 Rwy'n meddwl am y cyfnodol yn y ddefnyddio y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth Mae Gwyrddol. Rydych yn cael ei gwybod am y cyfnodol yma, mae'n cyfrifio bod yma yma yma yma yma yma yma yma yma yma, gan ystod y cyfnodol yma, y dyma yma yma ar y stryd Gwyrddol ar y Llywodraeth. Mae'r stryd gyda'r cyfnodol i gael ymgynghwyl a'r cyfnodol, yn cael ei gael ymgynghwyl a'r cyfnodol, a'r cyfnodol i gael ymgynghwyl. Felly, ddod i unig o'r Llywodraeth yn ymgyrchol, byddwn yn y Gweithgafol yn 2016, ysgolwch yn ymgyrchol yn ymgyrchol yn ymgyrchol yn 50% i'r cyfrifio ar gyfer y cyfnod, ddod i'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithgafol yn ymgyrchol. Felly, ddod i'r gweithgafol, rydyn ni wedi'u gwneud hynny'n gweithio'r semenau. Felly, stydw i'n dderbyn i'r holl o'r eu bydd, ddod i'r gweithio'r gweithgafol yn sylidoedd yn sefydlu o'r gennymau, ac yn y ffaisio'r Soras Llywodraeth yn ôl i'r gweithgafol. Felly, dyma'n ddweud hynny. Gweithio'r ffasol yn rhanau, fyddai ei fawr imig oedd a gwnaeth yma yn ymgyrchol yma o'i weithio. A'r ddod i'r gweithio'r gweithgafol, ac oes yn mynd yn 11.59 p.m. Dyma mae'n cael eu bant gennynosiaeth eich pwylo sien ddim yn ei dod o'r ateb o'r newydd a'r gwasanaeth ymlaesio ym ni, ond mor iawn yn pethau'r ysgolol, byr i'r newydd a'r trwyd, dwi'n adrodi nhw i'n gwasanaeth dda, wedi'u rhan o bobl, i'r plant, o banydd i'n cyfleu'r ddeunydd, ymlaes, iddo'n ddarparu, o ddisgrifennu meddoriaethau rhaglaethol i'r adrachio bosul. yw Professor Jonathan Goodhand, Dr Patrick Mehan, Dr Francisco Gutierrez-Sannin, and Dr Jasmine Batia. Tynedwch yn ysgrifennu yn ymddiwch ymweld yn ymddiwch yng ngyfnodd y 4 yrw ymddiwch ymddiwch ymddiwch ymddiwch, ac yn ymddiwch ymddiwch, yn ymddiwch ymddiwch, byddwch ymddiwch ymddiwch in the aftermath of war, and the research is generating new evidence on how to transform illicit drug economies into peace economies in Afghanistan, Colombia and Myanmar. So the format of this is actually going to be a panel and we are going to open with Jonathan Goodhand, followed by Patrick, then Francisco and then Jasmine and then have some closing remarks by Jonathan. A little bit about each of the panellists, Jonathan Goodhand is Professor of Conflict and Development Studies in the Department of Development Studies here at SOAS, and he's the principal investigator of the GCRF drugs and disorder project. Patrick Mihan is postdoctoral research fellow here at SOAS and a co-investigator of the GCRF project, and he co-leads the Myanmar research team. Francisco Gutierrez Sanin is an anthropologist and director of the Observatory on Land Restitution. He's researched the Colombian Conflict extensively and his role in the project is to lead the Colombia research and contribute to the methodology for comparative research, and Jasmine Bhartia is a postdoctoral research fellow here in the Department of Development Studies and her doctorate from Oxford University involved mixed method field work in Afghanistan. So Jonathan will speak for six minutes, followed by Patrick, Francisco and Jasmine for 12 minutes each and then we'll go back to Jonathan for some closing remarks before we open to the floor. Thanks everybody. So this is a four year research project, we're two years into it now. It's a big research project, there's 12 different members and we're doing research in nine different borderland regions of Colombia, Myanmar and Afghanistan. Colombia is producing over 50% of the global supply of cocaine, Afghanistan and Myanmar are some 90% of the global supply of heroin and a growing amount, a growing quantity of methamphetamines. So what we're doing, we hope to do tonight is present some emerging findings which aims to complexify and challenge dominant understandings of the relationship between drugs development in conflict affected borderlands and after my introduction we're going to zoom into the Myanmar borderlands with Patrick then we're going to go to the frontier coca producing regions of Colombia with Francisco and finally to a drug field boontown called Zaranj on the Iranian Afghan border with Jasmine. Now the starting point for our research is to critique dominant understandings and literature on drugs and developments and borderlands and the first thing to say is that the borderland regions are seen as sensitive spaces, national elites they for the four national elites they tend to matter more than other spaces but only crucially in certain ways. They are places where we have a kind of dialectic of intense anxiety and of neglect. There's anxiety because these are seen as ungoverned, as dangerous, as rebellious spaces, as places where the rule of where law and order is perceived to be limited and loyalties are questionable. There seem to be also places of illegality which exports dangerous public bads whether it's insecurity, whether it's migrants, whether it's drugs, whether it's terrorism. Conversely, they're also seen as neglected spaces. They're seen as places that are residual, that are left behind, that are marginal and disconnected. They're yet to be incorporated into state building projects and into expanding markets and linked to these kinds of perceptions, there are kind of dominant kind of frontier narratives if you like. They are linked to what James Scott has talked about as civilisational discourses. The civilisation is here, the barbarians of the margins are there. These are places that are presented often in drugs discourses as well as in development discourses, wild as untamed, as unruly. At the same time, they're also treated as places of potential. They're places that are untouched, that are underused, that are open for exploitation and development. These discourses of anxiety and neglect permeate, perculate their way into dominant policy narratives. We think this is captured in this idea of the drugs and development nexus, that they're seen as this vicious cycle connecting drugs with state fragility, with processes of mal-development, and borderlands are seen somehow as these fragility traps. So, there is this kind of link between drug field war economies, protracted armed conflict, and these ideas that drugs are a symptom and a product of this famous kind of world bank phrase of development in reverse. So, we want to challenge these kinds of narratives and these policy approaches. But these narratives and approaches lead to a set of kind of antidotes, which we think are deeply problematic. It's linked to what David Harvey talks about as a diffusionist narrative, that the problems or the pathologies of the margins are linked to the absence of states and the lack of connection with markets. Therefore, the response is to extend the imprint of the state, to establish a monopoly of violence, to extend the rule of law, to territorialize or close the frontier spaces and make them legible and therefore governable, and also to connect with markets, to open up the fruits of development through building connectivity, through building infrastructure, through thinning borders, and through creating development alternatives to illicit economies. And we can see in the policy debates around counter narcotics, there's a kind of an emerging or a kind of almost mainstream narrative now, that we need to integrate and developmentalize drug issues, that we need to combine these kinds of softer forms of interventions around alternative developments, around harm reduction, alongside the kind of a harder end of the spectrum, including eradication, interdiction, extending the rule of law. And there's an assumption that all these things come together, all good things come together, there's no tensions and trade-offs. And I suppose this is the starting point for where we position ourselves in our research. First of all, we feel that there's a need to de-fetishize drugs, that treating drugs as any other commodity takes out the heat and the passion, if you like, the anxiety which gets in the way of real, really hard analysis of how drug economies function. Secondly, we are starting from the vantage point of the margins in order to try and understand these processes. We try to build up what we call a borderland perspective, in the sense that we think that studying these questions of drugs and disorder and developments, through longitudinal research in these borderland regions, speaking with people from the borderlands, whether we're talking about coca producers, opium farmers, people who are working in the meth laboratories or mothers who have sons who are drug addicts or drug users. We think building at this borderland perspective and developing what we've called spatial histories and spatial biographies will get us a better understanding, a richer understanding, a capture, the dynamics of change and interrelations between drugs, development and conflict. Now we're doing this because we don't think the margins are exotic spaces which are disconnected, we think they're highly connected, they're linked into circuits of capital flows of resources and flows of ideas. They are relational spaces, the centres and the peripheries are linked to each other in many ways. We only have to look at Yabba or methamphetamines produced in the highlands of Myanmar and how it's transported across to the eastern seaboard of China or the bars and the clubs of Sydney and Melbourne to see these forms of interconnections and how processes going on in the borderlands are shaping other processes going on at the centre. So these are relational and transnational spaces and they constitute power at the centre, they're not just reflective of power at the centre. Finally, we think that these are places of rapid transformation of innovation, they're not lagging, they're at the forefront of social and political economic change. If we look at the drug economies in the countries and the borderlands we're looking at, we can see these are sites of experimentation, there are new technologies, new production techniques, new products, new markets, spontaneous sharing of know-how, the development of financial services and cultivation techniques, new schemes to regulate, organise and manage labour. So these in many ways are special economic zones. They are less problems to be solved and opportunities to be managed and exploited and so from this starting point we want to now zoom into the borderlands of Myanmar to explore these kinds of processes, this is in greater detail. Okay, so building on the insights that Jonathan has set out at the start of this talk, my aim is to explore how the illegal drug economy in Myanmar's borderland regions with China in terms of the production, trafficking and consumption of opium, heroin and methamphetamines has become embedded in processes of economic development in this region over the past three decades since the late 1980s. Developing the concept of the drugs development nexus I set out to show how Myanmar's long-standing illegal drug economy intersects now with techniques of borderland governance, surrounding processes of state consolidation and modes of development through which highly strategic and resource rich regions at the margins of the Myanmar state have become integrated