What do you think?
Rate this book
Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World
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.
258 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
20 people are currently reading
260 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
July 22, 2008
i looove books that make me change or broaden my perspective on how the world works. nordstrom presents an engaging and readable picture of the world's il/licit economies from local through global scales. if you've never pondered the importance of shipping (how significant could big boats still be in our networked, speedy cyber-world?) to our everyday lives, nordstrom will convince you that you really, really should. the author's stow-away journey from the eastern US to europe via freighter is particularly eye-opening. fascinating and frightening. a wonderful ethnography for public consumption.
February 4, 2012
I can't possibly recommend this book highly enough. In terms of social scientific methodology, it's a perfect example of how ethnography can be used for more than studying isolated communities and unique cases, to instead uncover hidden processes of larger social structures. And perhaps more importantly for the broader audience, the content on informal economy and the ubiquity of illegal trade is absolutely mind-blowing. And all in a very readable and often drily humorous package. A fantastic book.
December 7, 2024
read this for my anthropology class, pretty interesting! i actually enjoyed myself!
December 19, 2016
This book is not an easy read, although it reads well. It's not "easy" because no matter how intelligent you think you may be about contemporary world affairs, you will be humbled. What you think is going on in the world, meaning: everything in newspapers and on television for twenty-four hours a day, literally—What you think is important?—well, you will learn that it is not. What you are watching on television is a mask. A subterfuge to keep us all occupied and busy, while the real theft happens right under our collective noses. And that theft is what keeps the global economy running. And it always has, for millennia.
Anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom has travelled the world in a search of the end of a trail that begins when she sees a small Angolan boy in an Angolan street selling individual cigarettes. Mesmerized by his struggling enterprise, she explores how he got his job. And therein lies her understanding of the world none of us knows about. Africa is not as impoverished as we think.
Over two decades ago, I had travelled to Nigeria on several occasions, myself, as an attorney—not as an anthropologist. I learned myself that they do not have welfare (or they didn't years ago when I was there). Everyone works in Africa, if you begrudge me this generalization, please. I say this because there is a system, above-ground, and under-ground that employs everyone. Is everyone gainfully employed? Most likely not. But they have the dignity of earning a living. And that dignity of earning a living supports the food that you eat on your plate, the price of food in Wal-Mart or wherever you shop - yes, even Whole Foods. And it's the enterprise that even Congress knows very little about.
Even Presidents can do little even to intimate how the world truly works. It has always worked this way. But it is Ms. Nordstrom's explanation of "how" it works that is worth the read. I won't spoil it for you, because I want you to savor the "ah-hah" moment that I had in realizing how truly ignorant I was, even about the things that I "thought" I understood, both as a graduate of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, and as a lawyer who has practiced some form of international law for most of my career.
As for my review of the book, I learned that this type of writing that Ms. Nordstrom does is called, "creative academic nonfiction." We need more of it. The reason I kept reading the book (although it took me 10 months) was because there was so much in it that I wanted to digest. Due to the fluidity of her writing style it read more like a novel than a nonfiction book. But the research was definitely scholarly.
My caveat is that the book repeats the same information over and over again to a degree that the mantra becomes a bit stale. But I think lawyers do the same, so I can't really complain. Perhaps she really wants us to understand, so she beats you over the head, almost as if to convince. The thing is that you don't need to be "convinced" because so much of the book is from first-hand information that she experiences. Ms. Nordstrom travels the trade routes, talks to the lorry-drivers, the merchant marines, the warehousemen, the people who make the goods on our table arrive to the stores on time. And at each stage she explains how they are involved in the unseen matrix.
There is no illuminati. There's business. And for those of us who bemoan the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the Presidency? Well, read the book. He's replaced the faceless bureaucrat with the knowledge of who truly runs the world—the people with whom he does business—and instead of being unseen engines of the world's economy, they have a new megaphone called "political power" now.
I think the book is pretty dated now as it was copyrighted in 2007. Almost a decade has passed, so I don't know if Ms. Nordstrom's paradigm still works the same way. I had heard someone on C-Span state that one area of unaccountability [that the book exposed as riddled with issues] has been "cleaned up". I'm not so sure. So, I might need to read a more contemporary read.
