Narco-frontiers: A spatial framework for drug-fuelled accumulation

摘要

Based on historical and ethnographic research conducted in a region of northwest Colombia and drawing on the stories of novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this article develops the analytical concept of "narco-frontiers" to help disentangle the confusing political economy of agrarian spaces affected by the violence of the drug war. As socially produced spaces, narco-frontiers emerge through the convergence of four interlocking processes: uneven development, internal colonialism, political violence, and narco-fuelled dispossession. Although often depicted as "ungovernable" or "stateless" spaces, narco-frontiers are wracked by extra-legal regimes of rule in which the state is simply one actor among others. With the drug trade inducing violent agrarian change all over the world-from Colombia to Afghanistan, Burma to Central America-this article offers a spatial-historical framework for understanding these dramatic transformations.