Controlling the Shadow Trade

From tackling illicit flows of small arms to combating nuclear smuggling, the shadow trade has become a central target of attempts to control the means of violence. This article argues that much of this practice and literature is framed in unhelpful terms that posit two distinct worlds, an upperworld and underworld, that separates illicit flow networks from the familiar world of state security policy. This implies that the possibilities for controlling the shadow trade are limited or require expansive and expensive controls. The article then examines the formation of illicit flow networks, drawing on examples including narcotics, small arms, nuclear materials, nuclear technology, major conventional arms, dual use technologies, and chemical weapons precursors; and finds that state and hybrid actors rather than extensive private networks are constitutive of illicit networks in many ways. It concludes by reclaiming hope for controlling the means of violence in this hybridity.

Netwar Geopolitics: Security, Failed States and Illicit Flows

Recent and emerging security policies and practices claim a mutual vulnerability that closely links human insecurity in failed states with the threat to powerful states from illicit flows. This article first examines this ‘emerging orthodoxy’ of transnational security issues that reinforces the securitisation of poverty and the poor. It then subjects this orthodoxy to theoretical and empirical critique. Theoretically it shows that this orthodoxy is formed as a ‘geopolitical imagination’ that associates and stabilises particular views of weak states and illicit flows in a ‘netwar imagination’ by reasserting and reconfiguring traditional assumptions of the spatiality and nature of threats. A final empirical section, focusing on drug production and nuclear smuggling, argues that those assumptions and their assemblage are a partial, incomplete and often self-referential reading of illicit flows.

Control of wild rubber extraction in the forests of northeast India, 1850-1880

This paper uses the history of rubber extraction to explore competing attempts to control the forest environments of Assam and beyond in the second half of the nineteenth century. Forest communities faced rival efforts at environmental control from both European and Indian traders, as well as from various centres of authority within the Raj. Government attempts to regulate rubber collection were undermined by the weak authority of the Raj in these regions, leading to widespread smuggling. Partly in response to the disruptive influence of rubber traders on the frontier, the Raj began to restrict the presence of outsiders in tribal regions, which came to be understood as distinct areas outside British control. When rubber yields from the forests nearest the Brahmaputra fell in the wake of intensive exploitation, India's scientific foresters demanded and from 1870 obtained the ability to regulate the Assamese forests, blaming indigenous rubber tapping strategies for the declining yields and arguing that Indian rubber could be ‘equal [to] if not better' than Amazonian rubber if only tappers would change their practices. The knowledge of the scientific foresters was fundamentally flawed, however, and their efforts to establish a new type of tapping practice failed. By 1880, the government had largely abandoned attempts to regulate wild Indian rubber, though wild sources continued to dominate the supply of global rubber until after 1910.