Hi all,
In his 1986 novel Plakha, translated into English as The Scaffold, Chingiz Aitmatov, Kyrgyzstan’s great writer, tells the story of Avdiy Kallistratov, an idealistic young man who joins a group of drug smugglers travelling to a remote corner of Central Asia. To Kyrgyzstan, to be precise, where large swathes of cannabis grow wild in the picturesque Issyk-Kul region.
Aitmatov describes in vivid detail the brutal process of harvesting and trafficking the drug by a criminal group. But how close is this depiction to reality?
This is a question I put to Gulzat Botoeva, Associate Professor of Criminology at Swansea University and an expert on illegal economies in Eurasia, including cannabis production in Kyrgyzstan. We discuss how the harvesting began, who benefits from it, and how local authorities respond to the phenomenon. Is there any incentive in Kyrgyzstan to legalise the crop?
Here is a list of Gulzat’s publications on the topic:
Botoeva, G. (2014). Hashish as cash in a post-Soviet Kyrgyz village. International Journal of Drug Policy, 25(6), 1227-1234.
Botoeva, G. (2019). Use of language in blurring the lines between legality and illegality. In Governance Beyond the Law: The Immoral, The Illegal, The Criminal (pp. 67-83). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Botoeva, G. (2021). Multiple narratives of il/legality and im/morality: The case of small-scale hashish harvesting in Kyrgyzstan. Theoretical Criminology, 25(2), 268-283.
Hope you will enjoy this one!
Have a great end of the week,
— Agnieszka
