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- Convenors:
-
Patrick Meehan
(University of Manchester)
Jonathan Goodhand (SOAS University of London)
Frances Thomson (SOAS University of London)
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- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Land, water and development
- Location:
- S209, 2nd floor Senate Building
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 26 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on illicit drug crop (IDC) economies from a development perspective, challenging the dominant security and criminality lens for studying IDCs. The panel will examine what makes IDCs distinctive in terms of the kinds of development and the forms of political agency they produce.
Long Abstract:
This panel focuses on illicit drug crop (IDC) economies from a development perspective, challenging the dominant security and criminality lens for studying IDCs. Specifically, it brings recent research on IDCs into conversation with a wider body of work on ‘licit crops’ shaped by an agrarian political economy perspective. In focusing on IDCs and ‘illicit peasantries’ (growers of drug crops), we aim to better understand (a) the mechanisms through which prohibition shapes the agrarian political economy of IDCs (b) how these mechanisms and their effects generate distinctive patterns of development (c) and how IDCs and their prohibition lead to particular political subjectivities and forms of agency amongst ‘illicit peasantries’. The panel, with reference to IDCs in different parts of the world, will examine the continuities and connections between illicit and licit crops, including how licit crop crises and illicit crop booms intertwine, whilst also looking at what makes IDCs distinctive in terms of the kinds of development and the forms of political agency they produce.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 26 June, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This article develops a new comparative framework for studying the commonalities and differences between drugs affected frontier regions.
Paper long abstract:
A defining character of drugs-affected frontier regions is their dynamic instability and their boom-and-bust cycles. These are violent and disturbed landscapes, in which illicit drug economies play a transformative role. But not all frontiers are the same, and nor are the ‘illicit peasantries’ who inhabit the ‘narco-frontier’. In this article we explore the complex dialectical relations between frontiers, drug economies, illicit peasantries and peasant politics. In doing so we develop a new comparative framework, that provides a heuristic for studying the commonalities and differences across narco-frontiers and the mechanisms behind these differences.
Paper short abstract:
A retrospective comparison of illicit crop prices before and after certain historical turning points in Bolivia, Myanmar, Colombia, and Afghanistan.
Paper long abstract:
It has long been argued that markets are self-correcting, self-regulating, and self-sustaining in terms of what to produce, what to charge, and how to organise distribution. But stand-alone price analysis of illicit opium and coca does not explain why smallholders turn to illicit crops for coping and survival. This paper examines conditions of precarity, within which illicit crop markets can stimulate productivity and generate returns that can tame crises and relieve pressures. To smallholders facing marginalisation, violence, and climate change – growing opium and coca, despite their illegality, can reduce or spread risks and provide more predictability. Thus, rather than fix on the ‘invisible hand’ of price theory, the focus should be on the ‘visible hand’ of political entrepreneurship, interdependent relationships, and the metrics of precarity. To do this, this paper retrospectively compares illicit crop prices before and after certain historical moments in Bolivia, Myanmar, Colombia, and Afghanistan.
Paper short abstract:
The paper challenges simplistic views on illicit drug crops, advocating for a nuanced understanding of ethnic communities' socio-economic choices in the coca economy. Drawing on Colombian case studies, it highlights complex agency and governance within Indigenous and Afrocolombian groups.
Paper long abstract:
Scholarship on Illicit Drug Crops mostly understands illicit economies as disruptive for ethnic identities and ethnic institutions of territorial governance. In particular, illicit economies are said to generate violence in ethnic territories by strengthening the control of armed groups over coca-producing territories and unsettling socio/cultural changes that weaken collective processes of identity-making and territorial control. In this paper, we argue that this scholarship is underpinned by a simplistic representation of ethnic communities solely as powerless “victims” of illicit economies. We claim that formulating effective drug policies requires understanding in more nuanced ways the specific socio-economic trade-offs experienced by ethnic groups when entering the coca economy, recognizing ethnic subjects as holders of political and economic agency even in the violent context of coca enclaves. We draw on the analysis of two case studies in Colombia: the Catatumbo and Bajo Cauca regions, to investigate the complex forms of agency and governance that Indigenous and Afrocolombian communities hold in coca-producing territories. The ethnographic comparison between these two hotspots of coca production allows us to claim that the relationship between ethnic communities and drug economies is dynamic and framed by the different trajectories of ethnic social movements and territorial governance in specific socio-economic contexts and cannot only be understood as one of “resistance” or “dispossession”. Finally, we argue that simplistic understandings of this relationship can lead to counterproductive outcomes as they reproduce an “ahistorical” image of ethnic subjectivities as deprived of political agency, further excluding ethnic actors from decision-making spaces.