So, you think you know how the world works? Well, this may confirm your knowledge, as some of it did, in my case. But in other areas, I was actually taught something. If I can't learn something new when I read, it's a waste for me. So, I'm very glad to say that I read the book.
Anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom has travelled the world in a search of the end of a trail that begins when she sees a small Angolan boy in an Angolan street selling individual cigarettes. Mesmerized by his struggling enterprise, she explores how he got his job. And therein lies her understanding of the world none of us knows about. Africa is not as impoverished as we think.
Over two decades ago, I had travelled to Nigeria on several occasions, myself, as an attorney—not as an anthropologist. I learned myself that they do not have welfare (or they didn't years ago when I was there). Everyone works in Africa, if you begrudge me this generalization, please. I say this because there is a system, above-ground, and under-ground that employs everyone. Is everyone gainfully employed? Most likely not. But they have the dignity of earning a living. And that dignity of earning a living supports the food that you eat on your plate, the price of food in Wal-Mart or wherever you shop - yes, even Whole Foods. And it's the enterprise that even Congress knows very little about.
Even Presidents can do little even to intimate how the world truly works. It has always worked this way. But it is Ms. Nordstrom's explanation of "how" it works that is worth the read. I won't spoil it for you, because I want you to savor the "ah-hah" moment that I had in realizing how truly ignorant I was, even about the things that I "thought" I understood, both as a graduate of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, and as a lawyer who has practiced some form of international law for most of my career.
As for my review of the book, I learned that this type of writing that Ms. Nordstrom does is called, "creative academic nonfiction." We need more of it. The reason I kept reading the book (although it took me 10 months) was because there was so much in it that I wanted to digest. Due to the fluidity of her writing style it read more like a novel than a nonfiction book. But the research was definitely scholarly.
My caveat is that the book repeats the same information over and over again to a degree that the mantra becomes a bit stale. But I think lawyers do the same, so I can't really complain. Perhaps she really wants us to understand, so she beats you over the head, almost as if to convince. The thing is that you don't need to be "convinced" because so much of the book is from first-hand information that she experiences. Ms. Nordstrom travels the trade routes, talks to the lorry-drivers, the merchant marines, the warehousemen, the people who make the goods on our table arrive to the stores on time. And at each stage she explains how they are involved in the unseen matrix.
There is no illuminati. There's business. And for those of us who bemoan the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the Presidency? Well, read the book. He's replaced the faceless bureaucrat with the knowledge of who truly runs the world—the people with whom he does business—and instead of being unseen engines of the world's economy, they have a new megaphone called "political power" now.
I think the book is pretty dated now as it was copyrighted in 2007. Almost a decade has passed, so I don't know if Ms. Nordstrom's paradigm still works the same way. I had heard someone on C-Span state that one area of unaccountability [that the book exposed as riddled with issues] has been "cleaned up". I'm not so sure. So, I might need to read a more contemporary read.
So, you think you know how the world works? Well, this may confirm your knowledge, as some of it did, in my case. But in other areas, I was actually taught something. If I can't learn something new when I read, it's a waste for me. So, I'm very glad to say that I read the book.
July 30, 2011
This book is an important piece of anthropological work in many ways. It consists of several layers, therefore it can be read from different perspectives.
The first layer is a fascinating anthropological study. Carolyn Nordstrom presents loosely connected cases in her very readable "stories". These ultimately add up to a compelling narrative about the everyday or business-as-usual nature of global economies. Acts of illegality are not homogenously evil. They have a differentiated face. The dark side rarely appears per se. There are warlords and corrupt government officials who use their political power to amass personal wealths and build up their own empires. But the world of illegality and extralegality is much more defined by ordinary and common practices. We find day-to-day matters such as survival and local community-building on one end, and the mechanical international operations by organisations and corporations on the other.
The second major layer has more to do with social (anthropological) theory. Nordstrom's ethnography tells a lot about the limitations of modern states. As we can see, local and global matters do not only pose challenges to weak states such as post-civil war Angola, but affect also the apparently stable ones. The book follows the criss-crossing networks through geographical boundaries and describes how, in the meantime, they change from illegal to legal and back. The results of this are balanced and symmetrical questions about the state of affairs.
The third important layer is about the nature of anthropological knowledge and how it should be presented. There is an outline presented here about the new tasks and the new challenges that researchers have to face. Research has to be public. Its aim has to be informing the public, not just the state.
