centrality of national identity. But what appears to be replacing the national
is not a “global” political identity (as “cosmopolitical” dreamers have hoped), but rather a return to more localized
identities rooted in clan, sect, ethnicity, corporation, and gang.
15 Claire Suddath, “The War on Drugs,” Time, March 25, 2009.
16 Jerome H. Skolnick, “Rethinking the Drug Problem,” Daedalus 121, no. 3 (1992).
17 See Bruce Yandle, “Bootleggers & Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist,” Regulation (May–June
1983).
18 Jennifer Clapp, “Toxic Exports: Despite Global Treaties, Hazardous Waste Trade Continues,” in Deviant
Globalization.
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