into national, regional and global economies. In doing so, following Jonathan, I want to challenge simplistic policy narratives that have typically conceptualised the drug economy solely as a driver of armed conflict, instability, underdevelopment and indicative of political and economic marginalisation. Upland areas of Myanmar's eastern borderlands with China have a long history of opium production. Production expanded significantly in the decades after the country's independence in 1948. The opium economy played an important role in financing armed conflict which continues to this day between the central government and an array of armed groups based in the country's borderlands. Opium has also provided a vital support for the livelihoods of populations caught up in this conflict. In the late 1980s, though, the political economy of Myanmar's borderlands with China underwent significant shifts. Following a series of military victories, the Myanmar government reached ceasefires with many of the armed groups in Kachin state and Shan state, which served to pause, although not resolve, armed conflict, creating a no-war-no-peace environment. The ceasefire strategy was in part inspired by and in turn helped to enable the shifting economic importance of this region to development strategies of political and business elites in both Myanmar and the neighbouring province of Yunnan in China. In Myanmar, chronic economic mismanagement had left the country close to bankruptcy by the late 1980s. The failing of the national economy contrasted starkly with the country's flourishing black market cross-border economy, which was largely in the hands of opposition groups, while the vast natural resources in these areas were viewed by elites at the centre as a means of kick-starting the national economy. As a result of this, development strategies through the 1980s bought and 1990s onwards bought with them a new political geography, centred on securing control over the country's resource-rich and conflict-affected and drug-affected borderlands. Across the border in China, expanding border trade and resource extraction with Myanmar was promoted as a way of trying to address the growing economic disparity between the country's rapidly developing eastern coastal areas and its landlocked interior provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan. Cross-border trade and resource extraction was viewed as a way of converting Yunnan from a margin of the Chinese state to a central bridgehead between China and Southeast Asia. Myanmar's borderlands are rich in resources, especially timber, mining, including jade, gold, amber, gemstones and rare earths, and also rich agricultural land for various agribusinesses. The official opening of the border between Myanmar and China in the late 1980s and a series of changes to land laws and foreign investment laws paved the way for a vast expansion in trade, infrastructure projects and resource extraction in Myanmar's borderlands. These forms of frontier development generated vast revenues. Global witnesses estimated that jade exports alone amount to $6-9 billion per year. These kinds of development have taken place in Myanmar's China's borderlands over the past three decades, reflect a broader trend across Southeast Asia in which borderland regions have increasingly been reimagined as resource rich, unexploited wastelands targeted for large-scale development schemes and for economic integration and greater state control. These kinds of borderland development have fuelled metropolitan hubs throughout the region, notably Yangon, Kunming, Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong. Policy narratives claimed that peace development and tackling the region's long-standing drug economy were mutually reinforcing and that the opening up of borderland spaces for investment would provide a strong foundation for reducing levels of armed conflict and drug production. However, alongside these processes of ceasefire development, the drug trade in Myanmar's eastern borderlands continued to flourish. Myanmar has remained the world's second largest producer of illegal opium, much of which is converted to heroin within the country's borders. Furthermore, since the 1990s, Shan State has become one of the world's major producers of methamphetamine pills, known locally as Yaba, an increasing amounts of high-grade crystal meth. Shan State is now at the centre of Asia's illegal drug trade, which is a multi-billion-dollar industry. There has also been a distinct shift in perception surrounding the impact that drugs have had on local livelihoods within this borderland region. Opium has long been viewed as an important cash crop that was associated with many positive uses, cultural, recreational and medicinal. Changing practices, especially perceptions of the rising harms associated with injecting heroin use and methamphetamine use, has viewed as having been one of the defining features amongst borderland populations of their experiences of development over the past three decades. Efforts by state and business actors to reconfigure this borderland region from a strong hold of armed resistance to a key site of accumulation at the heart of state-building processes and a key part of regional trade and economic integration strategies has, I argue, had a significant impact on configurations of power in this borderland area, but in ways that have reinvigorated rather than dismantled the region's drug trade. In Myanmar's borderlands, as in many other drug-producing regions, the drug trade has long been an important foundation of power structures, including the financing of the means of violence, forms of accumulation, cross-border political and economic networks and extensive patronage systems. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that processes of development have resulted in attempts to harness this relationship between the drug economy, power and capital accumulation rather than attempt to dismantle or curtail the region's illicit drug production trade. In the time that I have remaining, I want to briefly reflect on four mechanisms that are coming out of our emerging research findings regarding this complicated relationship between drugs and processes of development. Firstly, negotiations around the drug trade have become deeply embedded in borderland governance structures that have been established by political and business elites to stabilise and open up volatile borderland spaces for investment and resource extraction. The region's drug economy thrives not because of a lack of governance but because of the relationships that have emerged between the drug trade and new systems of frontier governance. Offers of impunity and protection surrounding drugs and opportunities to invest in the legal economy and enter into the formal political system were part of numerous informal ceasefire arrangements agreed in the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, in many areas, the Myanmar army has deployed local militias to act as counter-insurgency forces and to provide the coercive muscle that has underpinned new forms of development in terms of facilitating land dispossession, protecting development projects, securing road networks and policing local populations that have been adversely affected by these unequal forms of development. Opportunities to run legal and illegal businesses, notably in the drug economy, has provided a way for Myanmar's army to strengthen the loyalty of these militia groups and enable them to be self-financing and to try to channel drug revenues to groups that are nominally aligned with the state rather than fighting directly against it. The drug trade has thus become an important foundation of reconfigured borderland power structures that have facilitated flows of investment trade and resources. Secondly, the drug economy has provided important investment capital for various development projects. The close association between the drug trade and the emerging nexus of military state and private sector power has enabled illegal drug revenues to be funneled into the legal economy. In one of the most well-known examples for those who follow Myanmar, Asia World Company, which is owned by the son of very well-known drug entrepreneur and longtime militia entrepreneur who has now passed away, Lo Seng Han, gained the contract to upgrade the road from Mandalay and Central Myanmar to the China border that reduced the travel time from three days, sometimes seven in the rainy season, to as little as 12 hours, and became a key engine for expanding cross-border trade between Myanmar and China. This company, and it's one of many, then went on to gain contracts to construct highways, airports, ports, and also parts of Myanmar's new capital, Napidore. Thirdly, in some areas, ongoing opium cultivation has become a lifeline for farmers facing new forms of insecurity from agribusiness-led development and the integration of rural areas into global markets. Rather than being driven by economic marginalisation and exclusion from markets, opium production has for some become the alternative development for smallholders, providing a way to mitigate the impacts of debt and dispossession that have accompanied these forms of development. Fourthly and finally, increasing levels of drug use have also become closely associated with certain development processes. The relationship between development and drug use has been most apparent surrounding extractive industries. Firstly, the construction of road networks to access remote resources, especially timber, has connected formerly remote areas. This has not only facilitated circulations of people and resources, but is also perceived by populations to have facilitated the spread of drugs into their areas. Secondly, the boom towns that have developed around sites of resource extraction have become key sites of transient churning populations and large circulations of money, where drug use has also become common. Drug use has also become deeply embedded in various labour practices surrounding extractive industries. Drug use has become therapeutic in some cases amidst dangerous, physically arduous and remote working conditions. Yabah, or methamphetamine pills, has long been viewed as a working-class drug enabling bodies to work harder, something that is valued by wage labourers seeking to increase their earnings in precarious livelihoods and also their employers. Drugs have also become a mechanism through which to attempt to control labour. It is not uncommon for employers to provide drugs or to part-pay wages in drugs as a way to retain an otherwise transient labour force. Selling drugs to workers also appears to be a way of recouping some labour costs, as wages are spent on drugs provided by the companies themselves in the compounds of these extractive industries. Many of those who have taken on these jobs in the hope of generating income to support their families in many cases have returned home without these savings, but with the added burden of drug addiction on households. So to round off in conclusion, I'm seeking to show, and as part of a key theme