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P77


has 1 film 1
Marginal development: States, markets and violence in drug-affected borderlands 
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
:
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, -
Panel Video visible to paid-up delegates