Speaker: Emilia Ziosi (University of Oxford) Emilia Ziosi is a Researcher working on the CRIMGOV Project at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, and on the Contested Space, Illicit Flows, and Order in the Contemporary World Project at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. Emilia completed her PhD on illicit economies and criminal governance in contemporary Honduras at the Department of International Political Studies, University of Milan in 2023. From February 2021 to June 2022 she was a Visiting PhD Student at the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), University of London. Her research interests include the relations between organised crime, the state and civil society, and the interconnections between legal and extra-legal governance. She holds a BSc in Economics from the University of Trento, Italy, and an MSc in Organised Crime, Terrorism and Security from the University of Essex, UK. Discussant: Sam Woolston (InSight Crime journalist, specialised in organised crime in Honduras and Latin America)
Abstract: Focusing on Honduras, a country that has significantly expanded its role as an operational centre for drug traffickers moving and storing northward-bound cocaine in the last two decades, this paper explores the movement of cocaine across transit areas. While traditional conceptualisations depict illicit flows in transit spaces as invisible and disconnected from territory and society, this paper shows the opposite. It posits that drugs do not merely pass through transit spaces, but rather they become embedded within them. Relying on the analysis of official judicial documents on drug trafficking cases and semistructured interviews with experts on the topic, this paper shows the embeddedness of cocaine trafficking within Honduran society and politics. It does so by shedding light on the role that legal and extra-legal actors have in creating and exerting control over 1) the physical infrastructures needed to enable the movement of drugs across the country, and 2) the social interactions that enable their transit. In doing so, the study contributes to shedding light on an understudied dimension of global drug markets, which is the local dimension and embedded nature of transit nodes along the supply chain.