within our project as a whole, that drugs are not residual to processes of development but are deeply embedded in the story of ceasefire development in Myanmar. Rather than assuming that development in drug and conflict affected borderlands, sorry, rather than assuming yet that development in drugs and conflict affected borderlands will necessarily support peace building and counter-narcotics, we need a much more critical engagement in terms of the nexus between drugs, violence and development. In place of tired narratives of development as embodying win-win solutions for all, analysis of the relationship between illegal economies and development processes offers new ways for understanding the distributive impacts of development, the winners and losers of these processes. In Myanmar, while the ceasefires reduce levels of outright armed conflict, the forms of militarized state building facilitated under the ceasefires contributed new forms of violence, not least the new forms of slow violence of drug harm. Drugs have also become a key form of both types of accumulation and impoverishment under the ceasefires. In many ways we've seen the privatization of the gains of the drug and development nexus and the socialization of the risks or harms associated with it. Huge revenues generated from development in Myanmar's borderlands have been concentrated in the hands of the few, often invested in centres far from the borderlands, while rising drug use is perceived to have had significant damage on individuals, families and borderland societies. These experiences of drugs and development offer vital but often overlooked insights into the challenges facing Myanmar's current peace process and why narratives of development bringing peace have been treated with growing skepticism amongst many in Myanmar's borderlands. So good afternoon, I will try to answer squarely this question that has been answered to the yes by a big bulk of the literature is our illicit crops in Colombia development in reverse, the empirical sources that I will use for this talk are two sites in the south west of Colombia, Puerto Aziz and Tumaco, which together some more or less 15% of the coca production of the country, less than 1% of the territory, so there is a huge concentration of coca crops in both of them. So when you review the literature there is a mass of of of of assertions about the narco distopia in Colombia, which accumulates armed conflict, the capture of illegal rents, violence and destitution. But even going away from the mainstream literature, I will give you only two examples. The first one is Anet Idder who says this book reveals how the myriad in number 2019 book about borderlands and conflict, how the myriad and dynamic interactions among rebels, paramilitaries, drug cartels and other violent non-state groups and gender violence around the social fabric of communities and challenge the legitimacy of the state. So let's say in in the sense drugs are a curse that falls over the population and more more correctly, but even then with a couple of missing links, Gothenburg asserts, and I think Gothenburg and Dowell asserts that the population of Putumayo and of the Colombian Amazon is basically a result of land hunger in Colombia, where there is a huge land concentration in the and the core of the country. But even with this very, I'm not saying that these are not quality works, they are very serious and in the sense paradigm changing works, but even in these you have a big hole or a lot of holes. First of all, you have a narrative of agrarian development without peasants. They simply don't appear in no part whatsoever without social agency, without capital accumulation, without social change. You see these places as static in their disgraces, without political change in power structures. And what she notes, as soon as she puts into the picture peasants, power structures, capital accumulation, et cetera, then the picture is very different from what it had been in the rain. So if you take for example vignettes of puppy growers, coca growers in Putumayo very early in the literature, people when they had their first contact with these illicit crops even fell into their knees and prayed and thanked God for the existence of puppy or for the existence of coca. So I will argue that in many senses, in many senses, that's a trend. If you fill up these holes and you start to look at the missing links, illicit crops are the alternative developments to Colombian mainstream developments, which is based on a certain type of economies which require very high land concentration, land tenure concentration at levels of the Colombian land concentration genius 0.89. So these are Martian levels of land concentration we are really rarely seen in elsewhere. So we made a survey among coca growers in Putumayo. That's why in this talk I concentrated on these two sites, on these two sites. And what you find is that first of all, several social sectors have been able to experience a modest social advancement. For example women, women have access to property, women have access to decision making within the household, women have the capacity of purchasing and buying things without asking for permission. You have the creation of an agrarian middle class, coca producing agrarian middle class, Colombia needs desperately some semblance of agrarian middle class, a sustainable familial agriculture in her rebirth style. So as professor, a historical, so as professor, created the category of the reproduction squeeze. What do you mean by this? Basically falling returns to labor and increasing cost of production. Many Colombian legal crops experience this with productive squeeze. The coca producers have not experienced it. So they can push forward a sustainable agricultural economy, spatial immobility, et cetera. But at the same time, they suffer huge costs, basically four types of costs coming from illegal regulation, illegal group regulation costs coming from the tax from the states, basically fumigation costs coming from the linkage and being cut off from access to services when you live in illegality and costs also coming from what's the people who live in the regions identified as social disorder and destabilisation created by the same home and bus economies. But precisely that takes me to the counter argument. There are basically two counter arguments to what I have been saying. The first one is that, yeah, the peasants may have a better livelihood, but they only get the crumbles of this global criminal economy, which is completely true. That's the problem. Let's say the counter argument to the counter argument is that no worker, no peasant, no human agent compares his possibilities and his menu of options to what could happen to what he really choose. And the second counter argument is that this boom and bust economy, this coca economy, has been very violent, which is completely true as well. But if you compare with the past of these regions, which experienced different connections, disconnections and reconnections with global markets through rubber, oil, cattle ranching, and marginally coffee, what you can see is that these connections and reconnections and these connections were very violent as well. The classic book on rubber in the Colombian Amazon is called Holocaust and the Amazons. Only to give you. And I would simply show some evidence. This is by an article of Margarita, Marine and Monica Pará, which will be published in January 2020 yesterday. I got the notice that it had been approved. They made a comparison using the survey that we did between the income of men and of women in the coca economy. Can you see not the difference? I can't think. It's basically the same. While the income in the main legal and primary economies is radically, radically different. So it's really substantially different. So this is a kind of glimpse to what I have spoken about the possibilities of social advancement. And here is the patterns of investment of coca growers. So the traditional story in boom and bust economies and in boom towns is that people start to spend all their money in prostitutes in alcohol, et cetera, et cetera, which was true for many of these weekends at the beginning, but it was an intergenerational shift. A strong intergenerational shift. People changed, their mentality changed. They got much more educated. They started to invest in legal economies as well. And then look, sorry for this being in Spanish. I forgot to put it into English. 52% of the people were investing, mainly investing in education. 80% on land, 18% on land, and the others in vehicles. So they were investing in different forms of social reproduction. Yeah, I'm just ending. So simply to synthesize, we could say that people in the coca economies are living at two levels, very tough trade-offs. One could say that at the micro level, at the household and individual level, they can scale the reproduction squeeze through accumulation. They can link to working markets, have a modest social advancement, and sorry, I have to take this out and have some connection with goods and markets. But on the other hand, they are exposed to illegality, social disorder, risks, and unpredictability. By the way, that's why they are interested still in processes of crops of situation. And then at the macro level, you would have sustainable familial agriculture against health and environmental damages, new forms of brokerage against exclusion, anxiety, and demand for recognition because these regions are massively tagged as illegal, dangerous, criminal, etc. etc. A positive regional economic spill overs, for example, over commerce, but at the same time costs huge costs of illegal regulation, and a generational transition against a very limited territorial rituals of the state ceiling to a workable statehood, etc. etc. So people are living into this and I would assert strongly that this is simply the mirror image. These very tough trade-offs are the mirror image of the mainstream agricultural developmental model, which is extending Colombia. Thanks. Okay, hi everyone. My name is Jasmine Batia, and I'm presenting work on Afghanistan, and specifically what I'm going to talk about today on Afghanistan is a small part of the research that we're conducting. So I'm going to focus in on one site of our research, and that site is Nimroz. So this province in red just here, that's Nimroz province, and it's not a province that gets a lot of attention or has got a lot of research over time. You often see other parts of Afghanistan that have had a lot more of attention in the past, and that's one of the things that we think is really interesting about it because it is a very interesting site. It's a site of great change and great, it's in flux at the moment and has been for the last, I would say, 20 years at least. The other thing that's very important to note about Nimroz is the border areas, and so if you look you can see it's bordering Iran on the western border and its southern border is with Pakistan, so it has two very important international borders. So that is part of what we're very interested in, looking at border crossings