Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World / Edition 1

by Carolyn Nordstrom

Overview

Carolyn Nordstrom explores the pathways of global crime in this stunning work of anthropology that has the power to change the way we think about the world. To write this book, she spent three years traveling to hot spots in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States investigating the dynamics of illegal trade around the world—from blood diamonds and arms to pharmaceuticals, exotica, and staples like food and oil. Global Outlaws peels away the layers of a vast economy that extends from a war orphan in Angola selling Marlboros on the street to powerful transnational networks reaching across continents and oceans. Nordstrom's extraordinary fieldwork includes interviews with scores of informants, including the smugglers, victims, power elite, and profiteers who populate these economic war zones. Her compelling investigation, showing that the sum total of extra-legal activities represents a significant part of the world's economy, provides a new framework for understanding twenty-first-century economics and economic power. Global Outlaws powerfully reveals the illusions and realities of security in all areas of transport and trade and illuminates many of the difficult ethical problems these extra-legal activities pose.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520250963
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	06/20/2007
Series:	California Series in Public Anthropology , #16
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	732,143
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Carolyn Nordstrom is Professor of Anthropology at Notre Dame and author of several books including Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century and Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Culture, both from UC Press; and A Different Kind of War Story.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

NATIONAL
1. The War Orphan
2. The Bombed-Out Shop
3. Coconuts and Cigarettes: Some Definitions
4. The Gov’nor’s Red Tractors
5. Military Takeovers (Or, How to Own a Country)
6. The Untold Story of the Amputees
7. Robber Barons

INTERNATIONAL
8. The Border Post—a Billion-Dollar Truck Stop (Going International)
9. Romancing the Stone: Borders and Businesspeople
10. The Washing Machine: Laundering, Part One

GLOBAL
11. Diamonds and Fish: Going Global
12. Ports
13. Drugs
14. The Culture of Criminals
15. The Culture of Cops
16. The World-Port
17. The Investment Machine: Laundering, Part Two
18. Human Cargo

HOME
19. Post-Terror: Creating (the Illusion of) Security
20. Conclusion

Notes
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"An ethnographically rich, peopled account of the global economy."—Times Higher Education

Editorial Reviews

An ethnographically rich, peopled account of the global economy.

Times Higher Education - Tim Hall

"An ethnographically rich, peopled account of the global economy."--Times Higher Education

From the Publisher