 Fy oes fel ddweud o'r adnodd y maen nhw'n gwahod am y cyfrifio'r pwysig hefyd, Jaime Le Mercier. One more round, please. I would like to warmly welcome all of you, particularly those who have travelled a long way to be here. A very special welcome to Professor Jonathan Goodhans, friends, families and colleagues. Thank you also to those from other institutions who have joined us because a SOAS inaugural is very special. It's a celebration and an enjoyable intellectual event for the whole SoAZ community. This is the third of this year's inaugural lecture series. Professor David Hume will introduce Professor Goodhan tonight. David is Professor of Development Studies at the University of Manchester, where he is Executive Director of the Global Development Institute. Formerly, the Brooks World Poverty Institute and the Institute for Development Policy and Management. He's also CEO of the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre. He's also President of the Development Studies Association of the United Kingdom and Ireland. David has worked on rural development, poverty and poverty reduction, microfinance, the role of NGOs in development, environmental management, social protection and the political economy of global poverty for more than 30 years. He has worked extensively across Bangladesh, South Asia, East Africa and the Pacific. His recent publications include books on global governance, poverty and development. Professor Christopher Cramer will deliver the vote of thanks. Chris is Professor of the Political Economy of Development at SoAZ in the Department of Development Studies. He's also a Vice-Chair of the Royal African Society and a former chair of the Centre of African Studies at the University of London. He leads on the Governance for Development in Africa programme which SoAZ runs with the support of the Moe Ibrahim Foundation. He's also the Chair of the Scientific Committee of the African Programme on Rethinking Development Economics which is based in South Africa. He's also involved with the International Advisory Group for a collaborative research programme in Colombia on land, inequality, war and peace which is linked to the ongoing peace talks in Havana and in 2000 he launched the MSC in Violence, Conflict and Development here at SoAZ. We are very grateful to both of them for being part of this evening's event. Please join us for the drinks reception upstairs in the Brunei suite at the conclusion of the lecture. And two final housekeeping points. Please do note where the fire exits are in case the alarm sounds. Many of you I hope will tweet during the lecture. I encourage you to do so but please make sure that your phones are in silent mode. To introduce Professor Goodhand I will now pass over to Professor Hume. Thank you. Good evening. It's a great honour and a joy to be able to introduce Professor Jonathan Goodhand to you tonight. It's an honour because Jonathan is a highly rated academic colleague whose work is of immense value. And it's also an honour because SoAZ is such a strong contributor to our understanding about development studies and about the ways in which the world is changing in Asia and Africa. It's a great joy because one of the compensations of being an aging academic is seeing your students do well. And Jonathan has done well and is doing very well. He was a master's student at the University of Manchester some years ago and subsequently a PhD student. I was trying to count but my counting is not as good as it used to be. It's not quite 25 years but I think my hair may have been black at the time when we first met. I'll go back a little bit into the history. As a master's student Jonathan stood out. He stood out in what was a vintage year. I've been looking back at the records and back in 91-92 we now have chairs from that group in Adelaide, Cairo, Daca and Tokyo. We've got senior positions at the World Bank, the UN and the DFID from that excellent cohort. But John stood out for two reasons. I mean the first one was academic ability. He got very high grades and showed great originality and great critical thinking in his work. But the second one was in his commitment and Jonathan hadn't come to Manchester to look for good grades. He was looking for knowledge that would help him understand how the world worked and that he could then apply to make the world a better place. Those of you who know Jonathan will know that he's a very modest person but his ambitions were extremely immodest. He was looking to get knowledge that would allow him to improve the lives of people living in some of the most difficult parts of the world to improve lives in. This desire to combine sort of deep analysis with practical action derived in part from his background. He had experience in East Africa as a volunteer. He'd worked in Afghanistan and on the Pakistan border in humanitarian work and also worked in Sri Lanka. I can remember back at the master's level at him talking and wanting to find frameworks that would help him understand whether taking sacks of used dollar notes on donkey caravans over the Pakistan-Afghan border for a major international NGO had actually made the world a better place or whether giving those sacks of dollars to the Muhajideen had actually created some of the problems which began to reveal themselves as the 1990s unfolded. John did very well in his master's degree and we were keen to keep him on at Manchester. At that time we had a major focus looking at the emerging role of NGOs in development and our focus was mainly on NGOs in stable environments and Jonathan had worked in what we would nowadays call fragile environments. We were also interested and Jonathan was interested in these issues looking at the increasing responsibilities and roles that were being allocated to NGOs. No longer were they simply to provide economic and social development but they were supposed to promote good governance, to promote democracy, to form civil societies, to strengthen social capital and a whole set of other grand goals and Jonathan had interest in these. Interestingly at that time these zones were referred to as areas where there were complex political emergencies. I think still the hangover that somehow these were short term emergencies that could somehow be overcome. The deep problems that would not easily be overcome were not fully recognised then. So with a tiny bit of support from me Jonathan actually did something very naughty. I'm sure his kids will be surprised at that, his children will be surprised at finding that. We couldn't find a PhD scholarship that matched his interest and so he designed a major research project for a leading aid agency and that but there was in the small print in that a little stipulation that it was not to be used for PhD studies and so I think when this proposal was being drafted somehow the fact that this might contribute to a PhD was neglected in the application. But as a result Jonathan took on a double workload and he more than delivered all the promises of the research project, he did the research, he created the data sets, produced the articles and produced a book from it but he also produced an excellent PhD out of that. For me it was fascinating as a PhD supervisor and as a co-investigator to be able to work on NGOs with Jonathan particularly to work in conflict zones and the project that he undertook looked at Afghanistan, Liberia and Sri Lanka and I think we're going to hear about Borderlands when Jonathan provides his lecture in a few minutes and it was Jonathan who actually introduced me to Borderlands. He took me to Eastern Sri Lanka and I found out probably most of what I know about Borderlands there. He had arranged for me to have a special visa as he had and we drove to a military checkpoint where we were checked over by armed guards and then we were waved through and moved into no man's land and after a couple of kilometres one could see trenches where there were child soldiers of the Tamil Tiger forces laying down with Kalashnikovs and grenades in case the Sri Lankan army decided to advance that day. A couple of kilometres further on we stopped at a school and met the representatives of the LTTE and negotiated with them access for our research and it was a rather surreal experience to formally sort of talking with two soldier bureaucrats about what our research goals were and what methods we were