Poppies, Politics, and Power

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tharin Bradford
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Aid ◽  
Illicit Drug ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Drug Control ◽  
Drug Trade ◽  
External Pressures ◽  
History Of ◽  
External Forces ◽  
Policy Failures

This book explores the history of the Afghan drug trade during the 20th century, detailing how, and why, Afghan rulers struggled to balance the benefits of the Afghan drug trade, both legal and illicit forms, with external pressures to conform to international drug control regimes and more tightly regulate drugs. This book explores why, over time, drug control became a key component of Afghan state formation and diplomacy; by embracing more coercive forms of drug control Afghanistan gained greater access to foreign aid and investment, especially from the United States. And yet, drug control efforts continually failed and the illicit drug trade expanded. This book complicates contemporary analyses of the Afghan drug trade, which depict drugs as juxtaposed with Afghan governance. The longer historical analysis details how the illicit drug trade emerged in response to a series of factors, including coercive forms of drug control, broader policy failures of the Afghan state, as well as, external forces such as the globalization of the illicit drug trade. In this way, drug control, as a component of Afghan governance and diplomacy, was fundamental in shaping the conditions of statelessness and lawlessness that are commonly thought to characterize the Afghan opium industry today.

Historians, Historical Analysis, and International Water Politics

2004 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Reuss
Keyword(s):  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Water History ◽  
Cultural Organization ◽  
History Of ◽  
Important Means ◽  
International Water ◽  
Sound Policy ◽  
Water Issues

The resolution of international water disputes demands historical analysis. Too often, this analysis is not supplied by professional historians but by policymakers, engineers, and others who may lack the required knowledge and skills. The result inhibits rather than advances sound policy. Fortunately, historians are obtaining increased appreciation for what they bring to the conference table. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which the United States recently rejoined, is attempting to further sound historical study; and the recently formed International Water History Association (IWHA) provides a forum to focus on the history of global water issues. These developments afford historians new and important means to make a difference in resolving some of the most pressing international resource issues.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 214-222
Author(s):  
James Tharin Bradford
Keyword(s):  
Illicit Drug ◽  
Drug Control ◽  
Drug Trade ◽  
War Economy ◽  
Essential Component ◽  
Drug Production ◽  
Historical Antecedents

This chapter details the connections between the contemporary drug trade and the historical antecedents analyzed in the previous chapters. It discusses how opium became an essential component of the war economy, and how many of the same problems that plagued counter-narcotics operations in previous decades continued to plague Afghanistan during the regimes of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani. Ultimately, the chapter examines how illicit drug production is intimately tied to issues of governance in Afghanistan, and how cornerstones of counter-narcotics operations, particularly interdiction and crop eradications, do little to improve governance, and instead, perpetuate the illicit drug trade, while reinforcing the legitimacy of anti-state groups, like the Taliban. To echo a recurring theme of the book, drug control was, and still is, deeply problematic and ineffective in Afghanistan.

Legal highs offer lessons for global drug control

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Illicit Drug ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The United States ◽  
Drug Control ◽  
New Psychoactive Substances ◽  
Legal Highs ◽  
Narcotic Drug ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Global Indicators

Subject Legal highs. Significance The international narcotic drug control system is facing pressure for reform, as global indicators demonstrate negligible progress in the ‘war on drugs’ and significant harm caused by criminalisation. Initially established over a century ago, the system is under scrutiny for its inability to anticipate and respond to innovation in the illicit drug trade. New psychoactive substances (NPS) or ‘legal highs’ epitomise the challenges faced internationally. Impacts Continual ad hoc tweaking of NPS to circumvent legal regulations will make such substances increasingly dangerous. With no geographical constraints on NPS manufacture, state crackdown efforts will merely shift production elsewhere. Differences in drug stances could foster wider tensions between neighbours such as Mexico and the United States.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
James Tharin Bradford
Keyword(s):  
Illicit Drug ◽  
Drug Control ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Drug Trade ◽  
Failed State ◽  
Opium Trade ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Us ◽  
Over Time

This chapter introduces the core arguments and narrative of the book, and how drugs produced in Afghanistan were initially embraced by a series of Afghan rulers, legally or not, as a vehicle to grow the Afghan economy. Over time, particularly because of American influence, Afghan rulers adopted more stringent forms of drug control. This books reveals that Afghan rulers adopted the prohibition of drugs to foster better diplomatic relations with the US to help build the Afghan state, but at the expense of Afghans who were increasingly dependent on the drug trade. The illicit drug trade emerged, not simply because of a failed state, but rather, in reaction to the abandonment of the legal opium trade and the gradual adoption of more coercive forms of drug control.

