Deviant globalization is a category of economic activity whereby actors leverage globalization’s technical platforms—communication, transportation and finance, to name a few—in order to distribute goods and services that violate Western norms and values about human rights, health and violence.
In this book, Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century, Monitor’s Nils Gilman, Jesse Goldhammer and Steve Weber argue that deviant globalization is growing rapidly, thanks to a rising demand for illicit goods and services in wealthy countries and the ability of deviant actors to profit by arbitraging differences in cultural and moral beliefs as well as law enforcement capabilities.
The Case of Mexican Drug Traffickers
A paradigmatic example of deviant globalization today can be found in Mexico, where drug trafficking organizations are generating tremendous wealth by satisfying the North American (and, increasingly, European) demand for drugs. This “industry” is now so thoroughly professionalized, it is able to adapt rapidly to evade major efforts by the Mexican and American governments to curtail their activities. In fact, some have argued (including many traffickers themselves) that interdiction efforts mainly serve to keep drug prices high and stable. However, labeling these organizations as “drug-trafficking” obscures a crucial additional dynamic—increasingly, such organizations are “diversifying their portfolios” by entering into other deviant industries, such as human trafficking or extortion, as well as legitimate ones, such as agriculture, oil and gas, mining and minerals, and alcohol. As such, these organizations contribute massively to the Mexican economy and, by some estimates, employ more people than the Mexican oil and tourism industries combined. Deviant globalization has increasingly become the de facto form that “development” takes in Mexico.
The most important thing to understand about these drug trafficking organizations is that they represent not just a law enforcement challenge, but also a fundamental political challenge to the states they operate in, making a proper analysis of their operational objectives crucial for national security planners. To a large extent, these organizations are increasingly taking on the functions of a parallel state—or rather, a pathological mirror image of the state. Like the Mexican state, drug trafficking organizations deliver public goods, such as education, housing, health and security. DTOs actively, violently and often successfully complete with their host state for power and territory. Unlike classic revolutionary movements, however, the goal of these drug trafficking organizations is not to overthrow the Mexican state in the name of social reform, but rather to cripple it—carving out a zone of autonomy for themselves to conduct their deviant business. This autonomy is gradually fraying the fabric of Mexican political life by eroding the legitimacy of the Mexican state. In sum, Mexican drug trafficking organizations pose a major security threat to the United States not just because they fuel a large and integrated set of transnational criminal activities, but also because they are collectively politically destabilizing Mexico.
Global Dynamics
Similar dynamics are playing themselves out in many countries around the world, from Nigeria to Afghanistan to Russia. In each case, the primary threat to the United States may come less from traditional state-military challenges than from “deviant entrepreneurs” who are organizing the global circulation of malignant goods and services even as they insidiously undermine the political legitimacy of the states within which they operate. Deviant globalization fuels terrorist-sponsoring organizations around the world. It cripples states such as Somalia and Congo, which generally increases political instability and decreases American influence.
Perhaps most important, deviant globalization decreases the legitimacy of American-style capitalist globalization in two fundamental ways. On the one hand, in wealthy countries, deviant globalization encourages people to reject globalization altogether because they perceive the cost of deviant globalization—which is inextricably linked to globalization—to be too great. On the other hand, in poor countries, deviant globalization convinces millions of under-served people that the legitimate global marketplace has little to offer them, thus alienating them from mainstream globalization and the United States as a symbol of its efficacy.
Deviant globalization is not a traditional threat in the sense that it entails a single identifiable actor or ideology that poses a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. Rather, deviant globalization is a complex set of processes that are actually hyper-capitalistic (unfettered by state power), giving rise to entrepreneurs and groups around the world that weaken the political and economic status quo (that is, globalization) by a thousand cuts. Furthermore, Western powers, which impose their moral views on the global economic system, enable this illicit activity by creating the demand and moral arbitrage opportunities that fuel deviant globalization.
In this book, the authors argue that recognizing the challenge of deviant globalization requires a significant mindset shift for the U.S. government, which typically seeks to interdict a wide range of activities that can be grouped under the rubric of deviant globalization because it believes that criminalization and eradication can be successful strategies. Unfortunately, for a wide range of deviant industries—from cyber and pharma, to weapons and finance, to tourism and health—management, not interdiction, is the only viable solution to mitigating the downside implications of deviant globalization. It is, in short, a very real and dangerous global threat that requires a shift in our data collection objectives, our modes of analysis, and our policies and actions.
Nils Gilman is a consultant with Monitor 360, focusing on national economic development and security. He has led projects on a diverse array of topics, such as the security implications of climate change, the culture of hackers, and the global narcotics trade. Prior to joining Monitor in 2006, Nils spent six years leading competitive intelligence and product marketing teams at enterprise software companies such as BEA Systems and Salesforce.com. Nils holds a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in intellectual history from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2003) and the co-editor of Humanity, an international journal of human rights, humanitarianism and development, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Jesse Goldhammer is a partner in Monitor 360, where he works with public- and private-sector clients to undertake strategic, analytic, organizational and institutional transformations. Jesse has spent the past 20 years bringing together unique people, ideas and approaches in order to devise lasting and effective solutions to vexing problems. These solutions include developing novel analytic approaches to understand and reframe client challenges, leveraging human networks to introduce alternative and unorthodox perspectives, and designing training programs to propagate new strategies and tradecraft. Having originally come to Monitor through Global Business Network, Jesse is also an expert in scenario planning—he has taught scenario planning training courses and published “Four Futures for China Inc.” in Business 2.0 magazine. Jesse previously worked in search-related strategy, sales and analysis at Yahoo!, Overture and Inktomi. He holds a B.A. in social science from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. in political science from New York University, and a Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley. An accomplished instructor and expert in modern political theory, Jesse has written several articles and is the author of The Headless Republic (Cornell University Press, 2005).
Steve Weber is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley, and a member of the Board of Advisors of Monitor 360. He is a specialist in International Relations, focusing on international and national security; the impact of technology on national systems of innovation and defense; and the political economy of knowledge-intensive industries, particularly software and pharmaceuticals. He is a Senior Policy Advisor at the Glover Park Group in Washington, D.C. His major publications include Cooperation and Discord in U.S.-Soviet Arms Control (Princeton University Press), the edited book Globalization and the European Political Economy (Columbia University Press), and The Success of Open Source (Harvard University Press). He is currently completing a book with co-author Jonathan Sallet, Meeting of the Minds: Open-ness and Innovation in the Modern Economy; and a book with co-author Bruce Jentleson, The New Age of Ideology: How America Can Compete in the Global Marketplace of Ideas.