proposing to utilise but luckily they approved the project and we were allowed to move on there. It was during that study that Jonathan certainly showed to me some of the exceptional abilities and skills that he's got. He had to show real conceptual originality trying to compare the sort of rich empirical materials that came from those three case studies at times torturing himself to try and find a sort of conceptual framework that really would allow those materials to be analysed. He showed sort of extraordinary ability to conduct field work in the most difficult of environments. Real flour, real energy in that. It took real persistence to work in areas that were effectively no-go areas. There were no other researchers thinking of working certainly in these areas at that time. I used a whole set of very original techniques. I remember in one village Jonathan trying to use co-production techniques to look at the way in which natural resource use had changed as the conflict had deepened. In Afghanistan there were extraordinary efforts to train the husbands and brothers of women who were subsequently trained by those husbands and brothers and then chaperoned, but this was to ensure that in the work that we conducted in Afghanistan, despite many of the problems about gender equality, gross gender inequality in Afghanistan, this was to ensure that we could get access to women's and girls' voices and understand what was happening in those villages. There was also an incredible commitment to taking back the practical findings and a whole series of policy and practice seminars organised in Peshwar, Colombo, Monrovia and London. Jonathan also then showed his interest in capacity development. I thought it was foolish, but Jonathan managed to do it, but he took a Liberian and Afghan researchers with us to Sri Lanka. I can remember, I think it was about 45 minutes of negotiation it took him whilst he negotiated with the Sri Lankan authorities about why an Afghani and a Liberian were being brought in to discuss the Civil War in Sri Lanka, trying to explain why that was appropriate, but the visas came through. Fortunately for Jonathan he's also very tough. Any of you who have jogged with him or run with him or cycled with him will know how tough he is. He's a legend in my family. He fell off a mountain bike when we were mountain biking and I patched him up with a smaller plaster plaster and then we went home, but my seven-year-old daughter after she'd said hello to us, did run into my wife and said, mummy, mummy, mummy, why is that man bleeding on the floor? Jonathan was too polite to point out that the small dressing that I put was insufficient to stop the blood that was pumping out from this mountain bike accident that he had. He also showed himself very tough. He could sleep anywhere even when there were shelves going overhead. He could eat whatever was available and he was exposed to a whole set of problems that he coped with. So these characteristics, this conceptual rigor, this deep empirical curiosity, boundless energy and commitment and a desire to create knowledge and apply it practically, I think they highlight certainly his early years and they've continued from the work that he's produced at SOAS, on war economies, on looking at transitions from war to peace and on the most recent work looking at borderlands and I think we'll see those examined very carefully tonight. Jonathan has a very critical analysis and he always challenges often the common sense interventions which external agents have looked for in these difficult borderlands and I think we'll hear certainly about counter-narcotics and how what appears to be a sensible policy to stamp out drug production can sometimes create incentives that will actually increase demand for drugs and increase levels of production. But Jonathan always goes beyond that and he doesn't only look at those problems but he also says so what can we do differently? How can we make these things less damaging and or help improve these policies? I'll not delay things any longer but I think we've got a real tour de force tonight so can you please welcome Jonathan Goodhand who will be talking about straddling the link, brokers, drugs and conflict on the Afghan borderlands. Thank you very much. Thanks very much David. I knew you'd get the cycling accidents in this. It just occurred to me listening to David. One of the things that links David and Chris is we've all gone around cycling in Lycra together. So where do I find my house? Okay so good evening everybody. It's very nice to see you all. It's very nice to see family, my mother and father and my Danny and Lara and Tarni who have, I'm wondering whether they're going to be able to sit through 40 minutes of me waffling along but it's great to see them. It's really nice to see old friends from previous stages in my life to see colleagues here and also to see past students and current students. So thank you very much for coming tonight. First thing to say is that SARS is a very unique place and I'll be forever grateful for the fact that in 2001 somewhat to my surprise I was offered a position at SARS after my previous career as a teacher in aid work and policy analyst. I kind of fell into this. I knew very little about academia really at the time. I knew very little about SARS but the longer I've been here the more I've realised how lucky I was to land up here and it's a place I can honestly say that I'm very proud to be part of. So in today's talk I'm going to talk about borders boundary crossing and brokers in a sense becoming a professor involves crossing a border and a boundary. First to pursue this analogy further you have gatekeepers who say whether you're ready to cross the boundary yet or not. And like many other real life boundaries crossing can be deeply theatrical. It can be very choreographed and you only have to look at other border crossings around the world. You look at the Wagga this example here or if you think about initiation ceremonies which require brokers to help uninitiated across these liminal zones. Borders are very theatrical places and anyone who knows me with the SARS inaugural lecture is a kind of border crossing will know that this is not really my style. I'm not very happy in these things. I'm much happier. I may look just as stupid. I'm more happy in Lycra and I've in fact was a professor appointed three years ago and I was avoiding it for as long as I possibly could. However, I'm very grateful both to David and to Chris who, if you like, are my borderland brokers who are helping me across this through this celebration but difficult occasion at the same time. And I ought to say probably I wouldn't be able to cross this border if it hadn't been for their inspiration, advice and support over the years. Now, I'd like to say something about why I'm interested in borderlands and brokers and David has given a few hints about that. The formative experiences for me were my years as an aid worker and that goes back to working in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the International Rescue Committee working with, say, the Children Fund in Central Asia and working with Intrak in Central Asia. And all these places were going through very intense processes of de-bordering and re-bordering at the times I was there as a result of war making as a result of decolonisation as a result of state building. And to give you one vignette and sorry other students have heard me rabiting away about this in the past but for me a very important experience of stumbling on and stumbling across borders was going, as we called it, inside, into Afghanistan as an aid worker and this involved repeated visits going across and negotiating multiple borders both the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan but also internal borders between tribal areas and settled areas and then across a whole moseg of complex boundaries between different merger-heading commanders the route she took every time varied as the dynamics of the conflict changed as attempts to regulate the borders changed as territories expanded and contracted between competing commanders and it changed according to the fixers who negotiated and mediated between these different boundaries whether they were NGOs whether they were commanders whether they were tribal elders and going inside involved a whole rigmarole a bit like