by Noah Raford
Participating in the production side of deviant globalization—hopefully 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. People sell their organs, become drug mules, process toxic garbage, or offer sex to middle-aged foreigners 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. To paraphrase John Lennon, deviant globalization is an important part of how development happens while the official development agencies “are busy making other plans.”
To make the claim that deviant globalization is a form of development is not to deny the awfulness and oppressiveness of many deviant industries 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 working roles. No doubt there are better and worse ways to improve one’s lot in life, but it’s 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 importantly, like them or not, both professions contribute to a kind of development.
Considering deviant globalization as a form of development challenges cherished views of the relationship between economic growth, transnational crime, and illicit behavior. Rather than representing a divergence from the liberal norm of licit growth in the formal economy, deviant globalization might better be conceived as a way for the globally excluded to find a space to be innovative, a space in which the rules of the game have not already been stacked against them. At the same time, however, this is not a subversively heroic Robin Hood morality tale. Today’s deviant globalizers are not proto-revolutionaries, aiming to remake society in an inclusive and collectively progressive fashion. Rather, they are opportunistic parasites 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, in other words, is in many respects an ultra-libertarian one—one that tacitly rejects what the liberal political economy defines as “the public good.”
Challenging the State
Why does this matter? Even if one grants that state-led development has mostly failed (with a few very large but still uncommon exceptions) and been widely replaced, or at least backfilled, by illiberal forms of self-empowerment, does that matter for the larger geopolitical system? Some argue that deviant globalization is just an annoying side effect of mainstream globalization, one that saps a small amount of cash from each of these mainstream processes as a kind of persistent tax but that doesn’t affect the larger functioning of the system. From this perspective, deviant globalization might be worth commenting on, but not worth taking all that seriously, compared to the big things that “really matter” in international politics.
We disagree. Our argument is that deviant globalization has profound geopolitical implications, because it is degrading state power, eroding state capacity, corroding state legitimacy, and, ultimately, undermining the foundations of mainstream globalization. More specifically, deviant globalization is creating a new type of political actor whose geopolitical importance will only grow in the coming decades. What makes these political actors unique is the fact that they thrive in weak state environments and their activities reinforce the conditions of this weakness. In his many essays, John Robb refers to these new players as “global guerrillas.”1
Warlord enterprises 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. State corruption fueled by drug money on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border exemplifies this point. 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. Finally, and most controversially, in some cases, these warlord entrepreneurs are also 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 the public. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) in Nigeria, the narco-traffickers in Mexico, the criminal syndicates in the favelas of Brazil—all are warlord entrepreneurs who not only have demonstrated that they can shut down their host states’ basic functional capacity, thereby upsetting global markets half a world away, but who are also increasingly providing social services to local constituencies.
Warlord 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, as we saw in earlier, deviant globalization represents a response to the failure of development and the hollowing out of the state. Once these deviant industries take off, however, they begin to take on a political life of their own. The state weakness that was a condition of deviant globalization’s initial emergence becomes something that the now empowered warlord 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 amount of time, energy, and attention trying to control what comes in and out of their borders. Although deviant globalization may initially have flowered as a result of state hollowing out, as it develops, it becomes a positive feedback loop in much the same way that many successful animal and plant species, as they invade a natural ecosystem, reshape that ecosystem in ways that improve their ability to exclude competitors.
What’s new in this dynamic is that many of these “political actors” only rarely develop an interest in actually taking control of the formal institutions of the state. Warlord enterprises have developed market niches in which extractable returns are more profitable—and frankly easier—than anything they could get by “owning” enough of the state functions to extract rents from those instead. Organizations such as the First Command of the Capital in Brazil, the ‘Ndrangheta in Italy, or the drug cartels in Mexico have no interest in taking over the states in which they operate. Why would they want that? This would only mean that they would be expected to provide a much broader menu of services to everyone, including ungrateful and low-profit clients, those so-called citizens. None of these organizations plan to declare sovereign independence and file for membership of the United Nations. What they want, simply, is to carve out autonomous spaces where they can do their business without state intervention. This underscores a crucial point about deviant globalization: it does not thrive in truly “failed” states—that is, in places where the state has completely disappeared—but rather in weak but well-connected states, in which the warlord entrepreneur can establish a zone of autonomy while continuing to rely on the state for some of the vestigial services it continues to furnish.