and Nimroz as a site of trade. And the other thing that is important for our research that isn't, and partly one of the reasons it isn't often looked at, is that it's not a major drug producing site but it is a major drug transit site, and so that is a little bit of a different lens that we're focusing on in Nimroz. So I just wanted to put up a few pictures so you can see, just get a sense of what the topography of Nimroz is like. As you can see it's very arid and it's very difficult to to grow things in a lot of the province. However there are some parts that are more kind of fertile than others and there has been a little bit of investment going in in the last 10 years to improve the agricultural capacity of the province. However having said that as you can see from the bottom, the main industry in Nimroz is trade, and so the major trade crossing with Iran is Zoranj, which is on the Iranian border. So we'll talk a lot about Zoranj because a lot of our research is focused in that area. So what I'm going to talk about now is just a little bit of the evolution of Nimroz in the last 20 years, and so it's evolution from this remote outpost to this frontier boom town, which kind of shows the changing landscape of Nimroz. And so its location is very far from Kabul, so for those of you who know Afghanistan, Kabul is more on the eastern side of the country. And so historically, I mean it's been very inaccessible. It's very difficult to get there. There hasn't been a lot of infrastructure to make transport very easy or accessible. It's been mainly through desert until very recently. And so what that meant was that engagement with the Afghan state was very limited, so you know the government in Kabul felt very far away. And also I think another point of note is that you could say it's a fugitive landscape, so it was a place because it was still remote that a lot of, say, insurgent groups like the Look Nationalist would take refuge. And so it's kind of like the Wild West. You can think of it that way. It's a place that's also very deeply affected by regional geopolitics and particularly by Iranian politics. And so I'm just giving a couple of examples how, like what happens in Iran has a big effect on Nimroz. So US sanctions, for example, increase incentives for smuggling USD and also smuggling of fuel. And of course border closures also negatively impact livelihoods in border towns in Nimroz. And so when those borders close or they get tighter, which happens from time to time, it affects the livelihoods of people living in Nimroz. And so that's a bit of the history of Nimroz that it's been this kind of very remote province that hasn't gotten a lot of attention. But recently it's become increasingly important as a geopolitical trade hub for both listed goods and illicit goods. And so I just want to reference one recent development, which was a trade deal between India, Iran and Afghanistan, which has accelerated a lot of the volume of trade through Nimroz. And this boom and trade has gone hand in hand with large investments in infrastructure and public services. And along with that, so illicit trades such as drug trading and human trafficking have also flourished in recent years. And so the human trafficking kind of has been going on for a very long time. But the volume of it I would say in the last four or five years has increased a lot, partly due to the fact that people who have been migrating to Iran, but also hoping to migrate to Europe as well. And so the volume of that has increased over the last few years. And I would say in the last two or three years has gone back down a little bit as well. And the other kind of development that is quite important to think about over the last few years is the growth of the insurgency in Nimroz. So Nimroz isn't historically a stronghold for the Taliban or a place where they had huge presence. But in the last few years what's happened is the Taliban have started to make inroads in Nimroz. And I think that some of the quotations that we'll get into a little bit later in the presentation we'll start to illustrate why that is. So at the moment they now control or contest quite a bit of the area of Nimroz, including some of the major trading hubs and trading sites. Although I would say the capital of Zaranja is still very much under government control. And so what I'm going to just post here is just a few quotations from some of the life histories that we've done in Nimroz. And so what we tried to do with these life histories is ask people with some knowledge of kind of a long-term knowledge of political developments in Nimroz to talk about their life experience and what they've observed over time. And so some of these individuals can tell you, like as you can read for yourself, that they've seen some positive changes happen in the last 20 years. And so this individual, for example, who's an education manager from Kang province, can tell you, you know, my life has changed for the better. My daughter is a teacher and she's getting paid. I have a salary as well. We have access to facilities such as telephones, internet, televisions, and we're using them. We are connected to the world. This is a very positive development for us. And so you can say for, you know, a province that's been historically remote that these changes help people feel more connected to family, to each other. So it facilitates those social cohesion. Also, an electrician and trader aged 67 from Kang province, the residents of Geron City have become wealthier. Some are involved in narcotics. Some have opened up shops in the city and some have jobs in government. And this individual as well, he says, you know, my sales went higher. There were more development programs, more construction, people were buying my materials. So my economic well-being got a lot better. And so I think this is something that we found in our interviews quite frequently, the sense that, okay, things have really changed in this province for the better from an economic standpoint. But of course these changes have come at a cost. And and so these are just a few testimonials about what's changed that some people feel a little bit more ambivalent about. So one thing that we noticed in our interviews was that there's a sense of growing inequality and also this sense of kind of predatory local governance. So for example, the first individual, the wealthy people in Nimro's province are living in Zuran City. The majority of these people are jihadi commanders, government officials, landlords and drug traders. And so the cost of land has just gone, it's skyrocketed in Zuran City. And so there is this concentration of very rich people. And a lot of people kind of feel left out of that. This is another quotation from another individual that addressed, we asked our respondents about what they thought were the causes of the Taliban insurgents coming into Nimro's. And his point of view was that, you know, one of the reasons was he attributed it to the corruption in the government. So the government's involved in bribery. They interfere in everything that poor people do. And he was saying, you know, the Taliban don't do that. They provide protection. We don't have to necessarily pay them a lot of bribes compared to the government. And that makes them more attractive. And so we heard this kind of again and again in the interviews that we conducted. And finally, I'm just going to quote from, we did a couple of interviews with people engaged in human trafficking. And I think the social norms are quite different when it comes to human trafficking when you compare it to say something like drug trafficking. With human trafficking, it was a lot more ambivalent. And you can see from this individual, for example, you know, he gave a testimonial about some of his migrants being kidnapped along the way. There was a lot of kind of insecurity for those individuals. And what he said was, I know this business is wrong, but there are no other work opportunities. And therefore, I have to do this business to provide for my family. And so, yes, he's better off economically, but there, you know, he has this kind of ambivalence about, you know, the insecurity and the moral kind of implications of what he's doing. And so what I wanted to do here was just kind of highlight that there is a lot of change in numerals. You do have this frontier room town where a lot is going on, but there's also a cost to that socially and also economically as well in terms of growing inequality. And so what does that imply? So one of the things that we want to explore a little bit more that's starting to come out of the research is this sense of that there is a differentiation between different levels of state, of the state and how the citizens perceive that. And so it seems from the research that there's a strong demand for central state involvement in the provision of public services, in the provision of infrastructure, all of that is quite popular, but people often explore at the local level their interactions with government officials are very predatory. They're not getting a lot of help, they're not getting a lot of security, they're not getting much out of those individuals at all. And so that's actually undermining state legitimacy you could say to some extent. And so, you know, there's a trader here that you can read his quotation that, you know, they don't, they expect that. They're very happy with the central government, but they don't expect much from the provincial government. And also I think, as I've alluded to before, there's this disillusionment with growing inequality in numeros and particularly in Zoran City. And so this individual could, he kind of sums it up this way. Drug traders and government officials involved in this business have also become wealthy, but poor people are getting poorer by the day. So this is kind of the situation and the impressions that we got from our initial round of research. And just to finish off very quickly, so this first round of research, it raises a lot of questions and a lot of implications that we hope to explore some more. One of the things that we are seeing in the research is that the fieldwork underlines complexities of emerging frontier boom towns. There's an agglomeration of different types of trades and networks. So you have state and non-state actors and listed and illicit trades that are all attracted to this boom town. And what we want to do with this initial round of research is we want to understand more about how shifts in political authority and shifts in border controls impact listed and illicit trades, as well as the underlying development processes that are implied by that. And one of the things that we want to look at in more detail is the crucial role of brokers. And you can see this very deeply throughout our research that rent extraction occurs as goods cross between different regulatory zones. And but while this is facilitating trade and development, there's rent extraction and control of trading networks is often linked to very high levels of violence. And so that's something else that we'd like to look for a little bit more deeply in