It links these bilateral accounts with increased revisionism in both drug policy historiography, one which highlights greater role and agency to individual countries and localities, as well as with revisionist accounts of the evolution of the UN drug treaty system. The paper thereby utilises revisionist accounts of Colombian-US relations, particularly those focused on PC. Only then, it argues, can a more comprehensive account of the politics of policy displacement within the war on drugs become apparent. However, to fully understand the drives to do so, one must look beyond traditional narratives of David versus Goliath and instead view his government’s approach as a manifestation of complex domestic, regional, and international political imperatives. The government of President Juan Manuel Santos undoubtedly played a key role in challenging prohibitionist drug policy precepts in the run up to UNGASS 2016, arguing that prohibitionist drug policies had failed to achieve their aims and were imposing unacceptable burdens on producer and transit states.
In this rendering, Bogota appears far less a client state of grander US regional designs, and far more an active protagonist both in terms of its own destiny and in terms of the international drug policy consensus.
#Dopewars 2 Pc#
This paper links broader revisionist drug histories with ‘mutual negotiation’ and ‘Colombian-agency’ based approaches to PC and the UNGASS in 2016. Meanwhile, Colombia’s engagement with the UN drug control system under President Santos, from 2012 through the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Drugs in 2016 represented a pivotal moment for international drug policy reform discussions, and one in which Colombia played a key strategic leadership and normative role. Plan Colombia represents one of the most extensive and institutionalised bilateral counter-narcotics efforts in global drug control history as well as an epoch shaping strategic framework in Colombia’s drug wars and its state strengthening efforts. It uses these key case studies as they represent arguably the most significant bilateral and multilateral drug policy engagements for Colombia and ones of major national and international significance for the US as well as governments under the UN drug control system more broadly. The paper’s significant contribution to the field is a linking of the siloed research on (a) Plan Colombia and (b) the UN drug control system, particularly the latter’s more recent history. Attempting to undertake both here would have resulted in a paper that is too thin on both points.
It suggests a further research agenda based on primary source research and interviews with policy makers. This paper is based on an extensive literature review analysis and is intended to chart a new analytic framework in understanding the relationship between member states and the international drug control system more broadly. Further it challenges the idea of the war on drugs being a solely US hegemonic construct rather than a multistate negotiated process, underpinned by numerous social, political, and economic power determinants that eschew simple analysis based on power asymmetries between states. However, this paper challenges this conventional wisdom both on the supposed passiveness of Colombian elites and society in accepting US impositions. The popular and academic conception of PC as a US imposition is widespread ( Pastor 2001 Stokes 2016, 2005). Plan Colombia (PC) remains a centre point of this bilateral relationship and is one of the most discussed and debated US policy interventions in the region. Specifically, it looks at the case of Colombia, long seen as ground zero in the United States (US)-led war on drug production and trafficking in the Americas. This paper analyses nation state agency in the global drug wars.
0 kommentar(er)
