PhD Project Outline

Within the field of counter-narcotics policy, the PhD project focuses on supply reduction strategies. Supply reduction strategies can be divided in two categories: policies referred to as "sticks" (law enforcement, interdiction, crop eradication, etc.) and policies referred to as "carrots" (alternative livelihood strategies, rural development, micro-credit and other support strategies for farming communities).

My PhD will focus mainly on the latter category, and will try to assess the role and impact of trade and economic development policies at the following levels:

At the local level, I will investigate what the impact is of national and international trade and development policies on the geographic areas where these are applied (Colombia or a region of Colombia; this is to be determined).

On the national level, I will investigate how these policies affect neighbouring regions and the country at large.

Finally, at the international level, I will investigate the impact of the trade and development policies within 1) the broader framework of international drug policy and 2) international trade.

In sum, the research focuses on the micro-level, but intends to analyse effects that go beyond the geographical region of study (onto the macro-level). This international analysis is necessary as, of course, it does not make sense to solely study the local or national effects when we are faced with a problem of a truly global nature, and the past has shown that gains in terms of counter-narcotics objectives can easily be offset by higher cultivation or production levels in other regions or other countries.

The principle of shared responsibility

The guiding principle of the PhD research will be the principle of shared responsibility, which in the context of this research can be considered as a moral and motivating link between, on the one hand, agreement among states on the need for a comprehensive or balanced approach as the only viable way to rein in the illegal drug economy, and on the other, the actions of the states and the international community at large in the realm of trade and development to counter the supply of illicit drugs.

Methodology

For my research, I intend to combine desk research with a field research period in Colombia. Using recent literature on the political economy of the international drug trade and on economic development and international trade theory in general, I will first construct a theoretical framework for my PhD thesis. Subsequently, I will gather information on existing programmes that are put in place in Colombia, and in particular two Colombian regions that I will select for my research. I am currently identifying which two regions would be most interesting, in terms of combining high levels of coca cultivation (whether in the past or present) with high investment in alternative development and other rural development programmes.

After that, I will prepare three field research visits to Colombia (academic year 2011/2012) by identifying the key data that I would need to assess the impact of trade and development policy on the two regions that I will visit. This will also include constructing a semi-structured, qualitative questionnaire that I will use when approaching people working within the relevant programmes implemented in the selected region(s). The specific projects and regions that I will visit will be selected with help of the Colombian government (Acción Social) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Bogotá.

Delimitations of the research

I will limit the research to the period between the United Nations Special Session of the General Assembly (UNGASS) on drugs of June 1998 to the election of President Juan Manuel Santos Calderón on August 2010. I will also limit the case study of Colombia to projects related to the product of cocoa within this period.

Academic trajectory

In 2008 I moved from Paris to Valencia to start my PhD trajectory within the "La Europa de las Libertades" programme of the Department of Constitutional Law and Political Science at Valencia University, Spain.

The title of my PhD Research Project is "The role of trade and economic development policies in reducing the supply of illicit drugs in Colombia". My tutor is Professor Carlos Flores Juberías, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Valencia.

In the first academic year (2008/2009), I enrolled in seven preparatory courses and wrote six corresponding research papers.

In the second academic year (2009/2010), I investigated and wrote a 154-pages research paper (the "Trabajo de Investigación") about the Turkish model of opium licensing as an example of a pragmatic way to deal with illegal poppy cultivation and opium production. This research paper was partly based on a field research visit to Ankara and the opium-growing region of Afyon in Western Turkey (July 2009). The aim of the research paper is to further develop your research and writing skills in preparation of the final phase of the PhD: the actual research on my final thesis.

In my third academic year (2010/2011) I conducted research as Visiting PhD Research Scholar at the Faculty of Sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE). At LSE, I received a lot of feedback on my research proposal, and fine-tuned both my research methodology and field research plan.

In my fourth academic year (2011/2012), I will conduct the field research in Colombia. I will normally move to Colombia at the end of 2011 to start the field research part of my PhD project which is intended to last at least six month, divided over three visits to Colombia. After that I will return to Valencia to finsh a first full draft of my thesis.

Full circle

In a way, the topic of my PhD brings me back to 2001 when I was an assistant to the Supply Reduction and Law Enforcement Section (SRLES) at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna. I investigated the potential of fair trade branding for products that were part of alternative livelihood programmes in Peru. At that time, I also participated in the 2002 Feldafing Conference on the Role of Alternative Development in Drug Control and Development Cooperation, where I helped to organise and run an information market displaying and selling all types of alternative products stemming from programmes in countries such as Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. This further sparked my interests in the trade and development aspects of the international drug problem. My internship at UNODC and the Feldafing Conference have undoubtedly played a substantial role in choosing the topic for my final thesis about ten years later.