International Journal of Drug Policy 89 (2021) 103045

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International Journal of Drug Policy

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/drugpo

Essay

Beyond the narco frontier; rethinking an imaginary of the margins

Jonathan Goodhand
Department of Development Studies, SOAS University of London, 10 Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London, WC1H 0XG, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: The ‘narco-frontier’ is frequently invoked in policy and popular narratives about drugs and armed conflict. The
Drugs frontier is represented as an unruly, marginal and ‘ungoverned’ space, a magnate for drug traffickers, rebels and
Frontiers migrants. These ‘non state’ or ‘anti state’ spaces are believed to have a comparative advantage in illegality, with
Imaginaries
borderlands and frontiers becoming centres for the production, consumption and trafficking of illicit drugs. Linked
Borders
to this representation is a policy narrative and set of assumptions that statebuilding, peacebuilding, development
Margins
Policy narratives and counter narcotics policies are mutually reinforcing, and involve the extension of a state presence into these
frontier zones, along with effective drug eradication, substitution and development activities. In spite of the
evident inaccuracy of this portrayal of the ‘narco-frontier’ the imaginary is extremely resilient and continues
to be reflected and reinforced in policy texts and narratives. This paper asks why has this been the case. What
ideological work does the imaginary perform and for whom? And what are the implications of an alternative
imaginary of the margins?

Introduction
Frontier regions on the margins of states in the Global South are
frequently hubs in the production, trafficking and consumption of il-
licit drugs, as well as being ‘hot spots’ in long running conflicts. There
is often assumed to be a nexus between armed conflict, frontier re-
gions and illicit economies and as a result frontiers are often seen as
key to answering a critical policy question in post war transitions –
one that animates the ‘Drugs and (dis)order’ research project – how
to transform war economies into peace economies in the aftermath of
war?1
There is an urgent need to better understand the dynamics of change
in drugs-affected frontier regions, yet as argued below, a dominant imag-
inary and policy narrative, captured in the idea of the ‘narco-frontier’,
impedes efforts to build a more sustainable and spatially inclusive peace.
The narco-frontier conjures up images of backward and Hobbesian re-
gions that have a congenital predisposition towards violence and ille-
gality. The idea of dystopian drug-intensified badlands has gained both
common currency in media portrayals, as well as policy traction, re-
flected for example in UNODC’s language of a ‘sinister nexus’ of drugs,
terrorism and crime (UNODC, 2009).
Two distinct narratives, on frontiers and drugs, converge to gener-
ate this powerful spatial imaginary. The portrayal of a lawless, violent
E-mail address: jg27@soas.ac.uk
1
‘Drugs & (dis)order: building sustainable peacetime economies in the after-
math of war’ is a four-year Global Challenges Research Fund project generating
new evidence on how to transform illicit drug economies into peace economies
in Afghanistan, Colombia and Myanmar [Award Reference: ES/P011543/1].
and marginal frontier, feeds into policy narratives that have material
effects. Policy designs provide a set of solutions or antidotes to the as-
sumed pathologies of the margins – promising a virtuous circle of ame-
liorative measures to address the vicious circle of ‘bad governance’ and
illegality.
I am less concerned in this paper with the evident inaccuracy of the
narco-frontier portrayal or the limitations of responses based upon this
discourse (though we touch upon both), than I am with trying to un-
derstand the power and resilience of the narrative. What ideological
work does the imaginary of narco-frontiers do? What functions (po-
litical, institutional, financial, ideational) does it play and for whom?
This is important, because efforts to reform and improve policy making
cannot only be driven by the need to generate better data and under-
standing; there is also a need to confront the underlying power rela-
tions and vested interests that perpetuate this imaginary of the narco-
frontier.
This essay is largely reflective and exploratory; though it draws on
emerging insights from the ‘Drugs and (dis)order’ project, its purpose
is largely to develop arguments and to map out some tentative policy
implications. In section two I outline the main features of the narco
frontier imaginary, as a point of convergence between two discourses
– on frontiers and drugs. In section three I show how this translates
into, and creates a space for, a particular policy narrative and set of
interventions. In section four I briefly touch upon the gap between the
imaginary, and the everyday reality of frontier regions and the perverse
effects of the policy model on these marginal spaces. In section five I
explore the functions of this imaginary and the sets of interests that
help perpetuate the narco-frontier narrative. Finally I draw out some of
the implications of an alternative rendering of the frontier for policy and
future research.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.103045

0955-3959/© 2020 Published by Elsevier B.V.

J. Goodhand
The narco-frontier imaginary
The narco-frontier imaginary is a point of convergence for two dis-
tinct narratives, one related to a particular resource/commodity (illicit
drugs) and the other portraying a distinct kind of space or territory (fron-
tiers).
Imaginaries generate shared language and understandings and com-
mon notions of legitimacy (Anderson, 1983: Appadurai, 2011). They
also produce shared practices, demarcating a sphere in which actors
can legitimately act (Jackson, 2006:25). Imaginaries thus shape and in-
form policy narratives, which are themselves works of representation
and performance, that enrol audiences and stakeholders and frame and
identify solutions to pre-defined problems (Bacchi, 2016; Mosse, 2010).
Therefore imaginaries both ’represent’ and ’enact’, material realities
in relation to, and through, drugs policies, as explored further below
(Bacchi, 2016).
