Carolyn Nordstrom

Of course, I'm far from the only person with a sneaking suspicion that many wars are encouraged by a political machine driven by profit. Diving into the world of war-time extralegal economies not only went a lot way in confirming my suspicions but also provided tremendous insight into the economic workings of the world's poorest regions.

I'm fascinated by fringe economies. One of my favorite college courses was a sociology class titled "Deviance" and I was really captivated by the creative ways of making profit people find at the edges of legality.

The most surprising thing to me from my short time in Ghana was encountering fewer beggars in Accra than on the Ave. It seemed like everyone's finding some reasonably constructive way of making money, which is definitely not what official accounts would have us believe. Allegedly, 90% of Angola's economy was extra-legal in the early 2000s. And of course, any foreign activity in the country is scaled and otherwise adapted to the 10% remaining which is on the radar. The Angolans who spend every day of their life finding some way to make ends meet in an extralegal way are for all intents and purposes invisible. Those heralded as heroes are always the big-idea people working within legal systems, and not those maintaining their traditional way of life against all odds.

The world is incredibly small, now. Non-state organizations and networks are gaining in importance and it's going to be really interesting to see how that affects society.

"Any excesses and atrocities perpetuated in the name of the state may be forgiven with the observation that sometimes you have to burn the village to protect the nation. No matter how bad it is, this reasoning goes, without the state, existence would be unspeakably worse."

"The realm of the unregulated is a realm of possibility and danger, where great fortunes and great cruelty are possible. But it is also where the average person turns for survival in an unsure world. The arena of the shadows is a place where power regimes are contested, where new forms of capital, access and authority arise -- some crumbling before they master any real influence in global affairs, others supplanting old regimes with new.
If shadow networks were merely illicit systems bent on rapid and potentially immense gain, they would not provide the challenge they do to legal regimes. It is this very irony -- the fact that extra-state systems provide not only dangerous wildcatting of resources outside of legal controls, but also offer a means of development to people with few alternate means of survival -- that makes shadow regimes a serious source of power in the contemporary world."

"It's taboo to suggest that development policies fail because they have been constructed on the basis of faulty assumptions and data. Instead, the popular cultural answer is that development policies fail because of the realities of underdevelopment, corruption, poor infrastructure, hegemony of western elitism, sociopolitical resistance, and the difficulties of implementation -- both in the development organizations and in the host countries."… (mehr)