In recent years, the volume of heroin shipped from Afghanistan along a network of maritime routes in East and Southern Africa appears to have increased considerably. An integrated regional criminal market has developed; shaping and shaped by political developments. Africa is now experiencing the sharpest increase in heroin use worldwide, and a spectrum of criminal networks and political elites in East and Southern Africa are substantially enmeshed in the trade. New policy approaches are urgently needed.
About the authors
Mark Shaw is the director of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime (GI TOC) and senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics International Drug Policy Project. He was until recently National Research Foundation Professor of Justice and Security at the University of Cape Town’s Centre of Criminology, where he is now an adjunct professor. He formally worked in several capacities at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Peter Gastrow is a senior adviser at GI TOC. He lives in Cape Town and has practiced as an advocate of the Supreme Court, served as a parliamentarian, and as adviser to the South African minister of police. Organised crime has been his main research focus since he served as the Cape Town director of the Institute for Security Studies, and as a senior fellow at the International Peace Institute in New York.
Simone Haysom is a senior analyst at GI TOC and a visiting academic at the Department of African Studies at the University of Oxford. She has previously worked as researcher at the Overseas Development Institute in London, and spent several years working as a consultant on issues related to forced displacement, urban development, organised crime and policing.
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