Both ‘drugs talk’ and frontier narratives, mobilise and legitimise pol-
icy through discourses that externalise defined threats to society or the
body politic. Both involve the construction and maintenance of bound-
aries – between the licit and the illicit, an inside and an outside, the civil
and the uncivil. Marginality is actively created; an ‘imagined commu-
nity’ with a purposive centre is conjured up through the production of
marginalized groups, regions and concerns (Das & Poole, 2004). Both
Gootenberg (2009) and Grandin (2019), writing about drugs and fron-
tiers respectively, note how official discourses about these phenomena
reflect a structural ambivalence, a set of Freudian tensions that combine
fascination and dread. Both are framed as external, polluting forces that
threaten the purity of the centre. Therefore there is a need to be attuned
to the ways in which ‘centres’ are discursively created and bolstered by
conjuring up a flip side of the ‘margins’ (Das & Poole, 2004).
Frontier myths
Frontiers and borderlands are over-represented in national imaginar-
ies of territory. It is not hard to find examples of how the margins are
central to discourses and imaginaries of nationhood; from US President
Trump’s obsession with the US-Mexican border wall, to the symbolism
and anxiety concentrated around the military demarcation line dividing
North and South Korea, both cases show how the margins play a consti-
tutive role in shaping national orders and imaginaries, and processes of
bordering often take place a long way from the border itself. The classi-
cal iconography of frontierscapes with their watchtowers, barbed wire,
fortifications and military barracks, provide a reminder and a warning
of their violent pasts and present.
Frontiers can be understood as vectors of territorial anxieties, em-
bodying uncertainties about territorial coherence and national survival
(Cons, 2016). They are sensitive spaces that matter a great deal for na-
tional elites, but only in certain ways. This manifests itself in dialectic
of intense anxiety and neglect.
They are frequently represented as disruptive and troublesome
zones; as ‘neuralgia points’ that have complex spillover effects within
wider regional conflict systems – for example the Afghanistan-Pakistan
borderlands connect to and fuel other sites of instability, from Kashhmir,
to the Ferghana valley, to China’s Xinjian autonomous region. Frontiers
are portrayed as ungoverned spaces and exporters of ‘public bads’, in
the form of insecurity, terrorism, illicit drugs, migrants and so forth.
They are frequently places with an insurrectionary tradition
(Hobsbawm, 1971; Robb, 2018; Scott, 2009), where monopolies over
the means of coercion are disputed, law and order is perceived to be lim-
ited and loyalties are questionable. Frontiers are commonly portrayed
as places of extreme violence and barbaric behaviour, captured very
graphically for example in Cormac MacCarthy’s novel ‘Blood Meridian’
about the American-Mexican frontier of the late 1840s.
Frontiers are also associated with geographies of contraband and
smuggling; as Tagliacozza’s (2005) research on colonial era Indonesia
shows, the maritime frontiers were fugitive landscapes that had, and
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International Journal of Drug Policy 89 (2021) 103045
sought to maintain, a comparative advantage in illegality. At the same
time frontiers are portrayed as residual and disconnected spaces that
are ‘lagging behind’; they have yet to be penetrated by, and integrated
into, states and markets and so have been excluded from the fruits of
development and modernisation. As such they are zones of untapped
potential, underused and open for exploitation and development, as for
example the logging and mining frontiers of Indonesia and Myanmar,
or the oil frontiers of Colombia and Nigeria. As Tsing (2004: 27) notes,
‘Frontiers are not just edges, they are particular kinds of edges where
the expansive nature of extraction comes into its own…frontiers create
wildness so that some – and not others – can reap its rewards.’
Therefore, frontier discourses and narratives reflect the ambiguity
of international and national elites and societies towards these spaces,
manifest in the aforementioned dialectic of anxiety and neglect, threat
and potential. They are ‘mixed up’ spaces, portrayed as ‘spatial aber-
rations and historical anachronisms, places where the state of nature
inexplicably lives on – they are seen as dystopian Edens, lawless and
stateless spaces bursting with untapped natural riches (Ballve, 2020:
11). As Scott (2009) argues there is also a strong moral and civilizational
dimension to state discourses about the periphery; they are frequently
stigmatized as wild, untamed and barbaric.
Drugs fetishism
Drugs, though their meanings have shifted over time and from
one context to another, have often tended to excite public emotions
(Ghiabi, 2019; Gootenberg & Campos, 2015; Seddon, 2016). Drugs are
mystified as the lead culprit for many social ills, imagined and real
(Friedman, 2002; Gootenberg & Campos, 2015). A great deal of ‘bound-
ary work’ goes into making a legal and discursive distinction between
illicit drugs and analogous commodities, and huge international and
national bureaucracies are devoted to policing and maintaining these
boundaries (Gootenberg, 2009: 14). The prefix ‘‘narco’’ is attached to
myriad cultural, political and economic actors – such as ‘narco-rebels’,
‘narco-traffickers’ or ‘narco states’ – gaining popular currency and policy
traction, de-legimizing certain actors and opening up spaces for particu-
lar forms of intervention. Counter ‘narco-narratives’, which mythologise
and romanticize narcos may be equally problematic and guilty of reifi-
cation; as Zavala (2014) shows, the popular imaginary of ‘narco-cultura’
including narco ballads, a corpus of texts, music, films, conceptual art,
tends to reproduce a mythic notion of narcos
Drugs fetishism involves the reification and abstraction of drugs,
unmooring them from their particular historical and geographical set-
tings and imbuing them with particular – commonly negative – quali-
ties. This fetishism, linked to a discourse of criminality, law and order
and incarceration goes hand in hand with policies and processes that
lead to stigmatisation, distancing and marginalisation (Alexander, 2016;
Ghiabi, 2019; Seddon, 2016; Zigon, 2018).
