A State Built on Sand: How Opium Undermined Afghanistan - SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 07/09/2017

The Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture 2017 titled "A State Built on Sand: How Opium Undermined Afghanistan" was given by Dr David Mansfield (Senior Visiting Fellow LSE IDEAS and Independent Consultant) at the Centre of Contemporary Central Asia & the Caucasus, SOAS University of London on 20 March 2017.

You can find out more about this event at https://goo.gl/UB4hED
You can find out more about the Centre of Contemporary Central Asia & the Caucasus at https://www.soas.ac.uk/cccac/

Opium production in Afghanistan has attracted considerable attention from politicians, policy makers, development practitioners and the international media. Even prior to the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001, fluctuations in levels of opium poppy cultivation were closely associated with perceptions of state power, particularly after the Taliban's successful imposition of an almost country wide ban in the 2000/01 growing season. Following the tragic events of September 2001 and NATO's engagement in Afghanistan, levels of opium poppy cultivation became intimately linked with the performance of the statebuilding project. Rising levels of cultivation have often been cited as evidence of failure of the international endeavour in Afghanistan as well as of those donor nations who were leading statebuilding efforts in major opium growing provinces like Helmand, Nangarhar and Kandahar.

Mansfield examines the reasons why drug control - and in particular opium bans - have been imposed at particular moments in time. He documents the multiplicity of international, national, sub national and local actors involved and how prohibition served quite divergent and sometimes competing interests. In doing so he provides the definitive account of the Taliban prohibition of 2000/01, as well as detailed accounts of two subsequent bans imposed in Nangarhar in 2004/05 and 2007/08, as well as efforts to reduce cultivation in Helmand between 2008 and 2011. Drawing on almost two decades of fieldwork in rural Afghanistan, Mansfield also charts how these bans impacted on farming communities; how prohibition endured in some areas and was even accompanied by a process of livelihood diversification and improvements in welfare, while in others a ban on opium production undermined livelihoods and destabilised the political order, fuelling violence and rural rebellion. 

Most of all Mansfield challenges the way we have come to understand political power in rural Afghanistan. Far from being the passive recipients of acts of violence by state and non state actors, this book highlights the role that rural communities in Afghanistan have played in shaping the political terrain, including establishing the conditions under which they could persist with opium production.