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- Convenors:
-
Patrick Meehan
(University of Manchester)
Jonathan Goodhand (SOAS University of London)
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- Chair:
-
Jonathan Goodhand
(SOAS University of London)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Palmer 1.11
- Sessions:
- Thursday 29 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how violence, poverty and illegal drug economies in frontiers and borderlands become embedded within processes of state formation and capitalist expansion. Starting from the margins, we argue, offers a privileged vantage point for offering new insights into development processes.
Long Abstract:
In many parts of the world, frontiers and borderlands are sites of state fragility and entrenched war economies, often fuelled by illicit drugs. The borderlands of Afghanistan, Colombia and Myanmar have experienced many decades of armed conflict and have emerged as global leaders in the production and trafficking of heroin and cocaine.
These drugs-intensified borderlands are frequently represented as either lagging regions left behind by wider development processes, or dangerous hot spots and ungoverned zones that export public bads in the forms of terrorism, illicit good and wider insecurity.
Yet this 'diffusionist narrative' fails to capture the essential characteristics and dynamics of change in state margins; these are regions of intense interconnectivity linked into national and global circuits of commodities, capital and investment.
We challenge this narrative, drawing upon research produced as part of a four-year Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) project led by SOAS, University of London, entitled 'Drugs & (dis)order: building peacetime economies in the aftermath of war', which is generating new evidence on how to transform illicit drug economies into peace economies in Afghanistan, Colombia and Myanmar.
This panel will explore how violence, poverty and illegal drug economies in these regions are not a function of the marginalisation of spaces left behind by development but have become deeply embedded within processes of state formation and capitalist expansion. Starting from the margins, we argue, offers a privileged vantage point for offering new insights into development processes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 29 June, 2023, -Alison Brown (Cardiff University) Patricia Garcia Amado (School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University) Peter Mackie (Cardiff University)
Paper short abstract:
Refugee settlements are often based in conflict-affected border areas characterised by intense informal cross-border trade. This study in Colombia and Bangladesh shows how displaced people use agency and initiative to navigate cartel controls and strengthen their livelihoods and local economies.
Paper long abstract:
By the end of 2021 there were 27.1 million refugees, 4.7 million asylum seekers, and 4.4 million Venezuelans displaced abroad, according to UNHCR. Of these, 72% live in neighbouring countries, predominantly low- and middle-income economies. Refugee camps and settlements are often located in borders characterised by intense commercial flows including informal cross-border trade. Borders and border control are often shaped by political economy relations between neighbouring states and, in conflict-affected areas, controlled by cartels and elite gangs working in collusion with the state. Yet, beyond high-profile illicit war and drug economies, many displaced communities use diaspora links to establish hazardous, informal cross-border trade in everyday items and licit goods, using ingenious means to circumvent or coopt border guards and customs officials.
Based on the hypothesis that enhancing the mobility rights of displaced people and enabling cross-border trade is central to the process of refugee socio-economic inclusion in host societies, this submission draws on the findings of a small-scale GCRF-funded 2022 project on refugee cross-border trade across the Colombia/Venezuelan and Bangladesh/Myanmar borders, where social relations and complex illicit payments enable refugees to navigate closed borders to address poverty and support livelihoods. The two borders present very different solutions to circumventing state regulation and hostilities. The Rohingya refugees of Cox’s Bazar are confined to camp, but work through Bangladeshi middle-men to navigate the riverine border, while between Colombia and Venezuela, near the town of Cúcuta, ancient ‘trochas’ (footpaths) are coopted for modern contraband routes stimulating the local economies of otherwise peripheral regions.
Linda Etchart (Kingston University)
Paper short abstract:
The expansion of global organized crime into Ecuador, with the involvement of narcotics cartels in illegal goldmining, has had negative social and environmental impacts. This paper explores the links among criminal cartels across the Americas and Europe, and the consequences of governance failure.
Paper long abstract:
The rapid expansion of global organised crime networks into Ecuador related to exports of cocaine since 2010 has led to the involvement of narcotics cartels in the extraction and export of other illegally derived commodities such as lumber and gold, and trafficking in protected species of animals. The impact of some of these activities has led to increased levels of violent crime and assassinations in coastal cities, as well as the contamination of clean water sources, and damage to ecosystems, affecting the livelihoods and survival of Indigenous and rural communities.
Effective resistance to criminal economic activity has been hindered by a blurring of the lines between the legal and the illegal, complicity of local officials and judges, and the widespread use of illicit payments to state employees in the procurement of government contracts. Such failures in governance have taken their toll on Ecuador’s political and social fabric, undermining trust in democratic systems and the judiciary. Taking Ecuador as a case study, this paper explores the vulnerabilities of primary-commodity exporting countries, their peoples and their environment, to the power of global demand for precious commodities. The author proposes solutions to protect both people and planet from the dangers of transoceanic trafficking networks underpinned by prevailing global economic structures.
Frances Thomson (SOAS University of London)
Paper short abstract:
Detailed analysis of the social relations of coca production in one of the country’s most important coca-producing municipalities shows that capitalist market imperatives are weak within this economy.
Paper long abstract:
The illicit coca economy has become a bulwark for smallholder farming in Colombia. This article helps explain why. Detailed analysis of the social relations of coca production in one of the country’s most important coca-producing municipalities shows that capitalist market imperatives are weak within this economy. The constant pressure to increase productivity is muted by, among other factors, fluid access to land, non-interest-bearing debts, and the lack of price competition between producers. Coca-growers are ‘improving’ production, but they mostly respond to opportunities rather than imperatives, as indicated by enormous variations in yields and haphazard accounting and cost-cutting. In the context of multiple agrarian crises, the coca economy allows even less well-off producers to survive.
Patrick Meehan (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
Since the late 1980s, Myanmar’s borderlands with China have been important frontiers for agribusiness, logging and mining. This paper explores how extractivist forms of resource extraction have generated new drivers of drug production and drug use and the impacts this has on borderland populations.
Paper long abstract:
In recent decades, Myanmar’s conflict-affected borderlands with China have become important new frontiers for agribusinesses, logging and minnig. The commodities produced in these regions and the capital that is accumulated from resource extraction now play an increasingly significant role in shaping wider processes of development across Asia. At the same time, the Myanmar-China borderlands remain a major site of illegal drug production and have experienced a significant increase in levels of drug use. This paper analyses how illegal drugs have become embedded in the forms of extractivism that have underpinned how these borderlands have been integrated into the global economy. Extractivism denotes a particular pattern of ‘development’ whereby the gains from resource extraction are privatised in the hands of a small number of beneficiaries and transferred elsewhere, while the costs – environmental degradation, dispossession, violence – are externalised and shouldered by local places and populations. This paper first analyses the linkages between agrarian extractivism, smallholder crises and opium cultivation. It then explores how drug use has become embedded in the extractivist modalities that dominate the mining sector. This paper reveals how extractivism can generate new drivers of drug production and use that layer upon longstanding histories of drug production in Myanmar.