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

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.

For too long, interventions and development programs in areas where drug trafficking occurs have failed to analyse the ties between criminal groups and local populations. In southern Spain, researchers have demonstrated a dramatic decline in government authority and an increase in corruption in districts where illicit activities occur (Ibanez and Navarro 2014; Sands 2007). In the Rif region of Morocco, eradication and crop-substitution measures have only increased the output of hashish producers, as well as swelling violent crime (Chouvy and Afsahi 2014). Beyond understanding the logic of criminal governance in the Western Mediterranean, this project aims to have an enduring impact on crime prevention and rural development policies in North Africa and Southern Europe. The primary beneficiaries will be four inter-connected groups of stakeholders involved in development policy and crime prevention in the two countries to be studied: NGOs, government agencies, policing bodies and ordinary citizens. These direct impacts will be supplemented by indirect benefits for policymakers in the fields of crime prevention and sustainable development.

(1) Crime prevention and development NGOs in the Rif and Andalucia
a. NGOs working in these two very different sectors will be brought together in workshops so as to gain a detailed understanding of their potential complementarity. In Spain, these will include the Federación Provincial Antidroga de Cadiz and the Alternativa Sindical de Policias de Andalucia. In Morocco, the main NGOs will be Agence pour la Promotion et le Developpment du Nord, AIDA and CODENAF. Workshops will build on connections already made by the PI. They will be organised to consult these groups at the outset of the project, so as inform the approach taken and address the 'blindspots' in knowledge these groups have acknowledged. in current policy that they hope this project can help improve.
b. Research outputs hope to improve not only funding and awareness of these NGOs, but to provide data and research that can allow them to better fulfil their objectives.

(2) Government agencies
a. Through two workshops including community leaders and Moroccan government agencies working in the Rif region, I hope to facilitate engagements between cross-sectorial stakeholders who rarely collaborate. The goal is to both gain a detailed understanding of why past development projects aimed at replacing cannabis cultivation with other agriculture activities have failed.
b. In conjunction with project collaborators, a best practices guide to alternative development programs will be produced so as to guide future public policies in the Rif.
c. Spanish and Moroccan government agencies working in the Rif and Andalucia will gain a detailed local perspectives on past crime-prevention strategies.
d. In both Spain and Morocco, resource poor regional authorities will gain a better understanding of the factors driving crime and drug trafficking.
e. Governments in the European Union will have an improved understanding of the largest source of hashish supply to the continent (EMCDDA 2013). At the moment they suffer from a lack of accurate data.

(3) Policing bodies
a. By sharing research outputs and participating in collaborative meetings throughout the projects, policing bodies will have better information on the failures of past crime prevention and drug substitution policies and potential alternatives going forward.

(4) Ordinary citizens in Spain and Morocco
a. As a result of better quality data and analysis circulating in the public sphere, policymakers will hopefully improve their policies in marginalised areas where drug trafficking occurs.

Indirect beneficiaries will include policymakers working on the illegal drug trade worldwide, on which more that $100 billion a year is currently spent (Wainwright 2016: 7; UNDOC 2010). The evidence used to support such interventions remains threadbare