This project is a pump-priming initiative to lay the intellectual and organisational foundations for a larger research programme on the resilience of global drug prohibition.
Despite mounting evidence of failure, prohibition has proven remarkably durable. Rather than attributing this persistence to inertia or imposition, the project develops an interdisciplinary framework to explain how institutions endure precisely through failure. It highlights how infrastructures of enforcement and compliance – such as policing, incarceration, militarised responses, and transnational monitoring regimes – transform crises into new sources of capacity, resources, and legitimacy.
In this way, prohibition not only survives breakdowns but thrives on them, converting evidence of ineffectiveness into justification for the maintenance, and even expansion, of existing regimes. Centred on Brazil but outward-looking, the project situates the country as a vantage point on global flows that reproduce prohibition, given its deep entanglement in both the transnational drug trade and the war against it.
The project’s outcomes will include groundwork for a review article and an interdisciplinary scoping workshop in Oxford, together establishing the research agenda and network required to secure a major external grant.
