Project description
The politics of cocaine trade routes
As the global cocaine trade expands, its supply chains become increasingly fragmented, with a multitude of intermediaries providing different services along drug corridors. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the POLIT project will examine how criminal actors coordinate to sustain illicit trade in transit countries, and why and how coordination arrangements vary across settings. Through a comparative analysis of two underexamined transit countries, Uruguay and Honduras, it will develop an analytical framework to explain coordination arrangements among intermediaries, including rival ones, along trade routes. POLIT will generate empirical evidence on the cocaine trade in under-researched transit countries, advance scholarship on illicit trade and extra-legal governance, and produce insights to inform drug and organised crime prevention policies in Latin America and Europe.
Objective
The global cocaine trade is booming and transforming. Over the past decade, production, seizures, and consumption have risen worldwide, while supply chains have become increasingly fragmented. This fragmentation is especially visible in small Latin American transit countries such as Uruguay and Honduras, which play a crucial yet under-studied role in sustaining flows to Europe, now one of the largest cocaine markets. Whereas large cartels once controlled entire drug routes and operations along them, today criminal networks operate differently. They subcontract tasks to specialised groups that provide services such as transport along drug corridors, but do not necessarily exert control over them. While these dynamics are increasingly acknowledged in academic and policy debates, they remain under-analysed and undertheorised.
The Politics of Illicit Transit (POLIT) project addresses this gap by investigating how illicit trade is sustained in the absence of monopolistic control. It explores the strategies and governance arrangements that criminal groups establish along drug routes to enable the trade, and how these vary across contexts. To do so, the project centres on a qualitative comparative case study of two cocaine transit hubs: Honduras – where multiple groups control route segments amid violence and institutional fragility – and Uruguay, where trafficking occurs without route control in a context of relative stability and low crime. Through ethnographic fieldwork and judicial document analysis, POLIT will generate rare, hard-to-collect empirical evidence on the cocaine trade in under-researched transit contexts. It will also contribute to scholarship on illicit markets and extra-legal governance by examining collaborations between rival criminal groups and by theorising how illicit trade is sustained in the absence of monopolistic control. In doing so, POLIT will generate insights to support evidence-based drug prevention policies in Latin America and Europe.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
KY16 9AJ ST ANDREWS
United Kingdom
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.