today you had to grow a beard you wore a shower camise you wore a chitrally cap my Afghan friend said I could be mistaken for a Neurostani which was clearly ridiculous but it was all part of the drama of going across the border and though the border was not a comfortable place to be it was frequently the centre of things it was far from being marginal and disconnected it was often in the waterlands where the action was taking place whether it was sanctuaries and base areas emerging or whether it was new political social identities being forged or alternative livelihoods being cobbled together or new sources of economic wealth being generated and so it's partly based on those kind of formative experiences that my research interest has emerged around borderlands and I'm going to talk very briefly I could talk about different projects but I'm talking about one that is very topical for me at the moment and is just starting which is an ESRC project which has started this month and which is the jumping off for today's talk and it's called Borderlands Brokers and Peace Building in Sri Lanka and Nepal Water peace transitions viewed from the margins now basically the research is interested in how the relationship between the political centre and the state's margins is recalibrated in wartime and in post-war transitions we intend to study different kinds of state margins those that are politically and economically salient and those which are more marginal and we want to develop what we call spatial histories of these different frontier regions alongside that we want to do and develop life histories of what we've called borderland brokers so for example political or military elites traders or businessmen or women or religious figures who mediate between centre and periphery or across the borderline how did they become brokers why did they become brokers how have they adapted to and shaped changes in political relations international institutional arrangements and conflict and peace building dynamics now my starting point for this the kind of so what question I guess is the assumption that borderlands are not marginal they're not disconnected they're central often to the ways that wars are fought and the nature of the peace that follows some borderlands may be laboratories of and drivers of change and development and in political terms and I'll expand on this in a minute but the key point I'd like to get across here is they can be the equivalent of incubators or special economic zones for poor or fragile states in other words they may be a specific kind of space that facilitates or allow processes that can't take place elsewhere and they have ramifications at the national and the regional level so my assumption here is that studying the margins might tell us very important things also about the centre or to put it another way the character of the whole is shown sharply by attention to the edges that correspond peripheries are interesting places in their own right but they're also privileged vantage points for understanding power relations at the centre and how these power relations are at least in part constituted by what's going on in the periphery now the urgency of this task seems to be particularly acute as the borderland between the rich and the poor is brought ever closer to the putative centre leading to the kinds of responses that we see in Calais or by Donald Trump to keep the periphery at bay so now I want to expand a little bit before going into my case study on the Afgantagic border around how we understand brokers and borderlands so brokers are defined by their ability to straddle multiple life worlds knowledge systems and to act as gatekeepers brokerage depends on the existence of boundaries of division of difference some boundaries are more difficult to cross than others they're more salient more energy, more resources are invested in the defence and maintenance so for example international borders have this structuring effect on other political and social boundaries the greater the power symmetries and the harder the border the steeper the gradient between the two sides this in turn creates incentives for transgression so take an example for instance of the high and smuggle drugs across the Afgantagic border the security premium is much greater it's a heavily militarised and pleased border the security premium is less, the step in value is less in the Afgantagic borderlands as I'm going to talk about in a minute it's still significant but it's less because of the level of policing Eric Wolff in a brilliant analysis of brokers in 1950s Mexico the ambiguities and the ambivalence around this gatekeeper and go between role he argues that they're Janus headed they're always looking into different directions they bridge the synapses between the centre and the periphery they address the problems but they never fully resolve them otherwise they would no longer have a function so they constitute at the same time the connective tissue between the national and the local as well as being the points of friction and they are representatives of the state at the same time they reveal the limitations of state power so borderland, sorry brokers they take different historical forms but they're a persistent feature of history and society and one way of looking at this is through literature so if you think about Thomas Cromwell's skill and manoeuvring in Wolff Hall it's very like contemporary jockeying around the Afghan presidency that we see at the moment if we take the past the opium trader in Amritav Ghosh's book and Book River of Smoke profiting by bridging the worlds of China and British India we can see characters like this also in the borderlands of eastern Central Africa they're not so different today and if we take I can't pronounce it Chris has been trying to train me on this but I still can't pronounce it he's the narrator in waiting for the barbarians he's a seasoned inhabitant of a frontier zone between civilisation and barbarians he's unruffled he's accommodating and he's also horrified by the brush borderharding reflexes of the newly arrived colonel job this tension between these two lies can be found in accounts of UN officials in Iraq after 2003 or British officials of the security development nexus in Afghanistan so I've argued that brokers are persistent they're perennial but there is a number of narratives around the emergence of modern states that brokers disappear, they wither away they consign to a pre-modern past so privateers, mercenaries, militias and pirates who have been foundational in the emergence of states were dispensed with as modern states centralised the means of violence and extraction mapping, census making, border delineation these were associated with the process of enclosure with territorialisation with the attempt to integrate and monetise people, lands and resources of the periphery so they become auditable commodities to the gross national product and the foreign exchange so brokers are absorbed, they're co-opted they're pacified, they're eliminated warlords become courtiers who in turn morph into state administrations or bureaucrats now you don't have to look very far to see that's nonsense and I think a good place to start is Anton Bloch's superb study of the mafia of a Sicilian village the key point that he gets across is that the mafiosi are intermediaries and they appeared in Sicily when the central state after eliminating the traditional land-owning elite needed to find new interlocutors like a guarantee, law and ordering of periphery the important point that Bloch shows is that state building and the mafia emerge together in a symbiotic relationship and yet if to use James Scott's terminology if we see like a state then the role of brokerage and intermediaries are rendered invisible of course there's a huge literature that critiques this kind of view which encourages us to disaggregate and unpack this thing that we call the state and I could spend a lot of time talking about political economy literature on limited access orders on political settlements on the political marketplace or I could talk about anthropological perspectives on this about institutional hybridity about brickolage about twilight institutions and David Moss's work here today on development brokers there isn't time for that but I want to make four quick points about why I think brokers