GCRF - Drugs and (dis)order: Building sustainable peacetime economies in the aftermath of war

First, the project will engage scholars working on the political economy of conflict and war to peace transitions. This includes researchers working on issues of violence (e.g. Christopher Cramer, Stathis Kalyvas, Teo Ballve), resources, statebuilding and political settlements (e.g. Jonathan Di John, James Putzel, Philippe Le Billon, Douglass North and Mushtaq Khan), and hybrid political orders (e.g. Volker Boege, Kate Meagher). The research will contribute to this literature by providing a comparative evidence base regarding the perpetuation of criminalised economies in peacetime and the complex dilemmas and trade-offs that exist between peacebuilding, development and counter narcotics efforts to tackle illicit economies. The research will be disseminated through publication in leading development and politics journals, through engagement with existing research networks (such as the Political Settlements Research Programme) and UK and international conferences. Second, the research will benefit scholars working on drugs and other illicit economies, including Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, Carolyn Nordstrom, Richard Snyder, Ko-Lin Chin, Francisco Thoumi. The research aims to redefine the field of drugs and development by generating an innovative, interdisciplinary framework for conceptualising the dynamics surrounding drug economies that combines political economy, livelihoods, gender, and public health analysis to understand the tensions that exist between counter-narcotics policies and concurrent efforts to address state fragility and poverty. The project is well-placed to disseminate research to audiences across different disciplines through the SOAS Violence, Conflict and Development research cluster, the new SOAS Corruption Centre, the LSE IDEAS International Drug Policy Project, the Centre for Research on Drugs and Health Behaviour (CRDHB) and The Centre for Health and Social Change (ECOHOST) (both hosted by the LSHTM). Third, the research will strengthen recent borderland studies scholarship focused on how state margins are not simply reflective of power relations at the centre, but are often constitutive of new political and economic orders (e.g. Hastings Donnan, Thomas Wilson, Benedikt Korf, Timothy Raeymaekers, Paul Nugent, James Scott and Willem van Schendel). Research will strengthen this growing body of literature by demonstrating how a borderlands perspective can address the lack of sensitivity to space in much of the literature on war to peace transitions and statebuilding, which focuses predominantly on national-level political settlements. The research will engage beneficiaries by submitting publications to targeted journals including Geoforum and Journal of Borderland Studies, and through interacting with the Asian Borderlands Research Network, the Association for Borderland Studies and the African Borderlands Research Network. Fourth, the project will provide an important contribution to the literature engaged with developing new research approaches for working in insecure terrain (e.g. Gutierrez-Sanin, Mansfield, Ko-Lin Chin). The research's integration of in-depth fieldwork, GIS spatial imagery and public health analysis will showcase methodological innovation that may then be adapted to other research initiatives in drugs and conflict-affected environments. These findings will be disseminated through the project's workshops and capacity building initiatives with UK-based and southern researchers. The project aims to strengthen the links between UK and southern researchers in Afghanistan, Colombia and Myanmar across all of these areas of knowledge by establishing an extensive research network through the project's proposed Policy Lab and subsequent Research Consortium for Transforming Illicit Economies.