Felipe Krause Awarded John Fell Fund Grant for New Research on Drug Prohibition

The Latin American Centre is pleased to announce that Felipe Krause, Departmental Lecturer in Latin American Studies and Coordinator of the Brazilian Studies Programme, has been awarded a John Fell Oxford University Press grant to support a new research project entitled Infrastructures of Prohibition: State Power and the Endurance of Drug Control.

The project is a pump-priming initiative designed to lay the intellectual and organisational foundations for a larger research programme on the resilience of global drug prohibition. Moving beyond explanations that attribute the endurance of prohibition to ideology or external imposition, the project develops an interdisciplinary framework to explain how punitive prohibition survives precisely through failure.

It argues that infrastructures of enforcement and compliance – such as policing, incarceration, militarised responses, and transnational monitoring regimes – convert crises into new sources of capacity, resources, and legitimacy. In this way, prohibition not only survives repeated breakdowns but often expands in response to them, transforming evidence of ineffectiveness into justification for the reinforcement of existing systems of control.

While empirically centred on Brazil, the project is outward-looking, positioning the country as a strategic vantage point from which to analyse global dynamics of drug control. Brazil’s deep entanglement in both the transnational drug trade and international enforcement efforts offers a unique perspective on how prohibition is reproduced across borders.

The award will support the development of the project’s conceptual framework, background research, and early dissemination activities, with a view to future large-scale external funding applications.

Recent related publication:

Krause, F. (2025). “Violence Is the Heart of Brazilian Politics.” Foreign Policy, 10 November 2025.