Based on the recently published Routledge Handbook of Smuggling, this panel brings together recent and long-standing scholarship on smuggling and conflict. It reflects on research on the topic and asks both what we have learned and what challenges remain in the field. It will connect current topics and case studies across the globe, while taking a look forward at smuggling and conflict research.

Open access version of the book available here: https://bit.ly/3vd0gAh. 

About the speakers and chair
Dr Max Gallien is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) located at the University of Sussex, a Fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD), and a Senior Fellow at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime (GITOC). He is a political scientist specialising in the politics of informal and illegal economies, the political economy of development, and the modern politics of the Middle East and North Africa.

Dr Florian Weigand is a research associate at the LSE and a co-director at the Centre for the Study of Armed Groups. He is the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Smuggling and the author of Waiting for Dignity: Legitimacy and Authority in Afghanistan and Conflict and Transnational Crime: Borders, Bullets & Business in Southeast Asia.

Dr Annette Idler is the Director of the Global Security Programme and Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Senior Research Associate at the Department of Politics and International Relations, and affiliate at the Latin American Centre, all University of Oxford. Her work focuses on global security, and she conducts research on the interface of armed conflict and transnational organized crime, and the implications for security architectures, peace building and governance. 

Dr Peter Andreas is the John Hay Professor of International Studies. He joined the Institute in the fall of 2001, and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Political Science. Previously, Andreas was an academy scholar at Harvard University, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fellow on International Peace and Security. He holds an MA and PhD in government from Cornell University and a BA in political science from Swarthmore College.

Shalaka Thakur is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, where she works on the role of power in conflict zones. She has been conducting research at the Indo-Myanmar borderlands over the last decade, looking at armed group governance, local political economy and borderland politics.

Dr Kate Meagher is an Associate Professor in Development Studies at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics. She is a specialist in African informal economies, and has published widely on issues ranging from smuggling to the gig economy, including Meagher, K. (2022). Rewiring the Social Contract:  Economic Inclusion and the Gig Economy in Nigeria, Hujo and Carter (eds) Between Fault Lines and Front Lines: Shifting Power in an Unequal World, Bloomsbury Academic.