The narco-frontier imaginary
One of the starkest contrasts in our world today is the gulf that exists
between the civil and the uncivil ….. terrorists, criminals, drug dealers,
traffickers in people and others who undo the good works of civil soci-
ety…. They thrive in countries with weak institutions and they show no
scruple about resorting to intimidation or violence. Their ruthlessness is
the very antithesis of what we regard as civil’ (Kofi Annan, foreword,
UNODC Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime, Polermo,
2004).
These two sets of discourses about frontiers and drugs powerfully
fuse together in the imaginary of the narco-frontier – which conjures
up the image of a space that is overwhelmingly defined and shaped by
illicit drugs. At what point in history the prefix ‘narco’ was added to
frontiers is unclear, but the beginnings of this fusion most likely date
back to the 1970s, at a time when the cold war and the war against
J. Goodhand
drugs were pursued vigorously and simultaneously. The former, linked
to covert support for states and insurgents by the two superpowers,
led to widespread irregular warfare in the rural peripheries in much
of the developing world and the later provided an unwitting spur for
the profit incentives and geographic dispersal that led to the drug boom
and the emergence of ‘narco corridors’ connecting remote frontiers with
metropolitan centres (Gootenberg, 2007; McCoy, 2000).
This new spatial imaginary was based on an assumed set of frontier
traits, that were intrinsic to, or part of the DNA, of the margins – all
bad things come together in the form of drugs, bad governance, malde-
velopment and armed violence, producing a negative equilibrium, char-
acterized by UNODC and others as a ‘sinister nexus’ or ‘vicious spiral’
(UNODC, 2009).
The geographies of drug production, trafficking and increasingly
consumption in the Global South are assumed to map onto belts of
marginalisation, underdevelopment and armed violence/insurgency.
First, the narco-frontier imaginary paints a close nexus between
drugs and violence.
Frontiers that have a comparative advantage in illegality and law-
lessness provide places of sanctuary for non state groups. Drugs are
viewed axiomatically as a conflict good, providing a source of rents
and a tax base for rebellion, enabling rebel groups to consolidate their
hold over frontier populations and spaces, carving out and creating new
forms of ‘narco-territorialty’ (van Dun, 2017). These groups may have
started out with political goals and motivations, but inevitably drugs un-
dermine and corrupt these goals, turning them into economically moti-
vated ‘narco rebels’. Left wing insurgents such as FARC in Colombia are
branded as ‘narco terrorists’, whilst the same label is applied to ethno-
nationalist groups in the Myanmar borderlands, as well as the Taliban in
Afghanistan. Extreme and performative violence, portrayed as lacking
any political rationale, plays into and reinforces the imaginary of the
unruly and ungovernable narco-frontier.
Second, ‘narco frontiers’ are viewed as both a symptom and a driver
of state weakness. Drug economies profit from instability and state ab-
sence, whilst also contributing to these processes. Where a drugs-state
relationship is acknowledged it is assumed that drugs are an external
force penetrating and corrupting the central state, via organised crime,
rather than being something intrinsic to the state and how it functions
in many contexts. The retreat of the state contributes to an absence of
public services and open or poorly policed borders, which reinforce the
frontier dynamic.
Third, drugs are viewed as being either residual to or, antithetical
to processes of development. Drug economies flourish in the absence
of ‘licit’ forms of development and as they become more established
they distort licit markets and undermine development processes more
broadly.
Fourth, the narco-frontier imaginary portrays these spaces and the
people who inhabit them as lacking agency. Narcotics are the lifeblood
of the frontier – they are spaces ‘addicted’ to drugs, shaping the lives,
livelihoods and incentive systems of farmers, traders, consumers, com-
munities, politicians and so forth. Those involved follow assigned scripts
– farmers as helpless victims and traders as predatory narcos. They be-
come props, or theatrical devices, in a script written by outsiders for
external audiences. For example in the preface to 2015 World Drug Re-
port, the then Executive Director of UNODC Yury Fedotov writes about:
‘Impoverished farmers growing coca and opium poppy to eke out an
unsustainable living; fragile regions and communities reeling from the
harm caused by the transit of illicit drugs, on their way to richer mar-
kets; women, men and children struggling with drug dependence, with
nowhere to turn.’
Fixing the margins? Liberal fantasies, centrist visions
The imaginary of the narco-frontier is a political construct, a work
of representation, which opens up a space for urgent policy measures,
ostensibly aimed at ‘fixing’ the margins. A set of prescriptions and activ-
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International Journal of Drug Policy 89 (2021) 103045
ities flow out of this policy narrative that have their own internal logic,
coherence and consistency. Although the package of measures may vary
across post war frontiers, and involves a multitude of different actors at
different levels, who are motivated by disparate goals and interests, the
broad parameters of the approach are relatively stable and consistent
across cases and over time. Part of the power of this narrative lies in the
fact that diverse actors can claim to be aligned to it, though they do so
for very different and often conflicting reasons.