How? Let's see the example of Global Outlaws:
1) The text is an interesting reading for non-scholars and scholars alike.
2) It gives a good understanding of the global processes that people hear about in the news and possibly even have an influence on their lives.
3) The author manages to bypass the categories and the perspective created by and used in a system of nation states, yet she constantly reflects to is.
4) The reality and the craft of research is also presented which strengthens the arguments.
Overall, this book is fascinating, and can be useful to many readers with different interests.
The first layer is a fascinating anthropological study. Carolyn Nordstrom presents loosely connected cases in her very readable "stories". These ultimately add up to a compelling narrative about the everyday or business-as-usual nature of global economies. Acts of illegality are not homogenously evil. They have a differentiated face. The dark side rarely appears per se. There are warlords and corrupt government officials who use their political power to amass personal wealths and build up their own empires. But the world of illegality and extralegality is much more defined by ordinary and common practices. We find day-to-day matters such as survival and local community-building on one end, and the mechanical international operations by organisations and corporations on the other.
The second major layer has more to do with social (anthropological) theory. Nordstrom's ethnography tells a lot about the limitations of modern states. As we can see, local and global matters do not only pose challenges to weak states such as post-civil war Angola, but affect also the apparently stable ones. The book follows the criss-crossing networks through geographical boundaries and describes how, in the meantime, they change from illegal to legal and back. The results of this are balanced and symmetrical questions about the state of affairs.
The third important layer is about the nature of anthropological knowledge and how it should be presented. There is an outline presented here about the new tasks and the new challenges that researchers have to face. Research has to be public. Its aim has to be informing the public, not just the state.
How? Let's see the example of Global Outlaws:
1) The text is an interesting reading for non-scholars and scholars alike.
2) It gives a good understanding of the global processes that people hear about in the news and possibly even have an influence on their lives.
3) The author manages to bypass the categories and the perspective created by and used in a system of nation states, yet she constantly reflects to is.
4) The reality and the craft of research is also presented which strengthens the arguments.
Overall, this book is fascinating, and can be useful to many readers with different interests.
December 13, 2013
For Carolyn Nordstrom, one of the most iconic commodities for the modern world's network of illicit/illegal trade is not drugs or arms, but cigarettes: "Cigarettes show every porous hole in our borders our customs, our laws, and our abilities to enforce the laws," a detective from the Scotland Yard tells her. "It's not just the cigarettes, it's what they move with." Nordstrom, an anthropologist from the University of Notre Dame, follows the path of the cigarette, as well as beer, Sony Playstation consoles, humanitarian aid fish -- and yes, drugs and weapons -- through a war-ravaged African country to Rotterdam (one of the oldest and most successful ports in the world) to our department stores and supply chains. The journey is at times heart-wrenching and at other times curiously heart-warming, but deeply disturbing the entire way.
Global Outlaws is a non-traditional ethnography in the best ways -- less a dry treatise on some foreign culture, Nordstrom expertly stitches together a pastiche of short stories, interviews, fieldnotes, and bullet-point lists to deftly explain how illicit trade is intertwined with the "official" economy in ways that are difficult (if not impossible) to unravel. She meets profiteering warlords and war orphans, women amputees who pool together their meager resources into ingenious, informal banking systems and truckers who travel in packs while moving trillions of dollars in goods across international borders -- all ignored by and unknown to the official economy as we know it. Rather than using numbers and figures, Nordstrom uses narratives of people, successfully waking the razor-thin edge between sentimental pitying and moral condemnation.
Global Outlaws, while probably not "popular non-fiction" in the genre of Malcom Gladwell or Steven Johnson, is still quite accessible to the public, though at times (especially in the Preface) she does slip into academic anthropologist mode to briefly discuss theoretical ideas and to lob critiques at various disciplines whom she feels has dropped the ball in documenting this massive global network of so-called grey markets. Despite this, readers who work and push through will find that the entire book is a fascinating journey and, after reading it, chances are you will never look at seaports, fish, or diamonds the same way again.