Paper short abstract:
The paper engages the complex relationship between formal cannabis policies and illicit drug economies in Africa.
Paper long abstract:
Illicit drug crop (IDC) economies are often viewed as impacted and shaped by the predominant prohibitionist approaches adopted by national governments as well as international bodies such as the UNODC. IDCs are portrayed as victims of policy and legal approaches that undermine livelihoods of illicit peasantries. Using cannabis experiences in countries such as Zimbabwe and South Africa the paper will show that illicit cannabis economies are not passively shaped by prohibitive national laws that have historically banned the substance’s cultivation, trade and use. Rather, the national drug laws and policies have and continues to be significantly impacted and shaped by illicit cannabis economies which they have failed to eradicate. Consequently, attempts by African governments to move beyond prohibition are hamstrung by their fear of IDCs and their ‘perceived’ effects on societies. This has shaped the nature of current legal reforms in some countries which only accommodate legal production for medicinal and industrial purposes targeted at export markets while continuing to ban all non-licensed cultivation, trade and uses associated with illicit peasantries. Additionally, the stringent regulatory conditions associated with legal cannabis markets are a clear demonstration of how IDC economies have created a reverse effect that in turn is affecting how licit cannabis is produced.
Paper short abstract:
In Colombia, rural communities producing illegal drug crops have developed (in)formal institutions for conflict resolution amid complex interactions with guerrillas. This study unpacks their innerworkings and the role of civilians beyond a narrative of coercion, through on-site fieldwork.
Paper long abstract:
Communities producing illegal drug crops (IDC) endure life at the margins of legality, permeating many social aspects of everyday life. In Colombia, rural coca-growing communities are excluded of the state’s justice system through lack of accessible services and by the illegal nature of their economic activities. Yet, in the midst of complex interactions with armed actors, they have developed mechanisms to resolve civil and criminal matters autonomously. The growing literature on wartime governance has explored how armed actors perform state-like responsibilities and emphasizes the importance of conflict resolution institutions in establishing authority. However, it falls short in unpacking the innerworkings of institutions and the role of civilians beyond a narrative of coercion. This article fills this gap, focusing on understudied peasant Latin American communities in the informal conflict resolution literature. I conducted 9 months of fieldwork in Caquetá and the south of Tolima, two regions producing or having produced coca or poppy. Through key informant interviews, participant observation, and a participatory workshop in three communities, I explored how conflict resolution has evolved in the context of the implementation of the Peace Agreement with the FARC – the 50-year-old guerrilla group. I argue that the hybrid nature of conflict resolution institutions in these rural areas enables agency practice at the margins, even amid armed actors' presence. I found that despite being crafted with the FARC, these institutions persist after their disarmament.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how drug cultivation and drug use have become embedded in processes of extractivist development in the Myanmar-China borderlands.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the intersections between two phenomena that have shaped eastern Kachin State in Myanmar’s northern borderlands with China since the late 1980s: the transformation of once-remote spaces into major resource frontiers shaped by overlapping and cumulative forms of export-oriented resource extraction, and the upsurge of opium cultivation and drug use. Through the analytic of extractivism, we examine how the specific modalities surrounding logging and plantations in the Myanmar-China borderland offer critical insights into how drugs have become entrenched in the region’s political economy and in the everyday lives of people ‘living with’ the destruction, violence and insecurity wrought by extractive development.