Underpinning the dominant response is a set of assumptions that
Harvey (2005) characterises as a ‘diffusionist narrative’, in which pe-
ripheral regions that continue to experience violence, poverty and ille-
gality are portrayed as marginalized spaces left behind by the uneven
diffusion of capitalism and statebuilding. Broadly, the antidote to ‘fron-
tier pathologies’ has been to fashion more ‘effective’ state institutions
and market practices so as to better pacify, ’develop’ and integrate these
regions. Specifically this involves an ameliorative package of measures,
including statebuilding, good governance and rule of law reforms, de-
velopment, market integration and counter-narcotics (CN) policies (see
Goodhand, Meehan, Bhatia, Ghiabi, & Gutierrez-Sanin, 2021).
Firstly, the idea of a political vacuum or state absence, opens
up a space and policy imperative for statebuilding, presented as the
top-down, centre-periphery diffusion of power downwards and out-
wards. According to the policy narrative, this involves (re)establishing
a monopoly over the means of violence, absorbing and reincorporat-
ing rebel-held territories, demobilising non state wielders of violence.
This is associated with the (re)territorialisation of frontiers, linked to
the technologies of mapping, ordering, measuring and demarcation – so
as to make society and resources more legible and therefore governable
(Scott, 1998). Whereas previously there had been a vacuum, or forms
of mediated sovereignty, there is now at least lip service paid to the im-
perative to roll out the infrastructural power of the state, so that it can
rule directly, provide core services and clearly delineate between citi-
zens and non-citizens, an inside and an outside. For example the 2015
World Drug Report refers to the ‘need to achieve socioeconomic paci-
fication and stabilization of the areas affected by the domination and
violence of drug traffickers” or illegal armed groups’. (UNODC, 2015:
92).
Secondly, the idea of ‘development deficit’, justifies a focus on ramp-
ing up development investments to act as the motor for the transforma-
tion of remote spaces into productive sites. Neoliberal integration is to
be facilitated though building infrastructure, communications, export
enclaves, special economic zones, commercial agriculture, the manage-
ment and thinning of borders and so forth. The idea is to connect the
frontiers into global commodity chains, financial circuits and regional
labour markets, transforming them into growth corridors and zones of
regulated markets and licit economic activities.
Thirdly, the portrayal of drug-dependant frontiers opens up the space
for counter narcotics policies that aim to bring about the transformation
of an illicit war economy into to a licit and regulated peace economy.
The idea is to bring the ‘shadow economy’ (Goodhand, 2004) out of the
shadows, disincentivising engagement in drug production and traffick-
ing through ‘harder’ eradication and interdiction measures, as well as
increasing the incentives for engagement in licit and productive activi-
ties through ‘alternative development’, rolling out support for the rule
of law, land titling, commercial agriculture and so forth. It is assumed
that alternative development will address the marginality experienced
by frontier communities: ‘Alternative development programmes often
involve beneficiaries that are marginalized — socially, economically or
geographically — from the main societal groups and suffer from poor
socioeconomic conditions. This may involve a marginalized zone within
a marginalized region’ (UNODC, World Drug Report, 2015: 90).
It is assumed that ‘all good things come together’; that the differ-
ent elements of this package are mutually reinforcing and will have a
cumulative and positively transformative effect on narco-frontiers. The
‘vicious circle’ is replaced by a ‘virtuous circle’ of peacebuilding, state-
building, development and counter-narcotics. Yet, as explored below,
J. Goodhand
the former is excessively pessimistic (and reductionist) about the nature
of ‘the problem’, whilst the latter tends to be unrealistically optimistic
about the viability (and desirability) of ‘the solution’.
Frontier failings: when policy hits the ground
The focus of this essay is less about the accuracy, or effects of this
policy package, as described above – these are more extensively dealt
with in other contributions to this special issue. However, a short set
of reflections on the limitations of this imaginary, and the effects of the
‘policy fix’ when it hits the ground are in order, before exploring why
the narco-imaginary narrative remains so resilient, in spite of its evident
flaws.
An alternative rendering of the frontier
The narco-frontier imaginary reproduces a set of essentialized fron-
tier tropes. It takes space and territory as a given rather than asking how
they are actively negotiated and produced (Lefebvre, 1991). How are
frontiers made, unmade and remade through the course of violent con-
flict, the impacts of illicit economies and cycles of intervention and ne-
glect (Ballve, 2020)? Like ‘the state’, territory is ‘an ideological masque
– an edifice that conceals an incomplete and uneven project that is con-
stantly being reinvented and repaired’ (Cons, 2016: 20). What processes
are at work that create and maintain marginality? How does ‘frontieri-
sation’ (Cons & Eilenberg, 2018) unfold in time and space?
The narco-frontier imaginary flattens and edits out the complex-
ity and diversity of frontier zones, providing a set of short-cut expla-
nations for the ‘frontier condition’. Firstly, it presents an overly sim-
plified picture of the relationship between drugs and the wider social
and political landscape. An inflated role is assigned to drugs in fron-
tier landscapes, though drug cultivation and trafficking tend only to
occupy a fraction of the cultivable land in frontiers. Illicit drugs are
very rarely mono-cropped, partly because this would invite too much
attention from state agents, and partly because peasants seek to spread
risk and boost food security by growing food crops for domestic con-
sumption as well as cash crops. The relationship between drugs and
violence, drugs and development is seen as being fixed and one direc-
tional, though other contributions in this special issue show a more com-
plex set of relationships; drug economies may contribute to processes of
social advancement and broader development (Gutiérrez Sanín, 2021;
Parada-Hernández & Marín-Jaramillo, 2021); processes of licit develop-
ment in the frontier may have exclusionary effects that push communi-
ties into the illicit drug economy (Meehan, 2021); drug economies may
contribute to stability as well as armed conflict (Bhatia, 2021).
