Evaluating Afghanistan’s past, present and future engagement with multilateral drug control
Project Completed
PROJECT TEAM
Dr John Collins
Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime
Contact: john.collins@globalinitiative.net
John Collins is Director of Academic Engagement at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime in Vienna. He is also a Fellow at the Centre for Criminology, University of Hong Kong, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, LSE Press. John’s contemporary policy interests focus on the political economy of international drug control and the evolving dynamics of national and international policy reforms. John serves as Chair of the Steering Committee of the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime (IASOC) and GI-TOC lead for the Drugs and Development Hub collaboration with GIZ GPDPD.
Ian Tennant
Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime
Contact: ian.tennant@globalinitiative.net
Ian Tennant is Head of Multilateral Representation at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime in Vienna. He also manages the GI-TOC Resilience Fund, a multi-donor initiative which supports civil society individuals and organisations working to counter the damaging effects of organised crime around the world, and leads the GI-TOC engagement with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the wider diplomatic and civil society community. Ian is currently the Vice Chair of the Alliance on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, an umbrella grouping of non-government organisations (NGO).
PROJECT SUMMARY
This research is part of the project ‘Monitoring the evolution of the illicit economy in Afghanistan’ which seeks to develop an overarching framework to better understand how a monitoring system for illicit markets in Afghanistan could operate. This will provide policy-makers in Europe and elsewhere with more advanced tools for scenario planning illicit trade developments and thereby formulate more effective policy responses against them. With the Taliban capturing control of Afghanistan, what the new regime will mean for illicit economies in the country, the region and the global community more broadly, and how they may evolve in the future, is the subject of this analysis. As Afghanistan’s cooperation at a regional level to prevent drug trafficking and other illicit flows will have major implications for regional crime and security policies and, by extension, geopolitical stability, it is vital to map what potential scenarios and options member states and multilateral bodies have for engagement with the new Taliban regime.
The research charts the history of Afghanistan’s interaction with the international drug control system and the complex relationship between national–international policy formation. It tells the story of Afghanistan’s relationship with and impact on evolving global drug regulations from the birth of the League of Nations drug control system to the present day. It draws on primary documentation from US and British archives and an extensive review of secondary literature, as well as a series of interviews conducted for the purposes of this paper. It argues for a more nuanced historical awareness of Afghanistan’s role within multilateral drug control as a way to understand its roles in the creation of the modern licit drug economy and its continued role in the modern illicit drug economy. Further, it argues that there is a need to engage broader society in discussions, to ensure more continuity is built into the system. It calls for re-centring international capacity-building efforts on community-centred approaches, not simply law enforcement and traditional alternative development (AD) programmes. Moving away from the former enforcement-focused activities also reduces the risks of human rights violations.
PUBLICATIONS
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Evaluating Afghanistan’s past, present and future engagement with multilateral drug control (SOC ACE Research Paper 6)
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John Collins, Shehryar Fazli & Ian Tennant, Opium, meth and the future of international drug control in Taliban Afghanistan, in Michael Cox (ed.) Afghanistan: Long war, forgotten peace. London: LSE Press, 2023.