Lead researcher: Annette Idler
Partner: University of Oxford, Global Security Programme
Duration: September 2025 – December 2026
Countries: Colombia, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia
Bringing together cutting-edge social science with innovative complexity science, this project establishes a comprehensive framework that cuts across multiple geographic scales to demonstrate under what conditions and how governance dynamics in borderlands facilitate licit, illicit, and informal flows and networks and how these relate to the emergence of cross-border drivers of conflict and peace and their effects on regional stability, livelihoods, and global order and security.
By doing so, our research seeks to illuminate the dynamic interactions of the political, economic, and social dimensions of global security: global order, transnational supply chains and local experiences of instability. Networked illicit flows of weapons, drugs, money, and trafficked people span borderlands where authority is contested and that are embedded in unstable regions. Yet they also are intertwined with informal and licit trade flows that nourish local livelihoods and can even stabilise entire regions. We thus need to carefully unpack when and how these dynamics unhinge the global order, fuelling insecurity at multiple levels and across regions, and when and how they can fruitfully feed into the wellbeing of otherwise deprived or marginalised populations including women and children.
Providing in-depth, on-the-ground insights into contested borderlands across Africa, Asia, and Latin America and adopting both a comparative and a “glocal’ lens, the project will show how tailored attention to addressing local governance challenges in these regions can contribute to enhancing regional stability, promote livelihoods, and pave the way for a more just and equitable global order.
For more information regarding this research, contact [email protected]