the research. But that's where I'll leave it for now and let Jonathan sum up. Thank you. So I'll be brief so we can go moving to questions. But to a few implications, I mean, first of all, one of the themes that's coming out of our research, and there's a question here about whether what we are seeing in Myanmar, Colombia, Afghanistan is our process of drug field development. And these borderland spaces are high risk but high opportunity environments. They're places of transformation, of disturbance, of reconfiguration. They're places in kind of shampterian terms of creative destruction. And we think perhaps that drugs, I mean, but there's a can here. I don't think it's necessarily a straightforward connection. But what we see from the case is that drugs can be an accelerant. They can initiate new rounds of accumulation. They can lead to forms of peripheral capitalism that have very visible transformative effects. Think of the desert spaces of Helmand or the rainforest of the Amazon basin being turned into new colonisation schemes and fueled by drug production. As Francisco said, they draw illicit drugs from providing escape routes. They provide an escape route or form of resistance to the reproduction squeeze. Perpeasants in Afghanistan or in Colombia or in Myanmar, it gives them access to land and give them access to credit. It gives them access to inputs. So in lots of ways, we see drugs providing a vehicle or an avenue for social advancement, social mobility. And in the case, certainly it puts a mile, investment in public goods, investment in roads, infrastructure, in education, in health service and so on. We can also see how the drug economy is helping produce frontier boom towns, whether in Musee or Zirange. And these places become export enclaves, where you get these agglomerations or clusters of illegality, where we're talking about the casinos, prostitution, the drug trade on the borderlands of China. But also it's linked very much and very embedded in, as Patrick has shown, in the listed economy and in governance mechanisms in these frontier areas. Drugs provide the investment capital, the startup capital that's shunted into forms of extraction, whether it's the jade industry in Myanmar, Cachin State, for example. So certainly what we're seeing is not development in reverse. What we're seeing, in many ways, is actually existing developments. And as Francisco has argued, in Colombia drugs are the alternative development. But that's not to say it's a simple relationship. It takes different forms in different contexts and it comes with major and very tough trade-offs. These trade-offs are affecting borderland populations in very kind of stark and very, very visible ways. One thing that we certainly want to study more in next rounds of research is this relationship between drugs and inequality. We have a hunch that this relationship changes in wartime and peacetime. We have a hunch it differs when we're talking about production or trafficking or drug use. And we also think it's going to be different when we're talking about methamphetamines, coca, heroin or opium. So there's a set of questions and issues there. We want to develop and explore further. Also drug economies have major distributional effects and it varies according to gender, according to age, according to class, according to location. We find a particularly interesting area to explore further is the intergenerational effects. We've seen in Colombia intergenerational learning. In Myanmar we see the intergenerational costs, the costs of drug use are very much borne on the youth. And we see that drugs economies are linked very much to informal brokeries, as Jasmine has mentioned. Drug producers are involved in the illicit economy. They need brokers to make those relationships to the illicit. They need brokers to represent their needs and interests. And this leads to very often arbitrary forms of governance. And finally, as we said, drugs are linked to violence in lots of different forms. The slow violence, the drug use, the coercive enforcement and drug programs, the arbitrary violence of non-state or state actors. So what we're not seeing really in these borderlands is a water peace transition. What we're seeing is protracted and chronically violent places and open-ended interregnum, if you like. And this leads us to the last point of going back to anxiety and neglect. And this question about the governance of borderlands. We are questioning the James Scott narrative, who we're a great admirer of his work, but his work on the art of not being governed. He presents the borderlanders as people who are barbarians by design. They seek to remain illegible to the state. They seek to evade the state forms of control of taxation of numeration. But what we're actually finding is the opposite of the James Scott thesis. We're finding actually state actors have an interest in continued liminality of these borderland spaces. They are places of opportunity where they can extract resources and rapid accumulation. And conversely, borderlanders want more state, not less. They want to make themselves more legible to the state, so they can make claims upon that state. Well, they want more state, but on very different terms. And I think that's something that we want to explore here further. It's about the art of being governed, not the art of not being governed. And I'll finish that. Thank you very much to the whole panel. And I would like to open up the discussion to the audience. We'll take a round of questions and then the panel will have the chance to respond. And then hopefully, I'm sure we'll have more questions. So we'll take another round after that. So if you put your hand up, if you'd like to ask a question, and we have mics, so our roving mics will come to you. Hello, my name is Gabriella. I'm doing the Master in Violence Conflict in Development here at Solas. And my questions for Francisco. I wanted to know if there is any initiative, like legal initiative in the Congress of Colombia or any other sense, to stop the war on drugs in Colombia. Because I'm from Brazil and I know, like I'm from Rio de Janeiro and I know I see daily how, I used to see daily how the war on drugs affects especially black population in our country. And I would like to know if there is anything happening in the Congress to make this project that you mentioned here in practice. Because illegality remains a problem in our countries and maybe we can fight alternatives. Hi, yeah. I wonder if some of the panelists could talk about the international dimensions of the drugs trade, because obviously the focus is on borderlands, borderland drug producing and drug transit regions, but obviously as international commodities linked with consumer markets, mainly in kind of core regions of the world, consumer markets in the global north. Yeah, it would be interesting to hear about what are the implications for these kind of marginal producer and transit regions of the links between those consumer markets. And yeah, I'm repeating myself now, so I'll stop. So, one down here, and then... Hi, Emanuele here. I found very interesting. Can you speak a bit more? Okay, so Emanuele, I found the juxtaposition of human traffic and drug traffic very interesting, because in my opinion there are two very different markets. I think full-flown capitalistic market on the drug side, taking up economic development that perhaps governments were unable to start off. Whereas on the human traffic I think we're at the range of extraction, as you said. Do you see any other similarities other than just the fact that they are in the same place, because they seem to me very different things and potentially human traffic being ruled by completely different incentives and interests and potentially getting very nasty. Thank you. We had one up there behind you. Hi, good evening. I'm David from Mexico. Actually it was very interesting to see a let's say as a very free type of capitalism, as a market actually. Also I would like to know if you consider in your study the negative speed-overs like of this kind of market, like this alternative model, naming a whip on traffic or corruption for institutions or black economy, because well, okay, you have as a separate way these border communities, but then they have negative speed-overs. They also have good speed-overs. I would like to know your opinion of the negative ones. What will happen to the conscious system as a whole actually? Thank you. I was very pleased with all the presentation and I was curious about whether you get all the numbers, because since those are very informal and sometimes illegal markets, where do you get the numbers? I am curious about that. The other thing is that it's a very tough question to ask, but of course we gain a lot on transforming anything in tradeable goods, in marketable goods, but I mean I have no problems with transforming drugs and legal goods, but when it came to human traffic, I felt like some attic problem regarding this. At the same time, do we really want that all development that we are supporting is to be held on the basis of this very unequal and very ingest capitalist basis? This is the contradiction that I'm seeing in those arguments in this sense. Okay, should we take one more just behind? My name is Paul and I also do development studies in LSC. The topic is quite interesting, but I'm going to ask a question more about the methodology side, because your presentation is about interviews. It's kind of a common methodology in anthropology, and I want to know more about other methodologies when we're doing this kind of like danger conflict research, especially I know Dr Patrick just came back from Merymor two days ago. Do you have any suggestions if other people also want to do this kind of dangers? Yes, dangerous research or drug policy, this kind of thing. Do you have any like methodologies recommendations there? Thank you. Okay, we have six, seven questions, so I think I'll just hand over to the panel to address whichever ones they feel they want to in turn, and then we'll take another round after that. Thank you. You have to put it on, otherwise it doesn't work here. So regarding the legalization issue, there was a certain movement forward in all Latin America, especially during the Obama times, so we had the legalization of a marijuana sector, so now we have a legal marijuana sector, which is doing relatively well under a lot of restrictions, et cetera, et cetera, but I do not predict any further advance in view of the positions of both the Colombian and the US government in this moment. Basically it's that. Regarding the negative spillovers, yeah, I was making a case where I put emphasis on the other side, but the negative spillovers are massive and people feel them in a very acute fashion, so on the one hand you have the impossibility of a legal state's regulation of this economy, so then you have to rely on other types of regulation, which are hugely costly, start with that. In second place, you don't have courts when you have a difference about the allocation of goods, so this can erupt into violence, so you have the standard