Atlantic History

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Geographic Region ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Borders ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

The field of Atlantic history analyzes the Atlantic Ocean and its four adjoining continents as a single unit of historical analysis. The field is a style of inquiry as much as it is a study of a geographic region. It is an approach that emphasizes connections and circulations, and its practitioners tend to de-emphasize political borders in their interest in exploring the experiences of people whose lives were transformed by their location within this large region. The field’s focus is the period from c. 1450 to 1900, but important debates about periodization reflect the challenges of writing a history that has no single geographic vantage point yet strives to be as inclusive as possible. The history of the United States intersects with Atlantic history in multiple ways, although the fields are neither parallel nor coterminous. Assessing the topics of slavery and citizenship, as they developed in the United States and around the Atlantic, demonstrate the potential advantages of this broader perspective on US history. Although the field emphasizes the early modern era, legacies of Atlantic history pervade the modern world, and individuals and institutions continue to struggle to understand all of the ways these legacies shape legal, social, economic, cultural, and political practices in the first decades of the 21st century.

Trends and Influences in the History of Australian Drug Legislation

1992 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 507-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond Manderson
Keyword(s):  
Drug Use ◽  
Illicit Drug ◽  
Illicit Drug Use ◽  
International Community ◽  
Drug Control ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
International Consensus ◽  
Drug Legislation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Independent Assessment

In this article the author briefly traces some features in the emergence in Australia of legislation controlling “dangerous drugs” such as opium, morphine, cocaine and heroin from 1900 to 1950. It is argued that, in common with other similar countries, the first laws prohibiting the non-medical use of drugs were enacted as a symptom of anti-Chinese racism and not out of any concern for the health of users. It is further argued that later laws, which built upon that precedent, developed not through any independent assessment of the drug problem in Australia but rather in response to pressure from the international community. Australia's unthinking acceptance of the growing U.S.-led international consensus relating to “dangerous drugs” influenced legislation, policy and attitudes to illicit drug use. The structure of drug control which emerged incorporated and promoted the fears, values and solutions of other societies without any assessment of their validity or appropriateness.

scholarly journals The Parasites

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olof Hallonsten
Keyword(s):  
Synchrotron Radiation ◽  
High Energy Physics ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Big Science ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
History Of

The synchrotron radiation activities at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (formerly Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) started out in 1972 as a small-scale Stanford University project. The project gradually grew to become one of the first national centers for synchrotron radiation in the United States and, eventually, an independent laboratory in charge of its own accelerator machine and organizationally a part of SLAC. This article tells the story of the first two decades of these activities, when the synchrotron radiation activities operated parasitically on the SLAC site, entirely peripheral to SLAC’s main scientific mission in high energy physics. The article’s meticulously detailed account of the history of the parasitic period of synchrotron radiation at SLAC constitutes an important and interesting piece of modern science history, complementing previous efforts in this journal and elsewhere to chronicle the history of the U.S. national laboratories and similar homes of Big Science abroad. Most importantly, the article communicates an alternative interpretative perspective on the institutional change of Big Science labs, consciously and consistently keeping its analysis at a micro level and emphasizing the incremental small-step changes of local actors in their everyday negotiations and deliberations. Not at all disqualifying or seeking to replace historical accounts framed with reference to macro developments of grand long-term change in science and science policy at the end of the previous century, but rather seeking to complement them, this article contributes with a worm’s-eye view on change and advances the argument for a further exploration of such viewpoints in the historical analysis of institutional transformation in science.

Clinton Certifies Mexico as Cooperative in Effort to Stem the Drug Trade; House Motion to Decertify Fails by Vote of 54–45

1998 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 138-143
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Illicit Drug ◽  
The United States ◽  
Drug Trade ◽  
Secretary Of State ◽  
The World ◽  
At Home ◽  
Transnational Threat

Acting on a recommendation from Secretary of State Albright, President Clinton today sent to the Congress his annual list of those major illicit drug-producing and drug-transit countries that have been certified as either cooperating fully with the United States or taking adequate steps on their own in the fight against drugs. We can only successfully meet the transnational threat of drugs in cooperation and partnership with other nations, President Clinton said. Building on our efforts at home in reducing the demand for drugs, I want to work with our increasingly committed partners in the hemisphere and around the world to stem the supply.

Surmounting Adversities in the Land of Lincoln

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher C. Fennell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sundown Towns ◽  
Almost All

The history of New Philadelphia illustrates significant elements of the systemic impacts of racism on citizens and communities in the United States. Similar experiences are presented in the development of other communities that struggled against such adversities. This chapter examines additional case studies of structural racism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Illinois. In his study of “sundown towns,” James Loewen found that many Illinois towns engaged in extensive discrimination in this period. Such sundown jurisdictions permitted African Americans access to their terrain as laborers during the day, but not as residents. His research showed that “almost all all-white towns and counties in Illinois were all-white on purpose” by the early twentieth century. In contrast, other communities embodied African-American aspirations. Fennell examines such racial dynamics using examples from archaeological and historical analysis of three more African-American communities in Illinois: Miller Grove, Brooklyn, and the Equal Rights settlement outside of Galena.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document