This research paper set out to capture the implications of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in August 2021 for the local realities of the opium trade and the diverse actors whose lives are entangled in the country’s pervasive drug economy. Focusing on a narrowly defined geography and period, the paper navigates the uncertainty that was omnipresent following the announcement of the Taliban’s opium ban in the two important localities for the country’s opium economy: Helmand – the source of more than half of Afghan opium before the April 2022 ban took effect – and Nangarhar, the key opium-producing province in the eastern part of the country.

Prem Mahadevan, Maria Khoruk, Alla Mohammad Mohmandzai & Ruggero Scaturro

January 2024

This research examines the impact of Afghanistan’s drug trade on the country’s neighbours, with a particular focus on the three countries, Pakistan, Iran, and Tajikistan, which account for the highest volumes of narcotics that transit from Afghanistan. It explores policy options in the post-August 2021 context, and considers the prospects of and challenges to greater regional cooperation.

Shehryar Fazli

November 2023

This paper contributes to research on the relationship between conflict and organised crime (the crime–conflict nexus), using Afghanistan as a case study. For the past four decades, Afghanistan has been plagued by internal armed conflict, influenced by local, national, regional and international external actors, and the intricate relationships among them. To varying degrees, power, politics and criminality informed these relationships. Organised crime provide actors in Afghanistan with significant political power, while powerful political actors are uniquely positioned to reap the profits of the country’s criminal markets. This paper gives an account of the existing literature on Afghanistan’s crime–conflict nexus, identifying some of the key insights that this literature has revealed. To do so, it uses a four-pronged framework, exploring how conflict has fuelled organised crime in Afghanistan; how organised crime has fuelled conflict; how conflict over the control of illicit markets has resulted; and how organised crime has contributed to the erosion of the state. By assessing the literature on Afghanistan’s crime–conflict nexus, the paper identifies knowledge gaps and suggests areas for future research.

Annette Idler, Frederik Florenz, Ajmal Burhanzoi, John Collins, Marcena Hunter & Antonio Sampaio

April 2023

With the fall of Kabul in August 2021, the Taliban swept back to power with almost shocking speed and coherence. This was despite two decades of intervention and state-building efforts by NATO powers, which had sought to forestall precisely this outcome. This failure of a direct intervention strategy raised immediate questions over the future shape of Afghanistan’s drug policies and how it would engage with multilateral forums such as the United Nations. The UN drug control system will have to contend with whether and how Afghanistan and UN member states can find a way to cooperate over the country’s drug policies, through anti-organised crime treaty and other frameworks. The Taliban’s April 2022 announcement of the reintroduction of an opium production ban has revived one of the key questions around its similar policy in the early 2000s: is this a sustainable and sincere move, or an opportunistic or impossible intervention?

John Collins, Shehryar Fazli & Ian Tennant

November 2022

This research paper examines trends in Afghanistan’s opium and heroin trade and the Afghanistan-Pakistan drug smuggling nexus. It begins with a brief overview of a collapsing formal economy that lends itself to transnational organised crime, before a specific discussion about a drug trade that is deeply entrenched in the Afghan economy and its politics. It traces the Taliban’s historic stance towards narcotics and assesses the prospects of the Taliban’s 3 April 2022 edict prohibiting poppy cultivation and the use and trade of all types of narcotics across Afghanistan, which could have grave implications for a collapsing economy.

Shehryar Fazli

June 2022

This paper examines the links between illegal drug trafficking, violence, and corruption in Central Asia. The research demonstrates how drug trafficking is highly organised with major criminal and state actors participating in the illicit activity. Criminal violence is spread across the region, especially in urban areas, but the Central Asian states are capable of intercepting and preventing illicit activities. By analysing big data on violence, drug interdictions, and patterns of corruption in the region between 2015 and 2022, we explain the relationship between drug trafficking and key actors from the criminal underworld and state agencies in Central Asia.

Erica Marat & Gulzat Botoeva

May 2022

This paper charts the history of Afghanistan’s interaction with the international drug control system and the complex relationship between national–international policy formation. Drawing on primary documentation from US and British archives, as well as secondary literature and interviews, it tells the story of Afghanistan’s relationship with and impact on evolving global drug regulations from the birth of the League of Nations drug control system through the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and up to the present day. The research suggests the need for a more nuanced historical awareness of Afghanistan’s role within multilateral drug control as a way to understand its roles in the creation of the modern licit drug economy and its continued role in the modern illicit drug economy. Further, it demonstrates the need to engage broader society in discussions, to ensure more continuity is built into the system—as relationships built with the old regime in Afghanistan have collapsed.

John Collins & Ian Tennant

May 2022

Organised criminal activities, by their nature, are hard to measure. Administrative data are often missing, problematic, or misleading. Moreover, organised criminal activities are under-reported, and under-reporting rates may be greatest where gangs are strongest. Here we draw on our experience in Colombia, Brazil, and Liberia of collecting systematic data on illicit activities and armed groups, in order to share our learning with other researchers or organisations that fund research in this area, who may find this useful for their own research. We address: first steps before asking questions, common challenges and solutions, and alternative sources.

Christopher Blattman, Benjamin Lessing, Juan Pablo Mesa-Mejía & Santiago Tobón

May 2022