Sovereign Haze: Hashish, Trafficking and the Illicit in the Western Mediterranean.

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This project seeks to assess how local communities and state authorities relate to the criminal groups that currently participate in the production and trafficking of hashish in Morocco and Spain. While it is well known that rebel groups and separatist movements provide goods and services as a means through which to contest state authority, it is increasingly evident that criminal groups with narrower objectives also govern people and spaces. Nevertheless, these groups rarely challenge the state directly. Instead, they tend to flourish in their interstices, seeking economic and sub-territorial dominion in order to make their economic activities both possible and profitable. Drug-trafficking organisations in particular tend to operate in places where states are seen to be weak or failing. Border regions and marginalised provinces such as the Rif in Morocco and Andalucia in Spain, both of which exhibit amongst the highest levels of unemployment and poverty in their respective countries, have been historically prone to hosting illegal activities (Pack 2019). Spurned by central government policies and incentivised by lucrative neighbouring markets, local communities have often accepted or supported the criminal groups that have turned parts of these regions into hubs for the traffic of hashish (Robins 2016). Who holds the monopoly of legitimate violence in these areas? How do social values and political circumstances shape local perceptions of the drug trade? Through what practices do criminal groups bolster support for their activities? These are the main questions this project seeks to answer.It will do so through a host of qualitative methods including archival work, interviews and participant observation. Data collection will be focused, in each country, on the perspectives of local residents and their interactions with criminal groups and government organizations (see Case for Support). It will draw on the PI's experience conducting research and long-term ethnographic work in the Middle East.The findings of this research will inform a broad academic audience in sociology, political science, geography and history. In scholarly terms, the project will make a major contribution to theories of sovereignty and illicitness, providing new insights into on-going debates regarding the links between corruption, social values and criminal governance. This will be achieved through an examination of how local communities in the Rif and Andalucia region relate to criminal groups involved in production and trafficking of hashish. Academic contributions will be delivered through scholarly articles, conference presentations, and a monograph. By encouraging a dialogue about the nature of drug trafficking and its links to local communities in the Rif and Andalucia, the project also seeks to improve development and crime prevention policies in these two countries. This will be achieved through a) research design and knowledge exchange workshops in Spain and Morocco b) op-eds in major media outlets in several languages c) a best practices guide that can be used by government agencies and policing bodies in the future.The potential applications of the project stretch far beyond the two countries under study. As drug trafficking and criminal networks are mutating around the world, presenting new risks for a wide variety of governments, it is more urgent than ever to understand their operations, the types of governance they provide and the forms of social order they seek to enshrine.