are particularly important in relation to borderlands so the first thing to say is that it's often at the edges of states where the complex political topography and institutional patchiness of the state comes out in sharpest relief in studying the borderlands as extreme sites they provide a lens for reading if you like the state as its limits a multitude of state actors cluster around the border the customs systems, the border police the border guards, the military units the health inspectors and so on a neoliberal restructuring of the states pluralises these institutional arrangements even further so I think borderlands are an interesting site to explore this constant tension that I've alluded to between on the one hand colonial and postcolonial forms of state building including border delineation including enclosure the separation and purification of populations and on the other hand the constant challenge to these processes manifest in perpetual circulation the mixing, the adaptation, the hybridity of social groups and networks and institutions this can be understood as a tension between what Apogeur I cause traits geographies the attempt to affix specific attributes to a given space and process geographies where in which human organisation is a result of various kinds of action interaction and motion trade, travel, pilgrimage warfare, colonisation, exile and the like the second point I want to make borderlands are zones of economic opportunity and experimentation frontier regions and weekly regulated borderlands situated far from the gaze of the state have if you like a comparative advantage in illegality and illegibility such zones like the Amazon Basin the Eastern Congo lend themselves to if you like adventure capitalism the capturing of windfall profits based on high risk, high return activities like illegal logging coltan mining drugs trafficking and there is a certain functionality about maintaining this liminal state in the borderlands so rather than seeing these as places as James Scott does of resistance of constant conflict between the state and the non state often there are places of collaboration of collusion between state agents and borderland populations national centres of power may be increasing dependent on trans border trading complexes so frontier zone we only have to look historically to see how frontier zones have had this important role in the dynamics of capitalist developments the opening up of the American frontier the frontier the colonial frontiers of Africa and Asia they were central to processes of capital accumulation in the imperial centres there were also places of experimentation where alternative forms of governance such as indirect rule tribal policing were trialled and then replicated elsewhere and I'm going to argue that the violent dynamics of primitive accumulation continue in many of today's frontier zones rather than withering away frontiers wax and wane according to the shifting value of frontier resources and institutional arrangements at the border the third point is that these characteristics of borderlands means they are really zones of brokerage so rather than seeing them as autarkic rather than seeing them as marginal they are highly connected to global circuits of capital exchange and borderland communities of brokers are constantly learning to adapt to and manage and exploit this extreme extroversion they act locally but they think globally they are mediating between in the absence of this mediating level of the state brokers are literally jumping scales so for example the catch-in entrepreneur doing deals with Chinese financiers to run casinos in Burma's northeastern borderlands the borderland broker can never be entirely trusted by the state their political loyalties are never assured their networks may span over the border and exit is always an option so brokers are pulled in these different directions there's a centripetal thrust of state building and the centrifugal force of markets borderlands of frontier zones can in a way be understood as ecologies of constraints and opportunity exchange according to Karen Barkey becomes a sort of habitus writing about the Ottoman Empire she argues that the frontiers were a place where boundaries were acknowledged but constantly evaded now my fourth very quick point is that though I've argued borderlands are important policy makers tend to suffer from borderland blindness they tend to see like a state they tend to take the national order of things for granted they organise in national teams their key interlocutors are central state officials they help construct national budgets and yet as we know the kinds of issues and problems that David has alluded to in his talk conflict poverty environmental degradation they don't respect borders they're not confined to international borders I think this borderland blindness is a major a major problem when borderlands are considered they're considered either as unruly ungoverned places that export public bads and they need to be securitised to be managed and there needs to be surveillance threats need to be kept out and we don't have to go very far to look at these kinds of policy narratives around borders an alternative way sorry this is just I think it's a brilliant response to the Swiss the Swiss one we're not sheep the alternative representation apart from being dangerous and governable places is their lagging zones that they have failed to integrate that there's a lack of connectedness and therefore there's a need to improve their connectivity to help them catch up to the globalisation now both narratives can be seen as spatial tropes and they do political work they tend to flatten complexity they elide the underlying power relations they justify particular sets of interventions or in action and we can see these processes of hardening and integration not as opposites but they're working in tandem with each other they're illustrative of the complex and dynamic processes going on around borders simultaneous efforts to harden or retool some and soften an increased permeability of others and as I've come to at the very end I think a borderland perspective offers a very profound challenge a very radical challenge to these kinds of policy narratives I now want to spend the last half of my talk zooming in on the Afghan-Tajik borderlands and this is based on some research ongoing research I've been doing it's based on three research trips in 1998 when I was doing the PhD with David in 2006 and 2013 and it's right in the northeast on the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan if you can see that kind of funny kind of narrow neck of land at the very top of Afghanistan the Wakharn corridor it's just to the left of there this is this is the borderland this is the borderland I was looking at and very kind of very quick bit of an introduction to this the this is a kind of high altitude area in the Palmya mountains very kind of marginal agro-pastralist zone that it's the border itself is divided by the Panj River so this gives you an idea of the mountainous terrain the points of connection are the valleys and this is zooming in on the border itself which divides what is now Tajikistan and the province of Gorno Barakshan Autonomous Oblast which I'll call Gabal from now on and Afghanistan's Barakshan province Korog which you can just get a glimpse of on the left hand side of the picture is the city on the or a town on the border of 40,000 and Faisabad is the provincial city of Afgan Barakshan which is located in the centre of the province and has a population of 50,000 now the border regions are settled by Ismaili communities who straddle the border in Gabal the Ismailis are the majority whereas in Afghanistan there are minorities in a province where Tajiks are the dominant group one thing I want to kind of just a quick kind of a side here I think something I'd really like to do and it's one of the joys of working at SAS is the PhD students who I'm very lucky to have had the experience of working with and I'd like to mention three in particular whose work has very much informed what I'm going to talk about now they are David Mansfield whose PhD was on drugs in Afghanistan his book is coming out soon with Hearst he's over there and I highly recommend it also Filippo Di Daniele who worked with me on one of these research trips and his PhD was on