costs plus the issue of disconnection, yeah, of disconnection from a lot of legal services, so when we speak about trade-offs, we take let's say seriously the negative and the positive aspects, both of them. The gist of the trap, because in a sense this is a trap, is that both the positive and negative dimensions or the good and bad spillovers stem from the very illegality of the business. I will give you just one example. Colombia has a huge problem with monocrups, for example, olive oil or cattle ranching, yeah, you don't have or you, and this we are demonstrating quantitatively, you hardly have monocrups in the context of coca farming. Why? Because people have to rely in other crops because they know they will be fumigated, so they are doing, they have very good practices but for the wrong reasons, yeah, so when we speak about trade-offs, the issue is to put into question also mainstream development and show the interconnections between mainstream development and this alternative form of development, not to show that it's kind of paradesiac or rosy. Yeah. The third and last issue I would address is about the methodology and the numbers. So of course it's difficult to have numbers here. We have access to numbers, we in Colombia have access to three types of sources on the one hand in-depth interviews and on the second hand we have access to databases coming from the substitution program that the state set up after the peace process. So we have major databases and then for example we can evaluate the patterns of land tenure etc etc, which has been very positive for us and third we use a source that was key for us in terms of perception etc, which is a survey, a survey we were able to set up with coca growers that participated in the program of land of crops substitution. Hi, so I just want to take up that a couple of questions about the distinction between human trafficking and drug trafficking that came up in our research and so you know our project is you know drugs and disorder project and so this is something that kind of came out inductively as we were in Nimro is you know it's just something that's that's quite significant there and not as much in some of the other areas that we're researching but it is interesting to kind of bring it out and so on the question of the difference between the two I mean maybe what I think is really interesting is the question you brought up about is are there any similarities beyond the fact that these things take place in the same kind of area and I think they're it's very interesting because I think there is a perception in law enforcement certainly that these networks are all interrelated so for example that people believe that oh these human you know these human trafficking networks are also just they're on top of human trafficking they're they're sending people with drugs and they're using this as a as a means to traffic drugs around and what we found kind of on a very preliminary basis and I don't feel at this stage like ready to make any kind of conclusive claim about it because we don't have strong evidence yet but it seems that in fact those at least from the information we have those networks are distinct and that they work in different ways so for example one thing we heard that was interesting was that human trafficking networks that are suffered are more likely to be to collaborate with each other than than drug trafficking networks and so that was just you know something that was interesting that was that that came up in the research and so this is something we want to explore a little bit more to understand a little bit more about those dynamics but that was kind of the initial impression that came out but there is certainly a stereotype that those networks are all kind of the same those criminal you know criminal networks are involved in the same kind of thing and in fact it doesn't seem to be the case and I would also say that I did notice um just from a you know a small sample that there's a difference in moral norms in the community so that there's a greater kind of discomfort with the idea of human trafficking than there is um from the idea of drug trading for example and so that's something that that came out in the research however I would say in terms of similarities you could say maybe the motive for people to get involved is kind of similar in that it's about economic security or improving economic security and so that is maybe something to consider as well so what are the motives for people to get involved in the first place are how do people end up in that kind of network or how do they move in and out of those networks so you know those are just some some initial impressions that came out of the research but certainly I think it's a valid question to bring up and something we'd like to explore a lot more okay I'll take up a couple of the other questions that haven't been talked about yet firstly a Niall's question around the international dimensions around the drug economy and I think for the sake of time in this presentation we kind of zoomed in on the particular experiences within these borderland regions but these are obviously intimately connected to wider global economies both legal and illegal so one of the things that's particularly stark in the Myanmar case is that the ongoing production of drugs in this area is associated with ongoing and expanding markets for drugs that have also shifted that you've seen quite a distinct shift in the markets for opium and other drugs historically within Myanmar we're going out to Bangkok, Hong Kong, right across to the US and to Europe far more of that market is now simply across the border within China so that one of the key drivers of ongoing drug production in these regions is the fact that there's a continuing large market for these issues and my sense is that what that has led to a realisation is the difficulty of tackling and stopping drug production from the state's perspective so from a central government perspective in these areas the ability to actually curtail the drug economy in these areas of contested authority where you have very large international markets is quite limited so what the priority has been has been trying to rework the power structures within those drug economies to try to channel more of those revenues to groups that are either in ceasefires or normally aligned with the state rather than fueling ongoing resistance against the the state so you see this interesting kind of movement of rather than trying to actually stop drug production simply trying to shift who benefits from that drug production and this is particularly stark in Myanmar's case where you've had quite effective reductions in drug production in China in the 1940s 1950s in Thailand through the 70s 80s and 90s that these regions of Myanmar are one of the few areas where drug production can continue to flourish and I think that helps to explain why these have become areas not only of opium production but also methamphetamine and crystal meth production that it's linked to the governance structures that have been established here and without wanting to go into it in too much depth I think linking back to kind of the idea that we're trying to develop here in terms of a borderland perspective that you see the success stories of drug reduction in China in Thailand but part of that story is the move across borders of increasing drug production within Myanmar itself so you have these kind of flagship success stories of drug reduction especially in Thailand is often kind of portrayed as the big success story but that looks a success story from a nation state perspective of reducing levels within Thailand itself it becomes quite a different picture when you see the sort of spillover effect into other areas just very quickly on Peng's question around methodologies I think we this presentation was more about trying to set out some of the key thinking and arguments we're developing in the project rather than getting into the actual nuts and bolts of how the project is operating itself but one of the key things that's been very noticeable for me moving from a PhD student trying to look at these issues into a much bigger funded project on this is the ability to work with local partner organisations that there is a huge it's still extremely risky and very challenging work but the opportunities to work with research partners that are based in these borderland areas who know these networks extremely well has opened up you know a much kind of richer and more in-depth set of research opportunities and field work chances and finally around that linking with one of the other partners that's in the room Ausis that another aspect of the field work that we're trying to do is link the on the ground field work with also what we can learn from satellite imagery analysis so one of the interesting aspects that's come out of just spending time with the partners over the last couple of weeks is the information that they are generating on border towns on the Myanmar China border and the shift between when certain borders get shut down and the the multitude of illicit border crossings between China and Myanmar and what's also coming out from the the analysis from the satellite imagery is also looking at the changes over the last 10 years of cross border kind of networks and the changing infrastructure around this so we're still it's still a work in progress but i think beginning to put those two together and ground truthing some of what comes out of the satellite imagery and then going back to the satellite imagery and saying what can you show from kind of some of these emerging insights from the field work is another interesting methodology that we're trying to develop and we're still grappling with. It's a cunning plan to be the last one so all the questions have been answered so just three things that I don't think have been addressed but I suppose that a very obvious point is that in terms of data there's few areas of public policy in which there's such a mismatch between the quality of the data and the the predominant policy responses and so what we're seeing in drugs is what we've talked about as policy driven evidence rather than evidence driven policy it's highly politicised it's highly reliant on UNO's DC data and it's really flawed. The other thing another thing to say is that we haven't touched on is about ethics and security of research and researchers and research subjects you know we're doing research on very obviously very sensitive issues in very difficult circumstances we're working with research partners who are exposing themselves to a lot of risk and so we're having we've been having an ongoing discussion throughout this research about our ethical protocols security protocols what data we share how we anonymise our data when we publish how do we what can we publish when we talk about this first round of research what can we present now to audiences like you and so we don't endanger our researchers when we go into another round of research so there's there's an ongoing dialogue around security risk and ethics which is you know which