Baird, A., Bishop, M.L. orcid.org/0000-0001-6981-6241 and Kerrigan, D. (2023) Differentiating the local impact of global drugs and weapons trafficking: How do gangs mediate ‘residual violence’ to sustain Trinidad’s homicide boom? Political Geography, 106. 102966. ISSN 0962-6298
Abstract
The Southern Caribbean became a key hemispheric drug transhipment point in the late 1990s, to which the alarmingly high level of homicidal violence in Trinidad is often attributed. Existing research, concentrated in criminology and mainstream international relations, as well as the anti-drug policy establishment, tends to accept this correlation, framing the challenge as a typical post-Westphalian security threat. However, conventional accounts struggle to explain why murders have continued to rise even as the relative salience of narcotrafficking has actually declined. By consciously disentangling the main variables, we advance a more nuanced empirical account of how ‘the local’ is both inserted into and mediates the impact of ‘the global’. Relatively little violence can be ascribed to the drug trade directly: cocaine frequently transits through Trinidad peacefully, whereas firearms stubbornly remain within a distinctive geostrategic context we term a ‘weapons sink’. The ensuing murders are driven by the ways in which these ‘residues’ of the trade reconstitute the domestic gangscape. As guns filter inexorably into the community, they reshape the norms and practices underpinning acceptable and anticipated gang behaviour, generating specifically ‘residual’ forms of violence that are not new in genesis, but rather draw on long historical antecedents to exacerbate the homicide panorama. Our analysis emphasises the importance of taking firearms more seriously in understanding the diversity of historically constituted violences in places that appear to resemble—but differ to—the predominant Latin American cases from which the conventional wisdom about supposed ‘drug violence’ is generally distilled.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ECONOMIC & SOCIAL RESEARCH COUNCIL ES/P001424/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 25 Aug 2023 13:28 |
Last Modified: | 12 Sep 2023 11:40 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102966 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:202724 |