drugs Matthews into Tajikistan and finally Patrick Meehan whose work on brokerage and drugs in the borderlands of Myanmar has also been very important has informed my work here so I'd like to thank them I'll refer to some things as we go along and also David his photographs were in the poster and also in this presentation he's not only an expert on drugs he's a brilliant photographer so let's zoom in this area used to be on a frontier shutter zone it was situated on the northern roots of the Silk Route and I'm going to tell this story in three and a half chapters it's not the complete story it's just fragments of it but just to give you a flavour of the borderland so the first chapter which I go through skirt over very quickly is the story of how this frontier shutter zone becomes a borderland the delineation of the border in 1895 as a result of the Crimea's convention which separated into this region into different imperial spaces between the Russian and the British empires and the border wasn't actually closed finally until 1949 but this separation led to very different state building and development trajectories in the two zones parts of the borderland some of which will become apparent in a minute the second chapter is what I call the Frontier Strikes Back and this is related to first of all the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and this began the process of prizing open the border because of the reconnections between the border people on both sides the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan though was the most significant thing and then the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union that precipitated civil war in Afghanistan and Tajikistan and that transformed the borderlands in a very profound way essentially it opened up the border it became an open frontier once more it was transgressed, it was crossed by military groups, by the Majahideen on both sides by by a whole range of commodities including drugs and weapons in the 1980s on both sides of the border political formations were sustained through external external funding through transfusions of financial and military aid and the role of external assistance meant that rebel go the end of external assistance meant that rebel groups on both sides needed to find alternative sources of finance now in a remote resource poor borderland the drug economy became the main source of revenue for the political fronts drugs were not new to bad action there was a long history of cultivation but from the 1980s drug production rose steadily and from the 1990s it accelerated rapidly because this structural shift in the conflict the opening of the border and the growth of the drug economy made these Ismaili settled border areas extremely important gaining a foothold of the border was a key to generating rents and there was an influx of Afgan-Tagic Majahideen into the border areas Ismailis in Afghanistan at the time talk about this violent period as the dark years and many of them migrated from to Pakistan in Chitral all along the eastern border and the control was parceled out to this mosaic of competing military entrepreneurs and the importance of this border was magnified with the emergence of the Taliban who gradually ended up controlling close to 90% of Afgan territory so when I first visited Bad Action in 1998 this was this kind of situation in Bad Action is my first trip to the northeast and it was this experience of field work and I haven't told David this and it's probably not the kind of thing to say at an inaugural lecture but it was when I first got into drugs you're going to go to Afghanistan one thing leads to another it was looking at going to Bad Action going to this I was going on this first research trip I was interested in how communities lies and livelihoods have been transformed by war but you only had to look around you and talk to people to see how Poppy had become central to everyday survival and how bedded it was in the local economy it really was the only game in town thanks David for this photograph the liquidity of how al-Adilas or money exchanges in Faisabad Mark it was completely dependent on the drugs economy shifting according to the annual cycles of Poppy cultivation and harvesting Poppy became a major agent of the commercialisation of agriculture and the monetisation of the economy which in turn brought about transformations in social structure including the emergence of new classes who accumulated and invested as a result of the drugs economy the growing differentiation of the peasantry as Mansfield notes in a poor conflict affected borderland for farmers Poppy cultivation is a low risk crop in a high risk environment one of the reasons being that traders collect the open resin from the farm gate and the risks of getting the product to the market unlike for other cash crops for traders on the other hand where the profits where main profits are made in this economy illegality means there's a high markup and considerable price inasticity it's easily concealed, easily transported and has a long shelf life as drugs moves from farmers fields to the border and then across the border there's a significant markup each step of the way the prime herring reaches Moscow which is one of the end markets but also the UK it's being sold at something in the order of $20,000 a kilogram compared to $4,000 in Tajikistan according to UNODC some 25% of Afghanistan's drugs are traffic through the so-called northern route and the routes from Barakshan are numerous and they also change quite a lot the traffic in routes out of Barakshan have changed according to the security environment on each side of the border during the height of the civil war in Tajikistan when the violence was centred in the southern regions the eastern routes the two right hand arrows were the most important through Shignan and through Ishkashan and then it went up through there but through to Tajikistan into Osh into Kyrgystan the dynamics of the drug trade reflected the political environment of the time it was highly decentralised there were many players and low barriers to entry in many respects it was a cottage industry and up until the mid 1990s most of the drugs crossed the border in the form of opium in small shipments facilitated by boat crossing the permeable border with a kind of capillary action coming back across the border with weapons, US dollars four-wheel drives, crates of vodka basic staples like rice and flour from the mid 1990s there were several important innovations and shifts in the drug economy in Afghanistan and we might see this as the embedding and the professionalisation of drugs production and this was partly because there was a strong military imperative to increase production at that time given the Taliban's monopolisation of other resource flows but I think an interesting dimension of this is also how there was a migration of people of capital, of know-how and of market linkages from another borderland in this case Nangarhar in eastern Afghanistan which had been a long standing centre of drugs production and drugs markets in Afghanistan it's a nice illustration in a way because this area was controlled by the Taliban at the time so this would have been working against the military and political logic of the Taliban but it shows how market structures and political and military structures don't neatly map on to each other now evidence of these connections can be seen for example in the appearance of the sagali red flower poppies from the east and the decline of the Hindi purple flower varieties that were traditionally grown in Balakshang Mansfield also reports the growing use of technology and cultivation techniques imported from the east at this time and finally the number of heroin processing labs in Balakshang started to increase as drugs dealers moved at the value chain and started processing herring importing the necessary precursor chemicals via the east and there's also reports that increasing morphine paste was sent up to Balakshang from Nangarhar for final processing and then exported across the border so going back to my analogy of borderlands as incubators what we perhaps see here in this drugs intensified borderland was the borderland becoming a special economic zone politically these market players drew upon the comparative advantages of this zone of illegality its market linkages its tradition of poppy cultivation and the stronger pressures to cultivate opium because of the lack of alternatives and they also invested in the kind of the language of special economic zones in upgrading and capacity development so as to accelerate process of accumulation now these trends were hugely magnified when there was the very famous Taliban and successfully enforced Taliban opium ban in 2000 and 2001 and this meant that Balakshang became the only poppy cultivating province in Afghanistan there was a ten fold increase in the farm gate price of poppy which increased the incentives to develop even more land to poppy and therefore the total heterage of poppy cultivation increased by 250% at that time so chapter 3 which I've called the return of the state so my next trip to the borderland was in 2006 and it was a very different situation the first time I went I had to fly to Faisabad on the UN play this time I was able to drive to Shignan on the border from Kabul it took two and a half days driving northwards through the thriving cities of Kunduz and Takar and from there northeast up the steadily ascending unsealed road to Faisabad and then from there it was a bumpy half day up into the mountains past the stunning Lake Siwa over the Siwa plateau settlements and orchards and fields to Shignan on the Pange River and since my last trip to Balakshan peace settlements have been signed in both countries on the Tajik side the 1997 peace accord have been a pragmatic affair the so-called wicked deal involved the divving up of the control of the main drugs routes between regional power holders the Parmeries contain control of the eastern Balakshan route though as a central government to its power Culeol in southern Tajikistan whose political leap was part of the inner circle of power in Dushanbe became the primary trafficking route so going back to the left hand arrows which became more significant in terms of the drug routes to a large extent and this draws on Filippo's work drugs provided a source of rents that stabilised the state in Tajikistan revenues from the drug economy between central and peripheral elites this led to this growing integration and professionalisation of the drug trade with fewer players higher barriers to entry linked to the increased role of the state as the preeminent player now on the other side of the border the US led coalition transformed the dynamics of brokerage and the political landscape of the northeast large transfusions of CIA funding flowed in to regional strongmen in these early months a great deal of money was sloshing around the local economy in Badakshan prior to the poppy planting season and this was at the time I remember when there had been a tenfold increase in the farm gate prices of opium so there are very strong incentives to invest in the drug economy which I'll come back to in a second US intervention an international state building that followed transformed the relationship between Kabul and the borderlands for Badakshan this was experienced as a moment of rupture with the collapse in the old front lines and the opening up of this remote borderland to the outside world road and communication linkages and ties with Kabul were developed road building within Badakshan happened, the removal of militiamand roadblocks took place the implementation will be a patch of disarmament, demobilisation reintegration programmes taken together improved connectivity and security a german led provincial reconstruction team was established in Faisabad and the organisation rolled out new programmes including the government's national solidarity programme people like Afghan aid I've been a trustee of and done very good work in the north east also expand their programmes at that time the picture here refers to the cross border markets which the Argychan invested in a major programme in re-establishing connections between Ishmades on both sides of the border through regional development, through building bridges through cross border markets so to a great extent in the north east there was a peace dividend in those initial years in parallel with these developments for the first time really in history of the certainly the remote borderlands there was a visible presence of the state in these border areas the political transition has been characterised as a form of warlord democratisation so in a sense, jihadi leaders and their militias were folded into the state administration at the provincial and the district levels Karzai's political style was to act as a broker to govern through personal networks placing loyal governors in the provinces and circumventing bureaucratic channels in Barakshan he simultaneously supported different individuals from two factions within the Majedin party Jamiat so therefore on the one hand the imprint of the state was consolidated but on the other hand on the other hand the state deployed the same broker in techniques as the warlords partly because it was made up of many of these same characters because the state could command resources it became the main arena of accumulation outside the drug economy it was backed up with foreign military force as well as funding and it couldn't be ignored by bad actually elites but the state was not powerful enough to subdue the old military class the result was this oscillation of power of hedging by peripheral elites they were not powerful enough to upset the new political dispensation but they were strong enough to preserve their autonomy and to wait and see what happened now in theory one would have expected improved security in the ramping up of development efforts and the building of the state albeit with these limitations mentioned to have led to a decrease in poppy cultivation surely development plus state building equals less poppy yet poppy went through the roof expanding year on year through up until the mid 2000s by 2004 it was ranked third in the so-called afghan provincial poppy production league so what was happening well firstly like into jikestown there had been a growing interest and professionalisation of the drugs industry unlike to jikestown the main player so the main like again like into jikestown the main player became the state however reflecting the more fragmented political landscape in afghanistan the more powerful position of regional strongmen and the country's long standing status as a drugs producer this has been a more contested and more uneven process in some respects drugs exerted this gravitational pull on the state from being this remote borderland that couldn't be profitably administered by the state the border regions became a zone of opportunity that state agents sought to control but the capacity of the state to assert control was limited and therefore rather than relying on coercive power it had to negotiate it had to broker its way into the borderlands indicators the growing and counter narcotics policies played into this process because they enabled the powerful to take out more powerful less powerful players are involved in the drug economy and therefore one of the indicators of this consolidation was the way that there was upgrading from opium to peringo across in the border and rather than this capillary action it was a funnel action of major shipments going across key exit points and across bridges and only those with high level patterns in government would be able to be involved involved in this so there was this kind of performative aspect of the counter narcotics policies to do largely for external consumption around eradication and also this is a picture of warning people of the iniquities, the dangers of opium but in many ways it had this perverse effect of consolidating and building the linkages between major players involved in the drug economy and there's a complex gaming system going on in terms of the links between national level and local brokers on the one hand local actors try and leverage external players in order to strengthen their hand locally in the post-2001 era patterns state patterns in Pfizer, bad or carb or international players like the German PRT or the American Special Forces have been leveraged in order to get to extract resources locally on the other hand external players seek to gain influence by exploiting boundaries and divisions in the borderline space now I was going to talk a little bit about one particular