Alas, states and warlord entrepreneurs are unlikely to find a sustainable equilibrium. On the one hand, the more deviant industries grow, the more damage they do to the political legitimacy of the states within which the warlord entrepreneurs operate, thus undermining the capacity of the state to provide the infrastructure and services that the warlord entrepreneurs want to catch a free ride on. On the other hand, the people liv
ing in the semiautonomous zones controlled by deviant entrepreneurs increasingly recognize those entrepreneurs rather than the hollowed-out state as the real source of power and authority—if for no other reason than the recognition that if you can’t beat them, you should join them. As these groups take over functions that would have been expected of the state, their stakeholders increasingly lose interest in the hollowed-out formal state institutions. Thus, even though warlord entrepreneurs hardly want to kill their host state, they may end up precipitating a process whereby the state implodes catastrophically. Something like this took place in Colombia in the 1980s and in Zaire/Congo since the 1990s and may be taking place in Mexico today.
Blurring the Lines: Security, Economy, and Regulation in a Post-Collapse Environment
The unavoidable truth is that both mainstream globalization and its deviant twin present difficult choices and trade-offs for everyone who either analyzes or experiences their processes. And that is now almost everyone. To see these choices and trade-offs for what they are, not what we might wish they might be, is an absolute prerequisite for constructing policies that governments, businesses, transnational organizations, and anyone else would seek to use to ensure that the benefits of globalization, broadly understood, are maximized and its horrors minimized.
But what happens if globalization fails and the systems that support it crumble? The implications of this volume are that deviant entrepreneurs in post-collapse environments are likely to emerge explosively. Nor will they be marginal players. Rather, through a variety of innovative and entrepreneurial means, they may assume dominance through hybrid state, market, and ideological functions. Their ability to establish authority and stability will depend first on their martial might, second on their organizational prowess, and third on their ability to stabilize their gains and provide para-statal services to those upon which they prey, depend, and support. Our ability to understand the dynamics of this transition and help nurture its progress from anarchic violence to established fiefdoms and, possibly, markets and para-statal institutions, could make the difference between a world of repeated episodes of Rwandan-style horrors and pockets of relatively mutualistic, resilient communities.
4 Sovereignty, Criminal Insurgency, and Drug Cartels
The Rise of a Post-State Society
John P. Sullivan
State change and shifts in sovereignty are a potential consequence of the erosion of state authority, legitimacy, and capacity. Possible outcomes of such shifts could include failed states, the capture of state authority by transnational criminals, and potentially the emergence of new state-forms. Insurgencies, high-intensity crime, and criminal insurgencies that challenge state legitimacy and inhibit governance are a key national and global security issue.
State failure is one potential outcome of insolvent governance and extreme instability. This issue has been a concern to the global security and intelligence communities for several years, specifically since the implosion of the Somalian state. State failure refers to the complete or partial collapse of state authority. Failed states have governments with little political authority or ability to impose the rule of law. They are usually associated with widespread crime, violent conflict, or severe humanitarian crises, and they may threaten the stability of neighboring countries.1 Understanding this issue has led to some very good work on the dynamics of state erosion. For example, the State Failure Task Force—now the Political Instability Task Force (PITF)—a CIA-funded academic research initiative, was established in 1994 to examine Somalia. Its mandate includes assessing general political instability, including revolutionary or ethnic war, adverse regime change, genocide, and politicide. After 9/11, it added the relationships between states and terrorists to its scope of inquiry.
Among the powerful research presented by the PITF is a global model for forecasting political instability.2 That model is simple. It uses a few variables and has achieved a reliable degree of accuracy for forecasting conventional changes of political states—including violent civil wars and nonviolent democratic reversals. This suggests common factors are at play in both situations. The four independent variables incorporated in the PITF model are regime change, infant mortality, conflict-ridden neighborhood indicators, and state-led discrimination.
This robust work looks at state failure from a conventional or political vantage point, but what about nontraditional or irregular drivers like transnational crime?