Secondly, a state-centred portrayal of the frontiers as marginal, resid-
ual and disconnected is at odds with the more decentred and rela-
tional perspective that is emerging from fieldwork of the ‘Drugs and
(dis)order’ project, as well as the rich literature on the history of fron-
tiers (Grandin, 2019; Hopkins, 2020; Prado, 2012; Tagliacozza, 2005)
and their contemporary dynamics (Ballve, 2020; Barney, 2009; Cons
and Eilenberg, 2018; Eilenberg, 2012; Peluso & Lund, 2011; Rasmussen
& Lund, 2018; Tsing, 2004). Frontiers are contact zones, places of
encounter between knowledge practices, jurisdictions and visions of
development and progress (Rasmussen & Lund, 2018: 292). Fron-
tiers ‘can be understood as relational spaces, produced through scaled
interactions which are simultaneously material and representational’
(Barney, 2009: 14). This relational approach has been fruitfully ap-
plied at a global/world systems level (Cotteyne, 2017; Hall, 2000;
Harvey, 2005; Moore, 2015; Tsing, 2015), showing the links between
capital accumulation in metropolitan centres and the dynamics of ex-
traction in frontier spaces, the connectedness and mutual shaping of
these processes, and the ways in which peripherality is negotiated, re-
sisted and imposed.
Centres and peripheries are therefore dialectically related to, and
co-produce one another. Frontier spaces are neither marginal, nor dis-
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International Journal of Drug Policy 89 (2021) 103045
connected but intimately bound up with wider circuits of capital, and
flows of people, commodities and ideas. The margins are not merely
reflective of power relations at the centre, but they are constitutive of
these power relations in a myriad of ways. For example borderland drug
economies shape the political economy of the centre, by providing na-
tional elites with sources of rent to buy positions, fund national elec-
tion campaigns, or leverage access into the licit economy. In Bolivia,
Grisaffi (2019) shows how the frontiers became a site of struggle, and
political laboratory, that ended up transforming power relations at the
centre. The coca growers union helped generate the social energy and
political organization that propelled Eva Morales – the leader of six Cha-
pare coca growers’ unions – into power as the winner of the 2005 pres-
idential elections.
Thirdly, the margins, far from being left behind, are often at the
forefront of social and political change; they are both disruptive and
productive spaces, acting as laboratories of change and innovation.
The role of frontiers as places of experimentation has a long history.
Hopkins (2020) argues that imperial powers ordered and policed their
peripheries by employing a distinct form of ‘frontier governmentality’;
the frontiers were seen as testing grounds for new forms of governance,
policing and development, which could be transferred and replicated
back in the imperial centre or in other peripheries. In a similar way, ex-
periments in counter insurgency, counter narcotics, alternative develop-
ment have been field tested in the frontiers of Afghanistan and Colom-
bia, often getting transferred from one region to another. Frontier gov-
ernmentality then, lives on in the systems of exploitation and regimes
of rule characteristic of many of today’s frontier zones; ‘by looking at
such peripheral spaces and peoples, we better understand not only the
violence emanating from them but also, more importantly, the centres
defining them’ (Hopkins, 2020: 26).
Fourthly, the idea that frontiers lie at the forefront, rather than in
the wake of, processes of state and market expansion highlights the
agentic potential of frontier zones and peoples. As Eilenberg (2012: 5)
notes, border people ‘working in the shadows of legality, creatively ex-
ploit the nooks and crannies that border life entails.’ Illicit economies
are one manifestation of the ingenuity of frontier communities, learn-
ing to adapt under conditions of extreme risk and pressure. In the fron-
tier regions of Helmand or Shan State, communities involved in illicit
drugs have demonstrated remarkable ingenuity, with the introduction
of new technologies and production techniques, new inputs, products
and market connections, the spontaneous sharing of market informa-
tion and know how, the complex organisation and regulation of logis-
tics, the continuous upgrading of capacities, including cultivation tech-
niques, financial services, insurance and risk management, new schemes
to regulate, organise and manage labour and so forth (Mansfield, 2018;
Meehan, 2021).
Fifthly, state-based narratives are actively contested by those on the
margins, who hold to alternative imaginaries of the frontier. Frontier
dwellers’ narratives draw on social memories and everyday practices,
rooted in situated experiences of solidarity and belonging, trauma and
rupture. As the trilogy of articles in this special issue on Pat Jasan in
Myanmar’s Kachin and Shan states compellingly show, local forms of
agency and mobilization in the frontiers, draw upon longstanding reper-
toires of resistance and struggle and are shaped by an amalgam of local
and external belief systems and institutions including, in this case, the
Baptist church (Dan et al., 2021; Maran & Sadan, 2021; Sadan, Dan, &
Maran, 2021). Therefore, territoriality is negotiated and people ‘scale’
the world they live in. For frontier dwellers the state scale is not over-
arching, and does not encompass and displace the local scales of com-
munity, family and household.