broker in the borderland and there isn't time to do that in a death now but it's about somebody who I've caught a disease and I've written about elsewhere and he's an interesting case because he started off in the Nangahar borderlands in eastern Afghanistan he was a Pashtoom and ended up as one of the major drug dealers on the Shignan border in the mid-2000s and then married a daughter of his primary business partner and moved across the border in order to move up the commodity chain he then got involved in and semi-licit trade as well as drugs including the Ruby business and his networks developed further connecting Pakistan India and Dubai and then the last time I went back to the borderland which I've come to in in 2013 he'd moved to both the area in Kabul so people who make money at the borders don't necessarily invest it in the borders but somebody like Aziz could not have become a successful broker in this area if he hadn't drawn upon his political, his social and his ethnic networks and in a way opium in many respects was a lubricant that transgressed that overcame these points of friction between different kinds of boundaries finally, because I'm going over time now the final chapter is I call three and a half because it's playing out and we don't know how it's going to finish but in our last trip there Philippo and I went to to Karog and Shignan this time we found it's too dangerous to drive there from Kabul and so he went to Dushanbe and the story is really of unravelling political settlements on both sides of the border on the Tajik side we think this is due to actually the extension, the expansion of the state the attempt of the state to renegotiate new political settlements in the borderlands to capture the resource flows around drugs on the afghan side it's about the retreat of the state about the growing presence of the Taliban about the international drawdown and it's also about which I've got time to talk about now the perverse effects that elections have played into these processes of churning the political landscape constantly and as a result unsettling the political order so it's unclear where this is heading at the moment it's clear that political there's a very strong connection between the political landscape and the drugs economy and this current situation now enables the Taliban to stand as the protector of the peasantry against state-run counter-narcotics effects and the state appears to be in retreat in the provinces which means borderland brokers feel they have a lot more autonomy and a lot more negotiating power in relation to the state I'm going to have to finish now four quick points so the first one is stepping away from the case study I'd argue that we need to study borderlands they're interesting firstly in their own right but also because they have interesting things and important things to tell us about that can't be studied from the state centres not all borderlands are rebellious and unruly and not all borderlands are economically or politically important what can explain the differences between borderlands or within borderlands over time I think there's scope for more empirically rich comparative work which brings together different disciplinary angles and feeds into broader theorisations on borderlands as well as policy debates and I think SAAS is in a very good position to lead such research given its regional expertise the growing number of scholars who work on borderland issues and some of them are here tonight Paolo is here I think James Carran is here and Patrick is here we have a lot of very important borderlands scholars who could lead such a project and what I try to argue here is that studying the borderlands doesn't just tell us something about the borderlands border zones themselves it tells us something about the centre that cannot be studied from the centre itself and this vantage point is profoundly unsettling the second point is that there are other baratoons of change incubators of development the liminality, the illegality is functional historically borderlands were zones of primitive accumulation places of experimentation I've argued that these historical processes resemble what is going on in many of today's borderlands illegible borderlands may be for the late developing states the equivalent of special economic zones they enable rapid processes of accumulation that can't take place elsewhere so to pursue this analogy further as Ho Jun Chang argues late developing countries have had the ladder kicked away from them do borderland zones constitutes for the political elites of some late developing states an alternative kind of ladder there are places where state builders can pursue the unsavory strategies of their European predecessors that are disallowed at least moderated elsewhere by the mantras of good governance human rights and equitable development thirdly brokerage is key to understand the character of borderlands brokers I've argued operate in the psychology of constraints and opportunity they negotiate centripetal and centrifugal forces between states and markets between different levels of power between different authorities and there's this constant oscillation back and forth which brokers attempt to keep intention and to manage these brokers they come and this shows with their own histories and life biographies they draw upon different registers of power and sources of legitimacy there are many other questions to ask for instance like Aziz is brokerage a career or merely a pathway I think there's something very different from political brokers who are territorial who stay in one area from these kinds of market brokers how does the role of brokerage change from change in water peace transitions and then finally international policies have perverse effects on these dynamics that I've been talking about external policies may be a vector of violence in borderlands militarised international peace building operations the war on terror, the war on drugs which have been associated with the securitisation and militarisation of borders and efforts to pacify unworthy borderlands through the deployment of drones through counts of search operations through stabilisation measures in flame and catalyzed cycles of violence in the borderlands so a borderland perspective could have very radical implications of policy by exposing the linkages between insecurity and poverty in the borderland regions and the metropolitan centres and it shows that many of the pathologies, the apparent pathologies of the margins are generated by policy regimes and initiatives emanating from the putative centre Wel, what a nice thing to be able to do to be able publicly to congratulate Jonathan on his professorship and to thank him for the lecture he's just given us I see it also as an opportunity to thank him for all his scholarly work for the inspiring teaching that I've watched him do here at SOAS and indeed for his friendship though I'm still struggling with the idea of the three of us doing this in Lycra up here I must say but anyway Jonathan told us how he stumbled first long ago on the significance of borders and borderlands and I think that's quite a nice vignette of how there's often a slightly arbitrary dimension to how we find and settle on the things that engage our interest as researchers for years sometimes the product of what the science writer Steven Johnson calls a slow hunch and he may have stumbled on the subject but he's not in any way stumbled to this latest border crossing the passage to his professorship rather he's been striding directly to it carving out a clear route through his research the multiple projects that he always has on the go his impressive rate of production of publications his very very thoughtful teaching and the intellectual leadership that he provides and obviously the respect he's clearly held in not just here in SOAS and in academia more widely but also amongst the NGO leaders the aid agency officials even military thinkers and officers with whom he has engaged and of course this border he's crossing now some of his checkpoints he's already breezed through leaving just this final performative crossing tonight is very much a border that's at the heart at the centre of intellectual life it's a boundary in itself that's no periphery but the institutional core of a university and what this one SOAS stands for and it's