I rapidly moved through Carolyn Nordstrom’s Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. I picked this book up at the 2005 AAA meeting, and just turned to it about a week and a half ago. [Aside: I have found that I really need to re-energize my anthropology side of late. My career in political campaigns has had a profound draining effect on my inner being. More on that in a future posting!]

Nordstrom’s book is a fabulous tour through the shadows, the places where legal and illegal, extra-state and state, and survival and profit intersect. She studies these shadow phenomena primarily along the front lines of wars in Angola, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, and elsewhere. However, her trenchant analysis shows that how the local is intimately intertwined with the global. It’s not a simply globalization is bad story, nor it is a simplistic core/periphery argument that she lays out. She shows how people survive, both culturally, politically, and economically in today’s world. She shines a bright light on these shadow or informal economies that are so often ignored by academics, politicians, and diplomats, or, perhaps worse than ignoring them, these people place informal economies within less-than-civlized groupings of people or speak of them as solely illegal.

Her deep ethnography of those living through war and not-war as well as the humanitarian and development corps that always pop up on the scene, illustrates the deep, varied, and strong ties that link human beings in one area to people in other areas. Surprisingly, she shows us that while statesman and media focus on illegal drug or arms networks, these informal economies also provide food, medicines, clothing, and the various necessities and pleasures of life. Additionally, in some war-torn or recently postwar societies, these informal economies can make up 20, 30, even 90% of the total economic activity of the nation. Economists, development organizations, the United Nations, and national leaders do not look at these economies, perhaps because doing so would lend credence to the fact that states aren’t as powerful as they portray themselves to be.

This is a fabulous book that explores territory that you won’t normally find in a international relations text or an economics lecture. But, you should read it to start to explore notions of power, the state, legal and illegal, formal and non-formal. In order to work in the international realm, be it development, politics, conflict resolution, or humanitarian aid, Nordstrom’s book should be in your satchel as you work to help people.