is is a very kind of it creates anxiety and certainly not like neglect then the final point in relation to Niall's question another area that we're looking at in the research is international interventions so you know some of these spaces are kind of hyper militarised interventionary spaces in which we've got your counterinsurgency going on alongside alternative development alongside harm reduction alongside peace processes and we're doing ethnographies of organisations and programmes to understand and to look at the complex entanglements between the different layers of these interventions they get broken through different mediators they look very different when they hit the ground and they're certainly they become part of the political economy of these these drug environments so that's that's one of the aspect of the of the research that we haven't touched upon today thank you um i think we'll take another round a final round of questions so if you put your hand right up and we'll try and get everything out so we'll start here thank you for your insightful talks um i was wondering if your research had or shows anything about the role of the state um because obviously it's portrayed as legal but i'm wondering if they also benefit and that they have an interest in upholding these structures of the drugs industry thank you thank you and then there's one over here hi everyone i'm scott newton from the school of law here um terrifically provocative presentations all and a wonderful conceptual framework that jonathan presented at the end subversive and destabilising um and jonathan knows that i love to destabilise from the perspective of the law right i a acute case of the of the hammer syndrome everything i see and my hammer is is is legal critique so everything i see is a nail um and i wanted to throw one potentially further destabilising factor into the hopper here and that's informality and the relation between formality and informality and development right because you presented the sort of dominant hegemonic idea of development um and one important strand of that is the idea that development is formalization the incorporation of everyone and everything into formalized and regulated space um and i think bit of what of all sorts of people but disoto comes to mind they're not no disoto's ideas that you know problems that rights and status are informal they need to be formalized um and i'm just wondering you know how you respond to that how that plays into your your your your your general theory here and if i since i threw out disoto and you brought in scott at the end let me suggest that disoto and scott operate with the same problematic spatialization because they both have an outside at an inside and for disoto everybody needs to come outside from informality inside and for scott everybody needs to stay outside but the fact is there is no outside because you know the relation of informality to formality is relational in your terms not residual so the law enables all sorts of things that it doesn't authorize so what when you throw formality and informality into the question here what do you do with them thank you uh this this question you just need to speak right into it hello this question is also for um francisco it's about um for me if i think about the illegal areas that are alternative uh development in colombia medellin would be the poster child of like my thinking for that so are the themes that you guys are talking about now the same kind of themes of how alternative development has come about by this different kind of money coming in or is it really affected more or uh impacted by the intervention of international actors and and aid um and the ramifications of the priest the peace process and what is or is it not being implemented okay we have two hi first personally thank you very much for that presentation um my question is on kind of the role if you've looked to the role that migrants and refugees play in this research because obviously all three of these countries have a huge flow of migrants and refugees um specifically kind of either the role they've played in this borderland these new sites of production or the other way around how these kind of borderlands have infected uh these refugees for example in colombia um i know that a lot of the violence around the borderland is now being blamed on venezuelan refugees migrants coming into the country so i guess i was just curious about that yeah i just want to echo um thank you for a fantastic presentation um i think i'm curious um in your research if it seems like um decriminalisation of drugs or um legalisation of drugs in the major consumption uh countries if you think that will have any impact on the sites you're researching or if that impact would be negligible sorry it's been a long day um and then i have a question for um patrick um i think um like hearing about the use of amphetamines and the use of um drugs and like the extractive industries is really interesting i was wondering if um like thinking about china's um one built one road project and thinking about lots of other major major infrastructure projects um that are either happening now or um going to happen in the future um if you see um kind of a spread of those practices of drug usage and then working so there's one just at the very back there oh thank you for the presentations and can somebody comment on this assertion that borderland populations seek more state not less um it's it sounds very interesting for me and knowing for example china's indian border a bit i know that um the space of um well a population there are very used to ambiguity and there are self identifications were changed by the state and the space for freedom the possibilities to get the best from the both both sides of the border were limited and actually disappeared so thanks to two states so it's very interesting for me okay i think we'll go back to the panel and perhaps we can go in the same order um take the same questions and jonathan can finish so if you want to answer the questions and add any closing comments you might have perfect thanks so so um regarding i want to comment about the informality formality divides because this is lived in columbia in a very literal manner after after the peace process there was a lot of debate about what to do with peasants who were involved in the coca crops so the solution that the state provided was formalization basically because their land was hugely informal and that's why probably the probably there has not not been the concentration that you see in other cases but then people are very ambiguous i think this is the third keyword ambiguity because they feel that formalization can precisely trigger a massive land concentration etc etc but at the same time they need formalization to have access to legal credit so so so once again a tough situation so so in some cases at least at least in columbia this formality informality divide is is lived quite literally at least related to some specific policies regarding meginia you're completely right but i think it's these things are lived in a radically different manner to to answer you seriously i would have to think more about the question but for example all the let's say the labor that works in coca crops in putumayo and tomaco many of them are migrant workers coming from other regions of columbia or from ecuador and the weight of the labor market in the coca economy is huge while in megin you don't see the same effect megin is quite developed city etc etc so though the economies the drug economies impacted both regions in in very heavy ways the paths were fundamentally different i would have to i would have to think about how to characterize the differences and similarities so so sorry i can't ask sorry respond immediately and the third and last comment would be about migrants and refugees i would want to stress this because i only dedicated a sentence to the issue the putumayo and tomaco regions have been successively connected to different boom and bust economies and we with very violent economies by the way with massive use of coercive labor of course labor so in in in a sense let's say this is a this is simply an additional round of capital accumulation as janathan said in his conclusion but it and the additional round with a lot of specificities on the one hand you have a you have massive illegality which you didn't see with rubber with with cattle ranching etc but on the other hand do you see only marginally you see but you see only marginally the presence of course labor you have it when the guerrillas in the paramilitaries force people yeah so some forms of coercion but but basically in one can argue that it it took place in the margin yeah it orders saying you have to you have to sell me the coca production and we have to engage in coca production but this was in the margin this was mainly driven by international forces and links between these regions directly links between these regions and global markets so once again there's a different difference between those rounds of capital accumulation in this one and I think it would be quite interesting to pinpoint the differences between these different forms of capital capital accumulation and the links the type of link of these regions with global markets in in each case uh so I'll touch on a few questions that came up that I think are probably most relevant though that probably all of them are I could talk for a while but the on the issue of the role of the state I mean certainly there is overwhelming evidence not just from this project but in Afghanistan from you know several studies that or you know accounts that show pretty conclusively a lot of government involvement in the drug trade in various ways and including you know going all the way to the very top and including from you know from there all the way down so so it's quite pervasive and I think if you asked you know random people they would say you know it's it's quite common you hear that you know the Taliban are sorry the government are more involved in the drug trade than the Taliban are even though it's kind of something that's very much associated you know with the drug terror nexus literature so so certainly that's something that's that's very prevalent and it's kind of like almost an accepted fact at this point I would say the question is you know how to kind of move forward from that or what to do with that and I think that's just a reality that we have to work in that space as we as we work on the question that's a little bit related on I think from the back it was about do people want more state and I was hope I hope in the in the presentation on Nimroz it was it came across that I think there's a complex kind of relationship that people have with the state in that there is a demand certainly for public services and infrastructure and that that seems to be doing people a lot of good and so one of the other things that came out for example is that there's a lot more drinkable water that's come into Nimroz and and so certain things like that have certainly improved over time education opportunities for