Nordstrom, Carolyn. 2007. Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Comtemporary World. University of California Press: Berkeley.

Best book EVAR!!! In this book, Carolyn Nordstrom embarks on a global journey to explore the nexus of goods, money, and power as they flow through contemporary conflict zones. She finds that the traditional demarcations of borders, laws, contrabond, il/legal trade are collective fictions that have little explanatory power of the world as it is. Instead, huge quantities of trade take place "off the books" and are fully integrated into the global economy. "[E]xtra-legal networks constitute a series of power grids that shape the fundamental econo-political dynamics of the world today." (xvii)

Nordstrom works from small to large, and so begins her exploration with an orphan selling cigarettes in Angola. This is actually a remarkably important thing to do, because it highlights the reality that a network-based approach means that having tools for approaching the subject position of any member of the network is key to understanding the network as a whole. Contrast this with a hierarchical approach, which would imply that trade can be understood through aggregate data and analysis of elite interactions. In the next step back, we contemplate where the child gets cigarettes:

"The man who fronts cigarettes to street children -- from Africa through Asia to the Americas -- is a lynchpin in the intersections of extra-legal transactions, business development, and political power. In a town like Muleque, Kadonga stands as an interesting nexus of linkages to international networks, informal economies, and formal state systems. With financial and business success, and with all their attendant alliances, this man, and those like him, can enjoy political power. As this book will show, he can back politicians, formulate policy through major state institutions, or stand for office directly. He can also work for international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), become a UN representative, sit on multilateral trade boards, or attend forums on international law. He isn't likely to give up his extra-legal alliances when he enters a formal state role. Why would he want to? As the young street child cigarette vendor reminded me: it's where he acquired money and power in the first place." (17)

The journey continues outward to the Gov'nor and his red tractors (supplied by an INGO and use to enrich the entrepreneurial warlord, and addresses the larger phenomenon of military participation in war economies:

"The number of trucks and planes traveling the country with everyday necessities like food, fuel, clothing, and medicines -- selling in city stores and village shops, at the sides of roadways and unregulated markets -- stretched out in my mind's eye. It linked with what must have been hundreds of thousands of local markets selling to the country's population. To millions of people. Daily. The sum total of revenues generated from the untaxed goods that changed economic hands daily had to be staggering. When all the unregulated extra-state daily transactions of life's necessities are totaled in, the figure of $1 million a day in illicit diamond sales pales by comparison. As Christian Dietrich said to me: "In the final tally: are you really making profits from diamonds or from all the soap and petrol and food and essentials that people need"

Such commodity networks are lifelines for a country. They anchor the complex interplay of economic development and profiteering: that kind of money can buy soldiers, sway politicians, even undermine governments; it can shape the course of development and of national policy. What military, what government, would allow anyone who was not fully allied with them such access? In the hands of the opposition, it could threaten the ruling party itself. At the same time, why would the government and the military allow access to allies without some kind of meaningful return? Return in monetary compensation, in support, in loyalty. Tight control over access to national infrastructure -- where right of entry is reserved for an exclusive in-group -- isn't (merely) about militaries controlling war, nor protecting national security.

This is the creation of empires. Subtle, international, unconditionally twenty-first century systems of wealth and authority ... but empires nonetheless" (40-41)

This analysis fits well within a lot of the Africanist literature: Reno's Warlord Politics, Chabal and Daloz's Criminalization of the State in Africa, for example. But this isn't war as pillage -- it's war as business, which has an important implication Nordstrom identifies:

"By reading the patterns of alliances, trade, and profiteering (in light of the more intangible dynamics of identity and ethos), I have had success predicting whether political violence in a country will worsen or abate. My predictions are generally 180 degrees opposite to those made by political scientists, diplomats, and INGO specialists. At the height of the most recent bout of severe warring in Angola, most analysts were pessimistic: they cited the massive gains leaders on all sides could enjoy in war -- gains that could easily disappear with peace. But the patterns of social relationships and extra/state activities made me optimistic. At the height of the war, I read its demise. Five months later, a peace accord was signed, and it has held for some years now. This kind of analysis isn’t unique. During severe days of war in 2001, I spoke with a European ambassador widely recognized as one of the brightest in the country. She told me she would give her frank opinion off the record ...

The ambassador and I were in agreement: in war, the leaders could divide up a country. But the very instability that can produce such gains, once industry begins to develop, becomes detrimental in the long term. To bring such gains to fruition, stable bases of politics, trade, and internationalization become desirable. At the break-even point, peace becomes a resource more useful that war. The robber barons are in place." (66-67)

The next section explores how national "shadow" economies are linked to international trade. Because, as described above millions of dollars in goods and capital flow through the country. But the idea of a major trade nexus situated in a remote warzone is nonsensical in the Kaplanesque construct of "The Coming Anarchy" that dominates Western discourse. Nonetheless, Nordstrom travels to the Truck Stop, a cross-border trading post in Angola.

"Today, Truck Stop boasts a hotel, scores of immense warehouses, tiny beer joints, and "supermarkets" that sell everything from food to toilets -- all lining a single main road running right up to the border post. Hundreds of trucks of every conceivable size and make are parked along the road, in front of bars and warehouses, beside supermarkets, and in front of the only hotel. The town seemed to consist of truckers in blue jeans, young women, and buisnesspeople from every continent. Beyond the town's perimeter, empty savanna bush stretches in every direction. A gigantic truck stop warehouse in a sea of sand and bush. A single thread of commerce connecting the riches made and lost in war and politics from all points of the world.

Along this thread of commerce flows millions of dollars. Daily. Truck Stop isn't a remote point on the world's financial maps; it's a geyser. Here, the term dollars isn't used figuratively. Business is done in dollars. The local currency isn't accepted, nor is Angola's kwanza. To stimulate trade, many of the warehouses are duty free, and a duty-free manufacturing zone ostensibly exists, though it appears to be more of a warehouse jobber -- moving goods internationally rather than engaging in manufacturing ...

This simple conversation points out a core dynamic in commerce and nation building. Neither of the two countries at this border post has a currency that exchanges on international markets. Neither can use the fruits of its own economy to get dollars. To obtain the international goods they need to survive, they have to find something that people with dollars are willing to give up dollars for. By hook, by genius, by hard work, or by crook.

Commerce went one way in this town: dollars came across the border, and goods went back. Goods accumulated at this border from all the world's continents. Dollars provided the government and businesspeople in this peacetime country with much-needed foreign exchange; goods kept the war-weary Angolan population from slipping off the UN quality-of-life charts completely.

Truckers kept the flow moving. Conversations, like goods, flowed around them as well. Information is one of the most important commodities in this line of work. Gina and I were sitting on the verandah of a beer joint talking with a group of truckers who had just come across the border with dollars to load up on supplies to take back to Angola ..." (72-73)

From this exploration, Nordstrom extracts 5 principles about the international economy: "Governments may allow business "irregularities" for the sake of national profits. Places like the border post accommodate this trade."; "The dollar-for-goods system is customized for speculation and profiteering."; "Extra-state speculation reaps far-reaching rewards."; "The fact that money is exchanged out of suburban houses or that trade takes place at exchanges in remote locales does not mean they are isolated in terms of global economies."; "The final point in this process is the somewhat radical notion that, in actual economies (those not reckoned solely in terms of formal legal exchanges but in terms of all exchange, regardless of legality), every location -- the proverbial everywhere -- simultaneously serves as offshore investment and local development." (87-88)

Nordstrom then moves into an analysis of global trade, considering fish poaching, drug smuggling, money laundering, port security, and law enforcement. The conclusion that keeps arising over and over again is that it is impossible to enforce anti-smuggling laws, because strict enforcement would require inspections that would bring the global logistics network to a grinding halt. The throughput of ports like Rotterdam and Los Angeles is staggering, and so only a tiny fraction of containers can be inspected. As a result an openly acknowledged system of graft and tax evasion operates -- I think the importance of this section, in addition to being profoundly interesting, is to demonstrate that the "shadow" economy is not just a function of attenuated state control in the world's hinterlands (to adopt a Western geography), but rather, is a natural tension between the state's ability to regulate and business' desire to make money. Thus, the "shadow" economy is a somewhat artificial differentiation -- il/licit and il/legal trade is a single entity that moves back and forth across boundaries, borders, customs, and conventions. To quote Nordstrom: "For most of the (hundreds of) people I spoke with for this research, the state is 'somewhat' important. They look out on a world of state bodies and extra-state networks -- variously disparate and intersecting as need dictates. Legality is a fluid concept." (207)

Nordstrom advocates a research agenda that focuses on "flow" and not "place" (207), which is to say a focus on the mutability and not the fixity of economic praxis. This, I think, is very similar to the project of constructing identity as contingent and contested -- if the nation-state is not central to earning a livelihood, then perhaps other Orientalist constructions of the post-colonial "other" deserve reexamination. And, more deeply, perhaps Western constructions of collective identity aren't so firm, either. If people are understood to be nodes on multiple overlapping networks of identity, kin, trade, politics, etc. then the process of engaging in development planning, counterinsurgency, or social advocacy begins to look very different.

And naturally, I can't wait to put into motion the secret plan that take me and my co-conspirator to the far flung reaches of the globe to search out these networks and write amazing things about them ...