International Politics and the Illicit Global Economy Peter Andreas Dirty Entanglements: Corruption, Crime, and Terrorism. By Louise Shelley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 386pp. $80.00 cloth, $29.99 paper. Dark Logic: Transnational Criminal Tactics and Global Security. By Robert Mandel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. 272pp. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Convergence: Illicit Networks and National Security in the Age of Globalization. Edited by Michael Miklaucic and Jacqueline Brewer. Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 2013. 298pp. $49.95 cloth, $14.48 paper. Human Smuggling and Border Crossings. By Gabriella E. Sanchez. New York: Routledge, 2014. 146pp. $155.00. The Money Laundry: Regulating Criminal Finance in the Global Economy. By J.C. Sharman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. 216pp. $29.95. Governing Guns, Preventing Plunder: International Cooperation against Illicit Trade. By Asif Efrat. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 384pp. $53.00. T he illicit global economy involves a diverse cast of non-state actors: drug dealers, clandestine arms traders, sex traffickers, money launderers, maritime pirates, coca and poppy farmers, copycats, child pornog- raphers, black market kidney brokers, embargo busters, and wildlife smugglers, to name just a few. The state actors are equally diverse: cops, customs inspectors, border guards, prosecutors, financial crimes investigators, undercover agents, and so on. One thing that all of these state and non-state actors have in common is that they have traditionally been almost entirely overlooked by mainstream International Relations (IR) scholars. Those scholars work- ing in the subfield of International Political Economy (IPE) have tended to gloss over the clandestine dimensions of globalization, preferring to focus on the more formal and visible (and more easily measurable) side of global pro- duction, trade, and finance. Similarly, those scholars working in the subfield of Security Studies have tended to gloss over the policing apparatus of the state and the criminal law enforcement components of global gover- nance. This is immediately apparent by simply browsing through the leading textbooks, readers, and journals in these two core IR subfields. However, this long neglect has been slowly changing since the 1990s, and especially in the last decade or so. 1 In this essay I review a sampling of recent books that are part of the still relatively small but growing literature on the illicit global economy and efforts to combat it. Not all of these books are explicitly framed around the big debates in IR, but they all speak to broad questions that have preoccupied IR scholars in recent years: Is globalization out of control? Is the state in retreat? Are borders in- creasingly irrelevant? Is the world defined more by change or continuity? What are the “new” security challenges in the 21 st century and how serious of a threat are they? Will the future be characterized by greater peace and cooper- ation or growing chaos and disorder? Sharp disagreements in the IR literature over the answers to these key questions are very much mirrored in these books. An Extreme Case of Globalization Gone Bad? The illicit global economy is defined by clandestine cross-border flows of people, goods, money, and information that are unauthorized by the sending or receiving country. Typically this means flows that are prohibited (such as drugs and endangered species), regulated (such as cigarettes, arms, people), stolen (such as art, antiquities, and intellectual property), or counterfeit (such as prescription drugs or currency). Together, these flows reflect the illicit “underside” of economic globalization. Peter Andreas (peter_andreas@brown.edu) is the John Hay Professor of International Studies and Political Science at Brown University. 782 Perspectives on Politics doi:10.1017/S1537592715001358 © American Political Science Association 2015 Review Essay