Global Outlaws is a non-traditional ethnography in the best ways -- less a dry treatise on some foreign culture, Nordstrom expertly stitches together a pastiche of short stories, interviews, fieldnotes, and bullet-point lists to deftly explain how illicit trade is intertwined with the "official" economy in ways that are difficult (if not impossible) to unravel. She meets profiteering warlords and war orphans, women amputees who pool together their meager resources into ingenious, informal banking systems and truckers who travel in packs while moving trillions of dollars in goods across international borders -- all ignored by and unknown to the official economy as we know it. Rather than using numbers and figures, Nordstrom uses narratives of people, successfully waking the razor-thin edge between sentimental pitying and moral condemnation.
Global Outlaws, while probably not "popular non-fiction" in the genre of Malcom Gladwell or Steven Johnson, is still quite accessible to the public, though at times (especially in the Preface) she does slip into academic anthropologist mode to briefly discuss theoretical ideas and to lob critiques at various disciplines whom she feels has dropped the ball in documenting this massive global network of so-called grey markets. Despite this, readers who work and push through will find that the entire book is a fascinating journey and, after reading it, chances are you will never look at seaports, fish, or diamonds the same way again.
September 12, 2016
This is a book for anyone interested in how our world works today. Nordstrom's accessible and captivating writing keeps you hooked as you watch an entire hidden world of il/legal activities spin out from the local, individual level to the global, corporate and state-level. If you thought our biggest threats to national security and economic stability were people smuggling drugs or weapons on their person across borders, this book demonstrates those methods are pennies in a multi-billion dollar bucket of less-than-legal trade.
It's hard to not sound like a conspiracy theorist when describing the findings of this book. There's an entire normal, formal, massive global economy of less-than-legal activity, frequently with fairly mundane objects (clothes, pharmaceuticals, food, toys, electronics, etc.) that occurs without any awareness from most people. Corporations and governments work together to achieve common, shady goals like manipulating aid and loans to countries. It all sounds insane, save for the copious direct, insightful quotes from people involved in every step of the process. From the war orphan selling loose cigarettes in Angola to truckers to politicians to customs officials to police to longshoremen - the list goes on - it is immediately clear that this world is typical, obvious, and visible (if frequently frustrating to those charged with preventing it).
It's a short book and compelling enough for non-academics. If you want to better understand the world you live in, it's worth a read.
It's hard to not sound like a conspiracy theorist when describing the findings of this book. There's an entire normal, formal, massive global economy of less-than-legal activity, frequently with fairly mundane objects (clothes, pharmaceuticals, food, toys, electronics, etc.) that occurs without any awareness from most people. Corporations and governments work together to achieve common, shady goals like manipulating aid and loans to countries. It all sounds insane, save for the copious direct, insightful quotes from people involved in every step of the process. From the war orphan selling loose cigarettes in Angola to truckers to politicians to customs officials to police to longshoremen - the list goes on - it is immediately clear that this world is typical, obvious, and visible (if frequently frustrating to those charged with preventing it).
It's a short book and compelling enough for non-academics. If you want to better understand the world you live in, it's worth a read.
December 12, 2014
I think that the book is very important for opening the eyes of the general population when it comes to illegal activity, from corruption to greater schemes. My biggest problem with the book was that it repeated itself a lot, to the point that I wondered why I had to read the current chapter, because I had read the same thing in the previous chapter. It was off putting and made the read more cumbersome. After that though, it was brilliant. Some amazing stories, both because they were both "good" and "bad," and they really made you think. I remember one story that made me question the validity of the book, protesting that nothing like this could actually happen, but that's the point of the book- showing that reality is much more illicit than we believe. My viewpoint of the world has been considerably darkened after this book.
July 22, 2021
A very interesting anthropological account that starts on the individual level and expands to the transglobal level on how economies straddle the legal/illegal through the smuggling of goods. It is an illuminating subject matter as it explores informal economic structures.
The only reason I did not give this five stars is because the author is clearly an academic and often engages in academic discourse that can be hard to follow. The book will see-saw from easy to read first hand accounts to academic rhetoric. Despite this, it is worth the read to learn more about how goods, even in America, are easily smuggled from abroad. Or how a packet of illegal cigarettes can come into the hands of a war orphan in Angola and all the informal (illegal) structures in place to facilitate this.