Transnational Crime as a Driver of State Failure, Transition, or Change
Two United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports that highlight the impact of transnational crime on states are: “Threat of Narco-Trafficking in the Americas”3 and “The Globalization Of Crime: A Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment.”4 According to the reports, both states and communities are caught in the crossfire of drug-related crime and the violence that it fuels in the Americas and across the Atlantic to Europe and Africa. According to Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Narco-trafficking is also posing a threat to urban security, from Toronto to Tierra del Fuego. Gang violence and gun-related crime are on the rise. Some neighborhoods have become combat zones.”5
Transnational criminal enterprises appear to be the early beneficiaries of the knowledge society. Manuel Castells outlined the rise of the networked, information society in the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture.6 In that work, Castells envisioned the emergence of powerful global criminal networks as one facet of the shift to a new state/sovereignty structure in which the state no longer controlled all facets of the economy and society. The conflict and security dimensions of networks have given rise to the concept of netwar7 and criminal netwarriors.8
The shift of government authority from the state to “para-states” or non-state actors/non-state armed groups or criminal netwarriors is a consequence of globalization, networked organization, and the exploitation of regional economic circuits to create a new base of power. These new power configurations may result in the decline of the state,9 new forms of sovereignty, or new state forms such as the “network state”10 or “market state.”11 As such, criminal gangs and cartels may be acting as new state-making entities.12
The capture, control, or disruption of strategic nodes in the global system and the intersections between them by criminal actors can have cascade effects.13 The result is a state of flux, resulting in a structural “hollowing” of many state functions while bolstering the state’s executive branch and its emphasis on internal security. This hollowing-out of state function is accompanied by an extra-national stratification of state function with a variety of structures or fora for allocating territory, authority, and rights.
These fora—including border zones and global cities—are increasingly contested, with states and criminal enterprises seeking their own “market share.” As a result, global insurgents, terrorists, and networked criminal enterprises can create “lawless zones,”14 “feral cities,”15 and “parallel states.”16 Figure 4.1 describes the local through global geospatial distribution of these potentials, ranging from failed communities (or neighborhoods) to failed or feral cities through failed states or regions.
Figure 4.1. Governance (State) Failure Continuum
The result has been characterized as a battle for information and real power.17 These state challengers—irregular warriors or non-state combatants (i.e., criminal netwarriors)—increasingly employ barbarization and high-order violence, combined with information operations, to seize the initiative and embrace the mantle of social bandit18 and confer legitimacy on themselves and their enterprises. Sovereignty is potentially shifting or morphing as a result of these challenges. This shift could result in a New Middle Ages, with fragmented authority, competing governmental structures, and a proliferation of chaos and violent non-state (and state) competition and conflict that challenges the primacy of the Westphalian state.19 Power and sovereignty are challenged by globalization and may result in
new state formulations.20
Mexico and Latin America as a Laboratory for State Transition
Mexico and Latin America are currently experiencing a onslaught from organized crime (cartels and gangs/maras) that challenges and erodes state capacity to govern, negates the rule of law through endemic impunity, and drives humanitarian crises through high-intensity violence and barbarization. In Mexico, over sixty thousand persons were killed in the crime wars between 2006 and 2012, along with an estimated twenty thousand in 2013. This extreme violence is concentrated in four of Mexico’s thirty-two states: Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Guerrero, and Baja California.
The situation is not constrained to Mexico. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are also particularly challenged.21 The spillover of the cartel war in Guatemala threatens institutional collapse, as cartels align with already virulent gangs and strike out with impunity. As a result, Guatemala City is subject to the brutal murders of bus drivers who refuse to pay extortion taxes to the maras, and the Zetas have invaded Guatemala’s northern departments, which caused the government to declare a “state of exception” to bring martial forces to bear against the criminal incursion. The alliances of cartels and gangs are hollowing out the state, controlling turf and roads and establishing training camps. In addition, they are starting to provide social goods to the communities where they operate. The cartels are also actively pursuing information operations (info ops) to secure their freedom to operate.22
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, organized crime has diversified, gone global, and reached macroeconomic proportions: illicit goods are sourced from one continent, as the report neatly puts it, trafficked across another, and marketed in a third.23 Mafias today are truly a transnational problem, and they are a threat to security, especially in poor and conflict-ridden countries. Crime is fueling corruption, infiltrating business and politics, and hindering development. Essentially, transnational organized crime and gangs are undermining governance by empowering those who operate outside the law:
