1st Edition

Rethinking Illicit Economies in Opium and Cocaine Policy Responses to Drug Crops in the Global South

By Eric D. U. Gutierrez Copyright 2024
284 Pages 24 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

284 Pages 24 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

284 Pages 24 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book investigates the cross-border trade in illicit drug crops in the global south. It exposes an important paradox: despite all the dangers and negative consequences of these criminal networks, in many cases, they also provide marginalised and excluded communities with important private sources of protection, investment, and employment. This book reconstructs and compares socioeconomic... Read more

1. The Puzzles and Stories of Resilience  2. The Strange Bedfellows of the Illicit Drug Trade  3. Bankers without Suits: The Money Men of Informal and Illicit Economies  4. Survival and Resilience: The Paradox of Illicit Crops  5. Criminals without Borders: Deconstructing and Deciphering the Life Stories and Role of Drug Lords in Agrarian Transformation  6. Precarity, Illicit Markets and the ‘Mystery’ of Prices  7. Intended and Unintended Interdependencies

Biography

Eric D. U. Gutierrez is a practitioner-scholar with over 25 years of research experience and field-based work with NGOs investigating precarity, disturbance, and indeterminacy in the global south. He received his PhD (cum laude) from Erasmus University Rotterdam’s International Institute of Social Studies (EUR-ISS). He was a member of the Executive Management Team of the Drugs and (Dis)Order Research Project led by SOAS-University of London, funded by the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). He is now an independent consultant, a Research Fellow at EUR-ISS and the International Centre for Human Rights and Drugs Policy, and a member of the network of experts of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GITOC). A Philippine national, he lives with his family in Germany.