The only reason I did not give this five stars is because the author is clearly an academic and often engages in academic discourse that can be hard to follow. The book will see-saw from easy to read first hand accounts to academic rhetoric. Despite this, it is worth the read to learn more about how goods, even in America, are easily smuggled from abroad. Or how a packet of illegal cigarettes can come into the hands of a war orphan in Angola and all the informal (illegal) structures in place to facilitate this.
March 5, 2020
You can tell from this book that Caroly Nordstrom is one of those truly gifted anthropologists who can present their research in a very gripping narrative form. I read this for a class with one of my favorite professors and it was so great to have the whole class really engaged in the reading and invested in what was happening. She paints a vivid picture of how globalization has really created a giant black market system that benefits and hurts people in equal stride. I definitely recommend this to anyone interested in how our economy functions.
June 10, 2021
This book was an important anthropological examination of the global trade system that facilitates the functioning of modern global capitalism. It reveals in a compellingly written ethnography the startling extent to which that dynamic obscures and relies upon massive transnational crime networks. Especially startling and memorable is the discussion of ports, and the percentage of trade that is illicit merely by virtue of how vast trade flows are. This book inspired me to dig deeper into the goods I use, the labour that produced them, and the manner in which they arrived in my community. I highly recommend this book.
June 6, 2022
This is worth the read but what starts as riveting scene and mood setting eventually becomes yet another run on sentence with an attempted provocative question (often the same one as a page or two earlier). The topic is fascinating and the writing usually fast paced, but Nordstrom makes a lot of sweeping statements from sometimes romanticized conclusions. Still one of the most readable modern ethnographies out there. Give it a go.
August 11, 2017
Eye opening
Most people have no idea of how the world really works. Nordstrom provides excellent evidence and analysis of extralegal and illicit affairs that happen worldwide. Clever insight, remarkable fieldwork, and overall a pretty good book.
Most people have no idea of how the world really works. Nordstrom provides excellent evidence and analysis of extralegal and illicit affairs that happen worldwide. Clever insight, remarkable fieldwork, and overall a pretty good book.
May 24, 2023
Probably outdated now since it was written in 2007, but still pretty informative and interesting. Really opens your eyes to how porous borders are and the sheer scale of smuggled goods. This is definitely a broad, high-level view of illegal economies and doesn't get too detailed on any one topic.
January 1, 2020
Anth 100
February 27, 2021
The global economy is a lot more messed up than I thought. Educational, entertaining, and thoughtful — quite the read!!
November 12, 2024
Book was a dizzying array of stories, it wasn’t for me.
December 27, 2011
i am still not done with it, the author lives in iowa where i am right now for the summers.....its a facinating look into how the economics of war and globalization play out, using angola as an example. the basic, fabrication and lies used to control people, and how the only way people can survive is my black market affairs. on how most companies are involved in smuggling. and the trick is in not thinking that this only happens in places like africa....
February 4, 2014
It's an really interesting book about global illegal trades. In many developing countries, much of the economy is hidden from he public books. The author did a lot of fieldwork and expose the dynamics behind all the "extra-legal" activities. You will see the world differently after reading this book!
December 2, 2014
I enjoyed the various layers and interconnectedness of the world that Nordstrom draws attention too. However, this approach doesn't allow her to examine the parts in depth and leaves the chapters feeling rushed.
November 15, 2012
Ok book. Starts out well and goes steadily downhill until by the end she's accusing Ivory Tower Economists of being Structurally Incapable of understanding that unregulated economic activity exists or how to study it.
January 2, 2013
I read this book for my ANTH 102 class. It was by far the most interesting part of that course. Nordstorm takes us on a journey into the world of the illicit and explores global smuggling networks and the security theater that surrounds it.
June 11, 2010
A great anthropological study about the various criminal networks that grow out of warzones, focusing on a case analysis of Angola
August 2, 2011
I was bored.
September 4, 2013
I cannot imagine a more boring and naive book, clearly written by a professional academic who has no "real world" experience in international business or trade.
Read
April 11, 2014Read the first few chapters for Prof. Daswani's class.
September 13, 2014
International Politics (Intro to)
May 18, 2017
I have endless respect for Nordstrom as a field anthropologist. She puts herself in such a broad spectrum of settings, and talks to communities and individuals that few others could manage. An incredibly important book, so much to learn from.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews