The Anthropology of Transnational Crime Control: The War against Drugs, Combating Human Trafficking, and the Fight against Counterfeit Medications

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas G. Kirsch
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2011 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 180159683

The objective of this anthropological project Is to describe and analyse how the making of order and disorder is presently reconfigured in sub-Saharan Africa under the influence of newly emerging regimes of transnational crime control. It explores the processes of translation and adaptation involved in transnational crime control in Sierra Leone and South Africa with a view to the question of what technologies and significations are involved in three fields of crime control, namely the war on drugs, the fight against human trafficking and the combat against counterfeit medicines. With this thematic focus, the project alms to make a contribution to wider social scientific debates on African states in the light of the continuing challenge to their authority in general; in particular, it examines by means of multi-sited ethnographic methodologies how forms of biopolitics articulate with performances of sovereignty under the new paradigm of securitisation. Under this paradigm, we argue, crime ha$ become a constitutive social and political category, and sub-Saharan Africa has become a kind of laboratory for new security regimes. By comparing two West African countries and South Africa, and by comparing three different (and yet interrelated) fields of crime control, the research seeks to achieve both an ethnographic specificity and a considerable level of generality that contributes to the objectives of the Priority Programme in terms of empirical research and theory work.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1448: Adaptation and Creativity in Africa - Technologies and Significations in the Production of Order and Disorder
• International Connection: Switzerland