Workshop: Unmaking and remaking the war on drugs

The global war on drugs has been catastrophic for human rights, fuelling organised crime, corruption, undermining rights to health, and leading to thousands of extrajudicial killings. The situation in the Philippines has recently brought such shortcomings into sharp relief; as many as 30,000 people have been killed by security forces acting in an ‘unofficial’ vigilante capacity since 2016. Former UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial summary or arbitrary killings Agnès Callamard has highlighted how the policies of the war on drugs ‘foster a regime of impunity, invigorating the rule of violence rather than the rule of law’. In the global north, protests by the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder have further re-emphasized the ways in which the war on drugs entrenches institutional racism and is interwoven with state violence. As a result, the aim of this workshop is to speak to how the war on drugs is going through processes of being unmade and remade at a global level, and how this interacts with processes of security, development, and human rights.

Hosted by the European Centre for the Responsibility to Protect and Centre for Global Security Challenges at the University of Leeds, the workshop will bring together a range of academic disciplines, policy practitioners, and non-governmental partners to discuss the state of global drug policy in 2022.

Attendees please register before 4/5/22