When the ‘frontier fix’ encounters resistance
In terms of achieving its stated goals, evidence from the frontiers of
Afghanistan, Colombia and Myanmar suggests that the ‘frontier fix’ has
perverse effects on conflict dynamics, lives and livelihoods, whilst doing
J. Goodhand
little to address illicit economies – in fact drug production has increased
following the signing of peace settlements.
When these policies ‘hit the ground’, they meet friction and resis-
tance, often leading to a growing disconnect between liberal rhetoric
and illiberal practices; statebuilding morphs into counter insurgency,
infrastructural investments into land grabs, the war on drugs into a war
against people (Zigon, 2018).
Therefore, ‘liberal fantasies’, cloaked in the language of good gover-
nance, developmentalism, a drug free world, and win-win solutions, do
not provide a convincing ‘fix’ to the pathologies of the margins. As other
contributions to this special issue show, they frequently have the oppo-
site effect, exacerbating rather than ameliorating illicit drug economies,
violence and maldevelopment (Acero & Machuca, 2021).
Ironically, if there is some truth in the imaginary of drug-intensified
frontiers, then the global war on drugs helped create it. A familiar pat-
tern has played itself out, in which CN measures including a greater
policing squeeze at borders and an increased focus on eradication, ‘leads
to a wider dispersion of illicit activities into inaccessible and intractable
drug territories – deserts jungles, mountains’ (Gootenberg, 2009: 22).
A set of deeply ingrained anxieties, biases, blinkers and blind spots,
contribute to: an inability to see, in a rounded and relational way, the
essential character and dynamics of change in frontier regions; a misdi-
agnosis and displacement of ‘the problem’ to be tackled; a lack of serious
consideration of the distributional effects of policies as they are enacted
in marginal spaces.
This leads to questions about why the narco-frontier imaginary re-
mains so powerful, persistent and stable, in spite of its limitations, which
takes us back to the question of what functions this imaginary performs
and for whom.
The functions of narco-frontiers
The various contributions to this special issue demonstrate a signifi-
cant gap between the narco-frontier imaginary and the lived experience
of frontier communities, who are on the receiving end of policies osten-
sibly aimed at fixing the pathologies of the margins.
This state of affairs can, on the one hand, prompt a positivist response
i.e. there is a need for a more accurate, evidence-based rendering of the
frontier so that policies are aligned with empirical realities and therefore
‘work’ more effectively. We do not deny the need for better data and
evidence, or a more emic perspective of the frontiers – and this is one
of the ambitions of the ‘Drugs and (dis)order’ project, which aims to
develop spatial histories of the margins and to amplify the ‘voices from
the borderlands’ so they are incorporated more explicitly into policy
debates (Drugs and (dis)order, 2020).
On the other hand, there is also a need for more interpretive ap-
proaches, in order to study the ideological work that the narco-frontier
imaginary performs (Rhodes et al., 2021). Why do policies, that are
manifestly failing still have support and continue to be implemented
and have enduring appeal for policy makers? What functions does the
imaginary perform politically, financially and psychologically?
Our attempt to address these questions below are tentative, ex-
ploratory and certainly not exhaustive. Further development of these
ideas and hunches is necessary, and to this end, the ‘Drugs and
(dis)order’ project aims to conduct further textual and discourse analy-
sis, along with case studies and ethnographies of policy processes and
interventions.
Seeing and talking like a state
The frontier imaginary reflects an embedded statism, manifest in
what Agnew (1994) calls the ‘territorial trap’ – in other words the reifi-
cation of state territorial spaces as fixed units of secure sovereign space.
As Van Schendel (2013) notes, the social sciences (and policy makers)
have tended to stand in awe of the state, taking for granted the national
order of things. Policy makers view the world through state eyes and
5
International Journal of Drug Policy 89 (2021) 103045
consequently they see, talk and act like states (Gootenberg, 2009). This
applies both to international and national policy makers, even though
they may have very different conceptions of the state.
Methodological nationalism tends to reproduce firstly, what
van Schendel (2013) calls ‘geographies of ignorance’. This ignorance is
partly based on lack of access to, and data on, frontier regions and illicit
economies, and the inbuilt biases that are reproduced amongst donor
agencies by organising in country teams, their dependence on state-to-
state partnerships and state-produced statistics and data, leading to a
failure to capture and make legible subnational and transnational pro-
cesses (Goodhand et al., 2021). It is also linked to the functionality of
ignorance; the imaginary of the narco frontier elides complexity and
nuance and instead provides a clear template for making sense of, and
justifying interventions, in these spaces.
Secondly, it reproduces a statist language of ‘control’ which under-
lays the construction and maintenance of illicit and criminalized flows.
As Gootenberg argues, states must mystify drugs in order to fight them
(2009: 31) and they ‘fall victim to their own speech acts by coming to
believe in the chimera of control’ (ibid:32). Anxieties about drugs and
frontiers fuse together in discourses of control and concerns about the
transgression of behavioural, legal, social and territorial borders.
These discourses, which generate and naturalise borders, divide the
legal from the illegal, citizens from aliens.
Thirdly, this statist discourse about drugs, as well as being embedded
in a wider political economy, in which rents are generated and allocated
to a complex assemblages of actors and organisations (see below), is
also part of an ‘emotional’ or affective economy in which various actors
generate symbolic capital by declaring moral panics and drug menaces
and being seen to be ‘hard on drugs’. This again creates strong incentives
to propagate the myth of the narco-frontier.