women I think there's a lot of accounts that we see of those kind of things and so when you're talking about what people's expectations are demands from the state when it's something along those lines then people tend to talk about it in a pretty positive way at least in Nimroz I mean if it's bad services then maybe that's a it's a different story but when it comes to the provision of security and justice in particular in Afghanistan I think that people really feel let down and are very frustrated and angry with what they are receiving from from most kind of in most areas of Afghanistan not just Nimroz or the other areas that we're looking at and so that's a big dilemma that people have is that they would really like to have you know a well-functioning state and what they're getting is is quite something that's very flawed and is very difficult to to live with with any kind of certainty and so that's that's kind of the observations that I could say in terms of what do people want or do people want more state I think the answer to that isn't really complicated I think it depends on what kind of state that the people that's available and then finally on the point of minors and refugees this is something you know certainly in the human trafficking side of things that's surely apparent but also I would say in a lot of the literature there is a link between migration and the spread of production that's something that's not necessarily from this project but we've observed in past projects as well and also I didn't talk about drug consumption but I did a project actually before this one that was looking at returnies from Iran and what what we found was a quite high prevalence of heroin use from people who had who had migrated to Iran to work and then had come back to Afghanistan and what they found I mean what we found in terms of what the impact was on their families was was quite tragic because they had sent you know their sons away to to Iran to earn money and when they came back they had none and then they also were you know quite in bad shape and they hadn't there was no kind of avenues for treatment or anything like that so so those are issues I mean it's not something I got into in this presentation but it's certainly something that's present in Nimroz and in other parts of the country and so so those issues of migration certainly plays a huge role. Hi I'll try to sort of link together a response to the question around the state involvement in drugs and also linking that with the question about Chinese investments on One Belt One Road and how especially that links with the China Myanmar economic corridor which is a key part of One Belt One Road. I think in terms of thinking through the relationship between the state and illegal economies it's always important to emphasise that the state is not monolithic that you have multiple different you know parts within the state and you also have actors who have both their state hat on at sometimes and then their sort of private hat on at the other times. You know Myanmar's borderlands you have the military you have civilian government you have formal government departments you then have all of these array of actors that I briefly touched upon in the presentation these forms of militias that are officially acknowledged by the state you know it's acknowledged in the constitution that militias are a part of government strategy but they're not part of the formal state so there's a lot of sort of very grey areas and I think one of another part of the project that we're trying to do is break down some of these binaries between the illegal and the legal between the state and the non-state that as soon as we get into the realities of these areas there's a whole array of sort of grey there that doesn't easily fit into these and I think when we look at the relationship between the state and illicit economies at least in what we've been looking at in Myanmar that you know it's problematic to claim that drugs are only happening in areas beyond state control that this is simply not an accurate representation of the spread of drug issues that what I tried to convey in the presentation was that these drug-affected borderland areas have come under increasing forms of militarized state building and state consolidation and yet drugs have continued to grow and to be a part of that story but at the same time some of the language around narco-states is also very problematic that it suggests a very coherent centralized system of state control over illicit economies which I think simply doesn't exist in these areas a lot of the time that forms of statehood in these areas are often crucially negotiated or mediated that statehood is built on trying to broker coalitions between formal government and localized systems of authority whether that is groups that were formerly insurgent groups that have now signed ceasefires or militia organisations that continue to retain significant control over local populations and resources that efforts to consolidate control and to open up these areas for development are based on forms of negotiation often between state and sort of non-formal actors and what we're seeing is that often illegal economies are key to those forms of negotiation that they provide a particularly kind of privilege space for forms of brokerage based on the fact that the state can offer quite credible threats in terms of eradication punishment prosecution but also opportunities around access to the legal economy forms of protection and impunity so you see this negotiation of illegality being quite an important part of these forms of mediated statehood and linking that to the one about one road initiative that I think what is fascinating here especially in this context that we're looking at is that there's an attempt to try and push quite ambitious and dramatic changes through these borderland areas whether they actually ever come to fruition or not remains to be seen but you know you have attempts to build this major railway that will link the China border all the way down to Mandalay and Yangon that you have efforts to establish this corridor that will link the China border through central Myanmar across to Bangladesh and have those links and these ambitious development projects are being built through areas that are still very volatile that are still fragile where you may have a degree of stability that has enabled these areas to open up but you certainly don't have a stable peace there and what you've seen is that the stability that has enabled these kinds of development projects to happen has been built on very sort of incremental ad hoc pragmatic agreements between the state private investors and armed groups militias and I think what you're seeing here is that this has left quite a difficult legacy but there's also a reluctance to unpick that that it does provide a degree of stability you know that the main roads that now link the border to central Myanmar most of the time they do stay open but that is based on a whole array of different armed groups that sort of have checkpoints along that so um there's a sort of reluctance to unpick this whole array of informal setup that enables forms of development to happen but it's quite problematic in terms of the legacies that that has then left and the kinds of foundations that these ambitious strategies are being built on but maybe I'll finish the I don't know about you but I'm ready for a drink so I'm going to be here I'm going to be quick and and Scott well I'll come back to your question a minute but I think that's several drinks the the question about you know do borderland communities want more or less state and it is a I'm very aware that we we should be aware about generalising these things but the the borderlands that we're looking at are places that have experience protracted very violent conflicts so I think there's a particular perspective that's coming out of borderland communities in that environment you know they've been subjected to multiple forms of violence the retreat of the state or a state that rules through what we call despotic violence rather than through infrastructural power you know it's it's coercive it's raw it rules for intermediaries and you know a common refrain coming from communities in these places is we feel abandoned and we'd like a state that is responsive to our needs that provides the the public goods that it does in other parts of the country and I can see also you know that may be different in in more stable settings where if you like there's this double vision of borderlands where communities are playing the system on both sides and they they benefit from that state so you know we're coming from a particular particular point of view on that Scott um I can't answer your question adequately but I think there's we don't see a clear inside and outside a clear you know formal and informal you know we're interested in the relationships between informality you know legal pluralism hybridity and formal systems in a way that there's a a symbiotic relationship between them you know the formal relies on upon these and so we are interested in Benton's work and for example and a whole range of other people who explore these these types of questions and one thing that we didn't talk much about but touched upon today was brokerage and that's we see that as a really interesting lens for instance if we were looking at these processes that you know the link between illicit formal informal how people mediate try and address problems but never resolve them and constantly kind of try and occupy these synapses as gatekeepers and so on the second thing just to finish off is we're looking at this kind of literature on frontiers and particularly Christian Lund's work who who looks at these these kind of these processes going on at the same time yet they seem contradictory on the one hand there's a state attempts to enclose and territorialize space to draw clear boundaries to regularize relationships you know to make the society legible and on the other hand there's these opening up of new frontiers these moments of rupture and where there's mobility there's fluidity there's unruly kind of processes of contestation and the two are connected in lots of interesting ways the opening of frontiers and the closing down of frontiers and there's there's cyclical and we think by actually looking at the moments of rupture we might find some you know that may help us explore these contradictions that are going on in these kinds of spaces thank you very much and we would like to invite you all to continue the conversation in a small reception in the scr which is on the first floor um or or just come and join us for a drink and some nibbles um and just remind you all that next week's seminar which is the final seminar of the term will be with Milford Bateman and Penelope Hawkins from microcredit evangelism to digital utopianism the unstoppable rise of the global microcredit industry but before we leave I'd just like to thank the panelists Jonathan Patrick Jasmine and Francisco very much for their presentations and all of you feel contributions