The Damage Done

2016

Social Transformations in India, Myanmar, and Thailand: Volume I, 2021

This chapter discusses historical and contemporary insurgency and opium cultivation in Myanmar, I first analyse the factors that lend to the durability of a given insurgency in Myanmar over time: geography, resources, and people. I then apply the analysis of this interplay of drugs and insurgency across decades in Myanmar, before turning to Chin state, Tonzang township in particular, to examine how that area fits into the triage of crime and insurgency described previously. I then describe opium-growing areas of Tonzang I worked in from 2018 to 2020, and how they differ from the stereotypes we often hold about such places. This is followed by the conclusion, which considers opium as a proxy indicator for the coerced integration of nonmarket-reliant peoples into markets, from resource security to cash insecurity, and the limits that the historical and contemporary illicit political economy imposes on the potential for social transformation in the post-junta era.

Critical Asian Studies, 2015

2021

About Drugs & (dis)order 'Drugs & (dis)order: building sustainable peacetime economies in the aftermath of war' is a four-year research project generating new evidence on how to transform illicit drug economies into peace economies in Afghanistan, Colombia and Myanmar. It is an international consortium of internationally recognised organisations with unrivalled expertise in drugs, conflict, health and development.

Journal of Agrarian Change, 2021

2015

Introduction The production, trafficking and use of illicit drugs represent a major global phenomenon. Alongside the damage this causes to individuals and societies, drugs are also perceived to be a major cause of sustained violent conflict and state fragility. Despite concerted efforts to reduce drug production and trafficking, western counter-narcotic strategies have largely been a failure. The global drugs trade continues to flourish and the US-led War on Drugs has caused substantial perverse results (Jelsma & Kramer 2005; McCoy 2004; Tullis 1995; Van der Veen 2002). In the decade since the 1998 UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs, which set 2008 as the date by which states should seek to “eliminate or significantly reduce the illicit manufacture, marketing and trafficking” (UN 1998) of drugs, global opium production grew by a staggering 78% (UNODC 2010c, 12). Over the past three decades the 2010 World Drug Report concedes that “global opium production and global coca pr...

International Journal of Drug Policy, 2021

The Diplomat , 2023

Made in China Journal, 2021

Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are understudied participants in the surge of Chinese outbound investment since the mid-2000s. This essay examines the fortunes of SME participants in the Opium Replacement Planting (ORP) program, a subsidy scheme established in 2006 for agricultural investments by Chinese firms in former opium-growing regions of northern Myanmar and Laos. The struggles of ORP firms in Myanmar highlight the importance of focused risk-assessment training and capacity-building work for Chinese SMEs in their outbound investments, especially where subsidies are involved. There is an extra black line under the heading ‘Background and Early Stages’. A Disappointing Harvest China’s Opium Replacement Investments in Northern Myanmar Since 2009 Rubber tree plantation in Myanmar. PC: Dale Winling (CC).

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011

The mainstream discourse on the political economy of drugs has emphasised the negative correlation between drug production and state capacity, with the presence of a thriving drugs trade seen as both a sign and a cause of weak states. Through an analysis of the drugs trade in Burma this study argues that such an approach is deeply flawed. Focusing on the period since the 1988 protests it argues that the illicit nature of the drugs trade has provided the state with an array of incentives (legal impunity, protection, money laundering) and threats (of prosecution) with which to co-opt and coerce insurgent groups over which it has otherwise commanded little authority. Although the state's involvement in the drugs trade was initially driven by an expedient desire to co-opt insurgent groups following the 1988 protests, this study also argues that over time it has provided an arena in which more immanent and largely unanticipated processes of state formation, namely the centralisation ...