Managing anxieties and displacing contradictions
The narco-frontier imaginary is a political construct and the dis-
course is put to work to perform various tasks including; identifying
threats, allocating blame, displacing responsibility, calming anxieties,
and justifying particular actions, which all play a role in generating and
reinforcing marginality.
Ballve (2020) shows how in Colombia the limits of the state are imag-
ined and acted upon in the frontier space. Discourses of statelessness
externalize and compartmentalize violence as something that only hap-
pens ‘out there’. Similarly in Myanmar a statist discourse which plays
on fears of fragmentation and borderland violence is deployed to justify
the creation, and perpetuation, of a military-dominated state.
This tendency for those at the centre to externalise problems is also
captured in Grandin’s (2019) history of the American frontier. He draws
on Freud’s work on outward phobias and underlying causes –‘the phobia
is thrown before the anxiety like a fortress on the frontier’. The frontier
and the border wall – an obsession with fortification against what’s out-
side – are symptomatic of the phobia, which displaces the trouble that
exists inside (Grandin, 2019,149). The American frontier, has acted as
a safety value, enabling contradictions at the centre – related to race,
class, land, inequality – to be displaced rather than resolved. The fron-
tier is a space where the centre ‘fixes’ itself, though only temporarily,
and often at great cost to those at the margins. In Colombia for instance,
a country with one of the highest levels of land inequality in the world,
the frontier regions have played the role of a safety valve, absorbing the
land hungry and evading the need for land reforms (Gutierrez-Sanin,
2019).
This dynamic of displacing problems to, and the stigmatising of, the
margins – social and geographical – can be seen clearly in the Global
War on Drugs; from the mass incarceration of black Americans on drug
offences (Alexander, 2016) to militarized eradication policies which tar-
get poor opium and coca farmers in the Global South. Both are mani-
festations of a tendency to displace problems rooted in contradictions
at the centre, onto marginal groups, and in so doing transferring the
J. Goodhand
costs and risks of such policies onto the most vulnerable (Keen & Ander-
sson, 2018).
The narco-frontier imaginary involves a process of blame transfer as
well as risk transfer: ‘It also serves to sweep under the rug the complicity
of our institutions and badly conceived drug laws and policies—namely,
global drug prohibition—in igniting the kinds of mayhem that have
afflicted places like Colombia, Peru, and Mexico in recent decades’
(Gootenberg, 2009).
Therefore the narco-frontier imaginary justifies a focus on supply
countries rather than western demand, the role of global financial cen-
tres in laundering drug money, or the unsavoury side of western med-
dling and hidden wars that contributed to the growth and globalisation
of illicit drug economies (McCoy, 2017). By caricaturing drug-producing
regions as spaces of violence, disorder and state absence, this plays a
twin role of justifying interventions in these spaces, whilst eliding the
role that western actors have actively played in creating this cartogra-
phy of violence and illegality.
Enroling allies, mobilizing support
The narco frontier provides a mobilising discourse, a clear policy
narrative around which diverse sets of actors can mobilise. The direct
sense of threat to the security interests and integrity of metropolitan
centres and advanced industrialised countries, lends urgency to the pol-
icy response, increasing the pressure to do something and importantly
to be seen to be doing something. External threats, imaginary and real
– linked to conflict, terrorism, drugs, migrants, transnational organised
crime – merge together and congeal to inform cross governmental re-
sponses to state fragility and regional insecurity.
Keen and Andersson (2018) show how the war on drugs discourse
successfully enrols diverse groups of actors, even though the policies
themselves fail to achieve stated goals. Therefore rather than asking
why interventions fail, there is a need to think about the war on drugs
as a system that ‘works’ for a multitude of actors who extract rents, bol-
ster their legitimacy, deal with threats or achieve other sets of goals, at
the local, national and international levels, by signing up to a war with-
out end. This is not exclusively an external agenda pushed by the US
in particular. For example many non state armed groups in Myanmar
burnish their own legitimacy by denouncing other groups and deploy-
ing anti-drugs and statebuilding rhetoric (Meehan, 2015). Therefore the
imaginary and associated policies ‘travel’ and become entangled with lo-
cal politics. Non state actors mimic the state and engage in ‘state talk’
drawing upon this policy narrative.
Distancing the past, legitimizing the future
The frontiers are portrayed and treated by the central state and policy
makers as exceptional places, where ‘normal’ rules are suspended, the
‘gloves are off’ and more coercive and brutal forms of policing and para-
militarization can be deployed and field-tested, away from the public
gaze and international scrutiny (Guttierez-Sanin, 2019).
The way that violence is sensationalised and often graphically de-
picted in the narco-frontier imaginary, serves an important function;
drawing on Zizek (2010), the focus on visible ‘subjective’ violence with a
clearly identifiable agent, masks pervasive and systemic violence, linked
to processes of uneven and exclusionary development or alternatively
the violence meted out in the name of the war on drugs.
The narco-frontier imaginary de-legitimizes actors and processes in
the frontiers, portraying war time actors and structures as illegitimate
and predatory, whilst in turn legitimizing new post war actors, from de-
velopment policy makers to businesses to NGOs. The debris of wartime
predation and accumulation are swept aside, presenting a blank slate on
which new policies can be enacted. This discourse has a strong temporal
dimension, drawing a clear line between the past and the present, so as
to create distance between the predatory accumulation of wartime, and
a post war period of legitimate governance and licit economic activity.