not a boundary where I want to detain him or you much longer so with the prospect of more relaxed celebrations outside I'll try to be brief late last week as I left my office there was a student sitting waiting in the corridor on the floor and she crained her neck and looked at me and she said oh you you're giving an inaugural lecture next week aren't you I said no no I'm not but my colleague my friend Jonathan is and you must come so I hope she's here but I left a bit a bit puzzled and then I thought ah two middle aged men glasses they both work on violence and development vanishing hair underneath this that you can't see it maybe she had us mixed up I thought but there the resemblance ends and for one thing to be a convincing lookalike I'd have to be on stilts as you can probably tell by now I'd also need and this goes back to what David said at the beginning he thought fitter as well one of the good things about knowing Jonathan here at service has been being dragooned by him along with our colleague Jens Lerkin who can't be here into mad cycling exploits the first time that we attempted the Etap du Tour this is a day in the Alps when amateurs get the chance to do one of the roots of the Tour de France it ended with me failing to finish completely Jens finishing but barely alive and in fact hospitalised and Jonathan he'd been across the finishing line hours earlier and couldn't see what the fuss was about entirely and I've learnt over the years not to trust his idle promises on the weekends that he's really very very unfit and he won't be able to keep pace with us and so on and so forth Jonathan and David pointed this out he's very very modest about his cycling exploits his running his triathlons as he is too about his research and its quality and his engagement with very very senior policy makers internationally but there's the same steel the same commitment and hard work in his academic work and sometimes working with Jonathan for example on the war to peace transitions course that we've been teaching together for several years it's a bit similar to those bike rides I'm pushing myself and thinking I'm doing quite well keeping up with the literature only to find that he's streets ahead and he's bringing new readings, new ideas and strains of the literature that might have a bearing on what we're working on and I'm left sort of puffing and trying to stay in the slipstream of his thinking and reading and wondering how the hell he does it frankly but so to Borders and Jonathan's lecture Economists revolution as something that took place in the late 19th century with a shift towards the analysis of the implications of changes tiny changes at the margins in market transactions but in a way I think perhaps there's a sort of different kind of marginal revolution underway in the social sciences at the moment and increasing interest and the analytical fertility and the fundamental importance of the margins of nation states and domains of political order in other words in Borders and Borderlands and this is not just about bringing the marginal into focus about making the side effects the centre stage it's about as we've heard seeing how the peripheral the borderland is actually at the very centre of the processes of change adaptation and development and I think it's obvious to you all from Jonathan's talk how significant his own contribution to this field is as he put it Borderlands and the brokers facilitating and profiting from their crossings are not so much enclaves of trouble making and backwardness rather they're often incubators of governance and state making experiment in his rather superb analogy they're a bit like special economic zones Studying these Borderlands helps us see how governance evolves how states take shape in complex ways often and perhaps typically in ways that do not follow the neat linear hopes and expectations of international organisations we've seen some of the unintended consequences of international efforts to clarify and harden political ideological boundaries as in Jonathan's example about the effects on opium accumulation and class formation of US aerial bombing and my goodness how timely that insight is the attention too to drugs enhanced Borderlands dynamics where the boundaries between Lysit and Illysit overlap with political geographical boundaries has a wider comparative relevance one example would be in the coca producing and trafficking Northern Borderlands of Colombia where there's still I think far too little attention paid participants in the Havana peace talks or by international organisations to the significance of rather similar dynamics to what Jonathan outlined Jonathan's work not only focuses on the creative tensions inherent in Borderlands it positively embodies those in his own intellectual approach many of us here are used to celebrating by intent at least the aims of being interdisciplinary and few of us deploy interdisciplinary work quite so effectively and seamlessly and with such effect as Jonathan does well in a world of razor wire high wall gated community disciplinary boundaries that may be my paranoia at spending too much time with economists but he Jonathan disregards those and he upholds the right to roam his values are those of Albert Hirshman the values of disciplinary trespassing and that takes a lot of verve and confidence to do and in this I think Jonathan gives us a superb example of the values that our department and development studies here at Sirius upholds in general and while his range the range of disciplines that he's keen to delve into, keen to draw on keen to try to fuse together his range is broad I think there are two things that make this particularly effective in his work one is that he's committed to field work and often in very very challenging environment he doesn't quite let on because he is modest about that he was one of the first people in fact to write to publish on the ethical and the practical challenges of doing field work in on and around contexts affected by violent conflict but the other is that he have and he has and you'll have to forgive my language here there's no better way to put it he has a powerful innate bullshit detector so on the one hand he's always alert to fresh ways of thinking new ideas or prisms to explore but he's also on the other hand always testing them against the pith of reality in Sri Lanka or Afghanistan and so on now there's something else I have to mention for someone who's interested in spatial analysis and awareness as Jonathan he's made life pretty difficult for himself and us by splitting his time lately between London and Melbourne in Australia but even that he's managed to turn to a very very interesting and selfless advantage actually when people complain as they do here about the institutional barriers to collaborating across departments and disciplines that saw us and they do so with some reason it's all the more important to acknowledge that actually this is what saw us is really really good at generating productive collaborations across disciplines and departments we do it through our regional focused centres we do it through the food studies centre or the migration studies centre and so on and Jonathan has turned this difficult situation having his life and his work stretched halfway around the world to great advantage he's managed through this to bring together lawyers, anthropologists political economists historians political scientists and geographers we smuggled some back in after our geography department was transferred to kings and others within saw us and then between saw us and Melbourne to develop this work this evolving work on borders and borderlands and their relationship to processes of state formation socio-economic development and peace building so we've got a lot to thank Jonathan for and a lot to learn from him both in terms of the substance and the insights of his work but also the way he's gone about it and goes about it now I'm going to close in a moment but I want to ask you when I do if you could just stay in your seats for a moment and wait for us the Lycra 3 or 4 to proceed out and then we'll welcome you upstairs for a drink but I think you'll agree with me that we can now safely say that his papers are in order and with that we can slap down the final stamp on his intellectual passport and let him through Jonathan, well done, thanks