6
International Journal of Drug Policy 89 (2021) 103045
From narco-frontiers to post war frontier capitalism
The narco-frontier narrative stands as a warning to, and as a legit-
imation of, an influx of businesses and corporate finance in order to
stimulate growth and create alternatives to the illicit economy – a shift
from predation and spoliation to legitimate accumulation.
Post war frontiers are portrayed as vacant spaces, or zones of poten-
tial, ripe for exploitation and development. They are to be transformed
into new sites for the expansion of markets and new rounds of accumu-
lation and investment, though the latter often takes place in metropoli-
tan centres rather than in the frontiers. China’s expansion into northern
Myanmar is an example, with frontier regions providing a source of re-
sources for development processes taking places elsewhere, in this case
in Yunnan province, as part of a Chinese strategy to develop growth
hubs in the west of the country to rebalance the ‘over-development’ of
the eastern seaboard. Similarly in Putumayo, southern Colombia, the
post war period has been associated with the rapid expansion of oil
companies into the Amazon basin region.
Sense-making and cognitive dissonance
Finally, the narco frontier imaginary also perhaps provides a tem-
plate or ‘sense-making’ framework for policy makers and practitioners,
confronted by a world of uncertainty, complexity and ‘wicked’ problems.
The imaginary may quell doubts and provide reassurance. It provides a
clear ‘map’ of the problem, out of which flows a defined set of solu-
tions. Evidently this involves a form of denial or ‘functional ignorance’
(Duffield, 1996), an inability to analyse power, including the political ef-
fects of policies on the margins or the forms of political agency emerging
from these spaces. The imaginary can be understood as a way of dealing
with uncertainty and dissonance, a strategy for filtering out information
and data, which clashes with one’s world view.
Conclusion: towards an alternative rendering of the frontier
We recognise the danger of exaggerating the coherence and hege-
monic power of the narco-frontier imaginary. Policy narratives morph
and change, they are constantly challenged and many actors within the
drugs-development-peacebuilding assemblage do not subscribe to such
a simplified narrative and policy model. Some within the development
and harm reduction fields challenge the narco-frontier trope that securi-
tizes and stigmatizes communities living on the margins. We also recog-
nise that policy makers, at the ‘sharp end’, often appreciate a more com-
plex reality than the narco-frontier imaginary, with its trope of vicious
and virtuous circles, allows.
However, we have argued that broader structural and systemic fac-
tors tend to reproduce and reinforce the myth of unruly narco-frontiers.
In spite of its limitations, as an accurate portrayal of drugs affected
frontiers, it performs several important roles. And perversely the pol-
icy model based on this myth tends to reinforce the dynamic it is sup-
posed to be countering – a militarized prohibition model pushes illicit
economies further into the margins, escalating and intensifying the vio-
lence of these spaces and pushing marginal communities into a tighter
embrace with illicit economies.
As Gootenberg argues (2009) there is a need to reframe drug debates
and policy models through a more wide-angle and moving optic, so as
to move beyond seeing and ‘talking like a state’. Of course this would
mean seeing more sharply the world through the eyes of frontier com-
munities, whose narratives and stories have tended to be edited out and
silenced in dominant debates on drugs. A more subaltern perspective is
urgently needed to inform these policy debates. This would mean de-
veloping policies that work with the grain of frontier societies, rather
than some dystopian imaginary based on notions of a ‘sinister nexus’.
We have highlighted the transformative dimensions of frontier regions
and illicit economies, and recognising this would open up new spaces for
thinking creatively about how policy initiatives can support, replicate
J. Goodhand
and stimulate the energy and ingenuity of frontier economies, turning
them in more productive directions.
But this frontier perspective should not cause us to lose sight of
the relational approach to frontiers advanced in this article. This high-
lights the ways in which centres and peripheries are co-produced and
how marginality is actively created and maintained by dominant groups
and power centres. There is a need to pay close attention, borrowing
from Cons and Eilenberg (2018), to processes of ‘narco-frontierisation’
– in other words the power structures and economic systems that open
up, exploit and maintain unruly, drugs-affected frontier. Going back to
the original question of how to transform war economies into peace
economies, the answers to this question do not lie only, or even pri-
marily in ‘fixing’ the margins. The key function of the narco-frontier
imaginary is perhaps the way that attention, responsibility and blame
are focused and displaced onto the margins, rather than on centres of
power and policy-making. Going beyond this imaginary would entail a
major shift or reversal – re-imagining ‘the margins’ would also neces-
sitate a re-imagining of ‘the centre’, recognizing how the two are con-
nected and looking at ways to change and rebalance these connections
so they operate more in the favour of frontier populations.
Funding Statement
This work is supported by the ESRC, Drugs and (dis)order: Building
sustainable peacetime economies in the aftermath of war, UKRI award
no. ES/P011543/1, 2017-2021, as part of the Global Challenges Re-
search Fund.
Declarations of Interest
None.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the following who provided critical feedback on
earlier versions of this paper: two anonymous reviewers, Tim Rhodes,
Patrick Meehan, Maziyar Ghiabi and Adam Pain. This paper also bene-
fitted from numerous conversations with different members of the Drugs
and (dis)order research programme.
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