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Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy / 2002 / Jane's Intelligence Review.
The last decade has seen two main trends in opiate production and trafficking in Southeast Asia: concentration of opium poppy cultivation in Myanmar and diversification of the drug trafficking routes from Thailand to China and northeast India. Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy reports.
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy / 2002 / Atals Asies nouvelles.
Description et cartes des itinéraires majeurs du narcotrafic en Asie.
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy / 2001 / Annales de géographies.
L’origine géographique du pavot à opium est mal connue, mais peut être estimée d’après les relations étroites qui ont existé entre la plante et l’homme, et les indices archéologiques que ce dernier a pu en laisser. Papaver somniferum est un cultivar. Ainsi, il n’existe pas à l’état réellement sauvage et sa diffusion aurait grandement bénéficié des migrations humaines et de l’anthropisation des milieux qu’elles ont impliquée. Le pavot a donc migré d’ouest en est, depuis l’Europe ou l’Asie mineure, et ce sont les Arabes qui ont été les principaux diffuseurs de la plante et de ses usages.
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy / 2011 / World Politics Review.
From the early 1950s until 1990, when Afghanistan’s opium production surpassed that of Myanmar, most of the world’s illicit opium originated in mainland Southeast Asia. This is partly because the region’s rugged hills and mountains, heavy monsoon rains and lack of transport infrastructures have long protected rebel armies and illegal opium poppy cultivation from the writ of central governments and anti-drug agencies. Myanmar’s turbulent political history and internal wars since its independence in 1948 also contributed significantly to Asia’s long reign as the global leader in illicit opium production, as the opium economy and the war economy clearly nurtured one another.
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy / 2010 / The Trade in Human Beings for Sex in Southeast Asia.
Mainland Southeast Asia, or Indochina—as it has long been known due to its position between India and China—has been marked by decades of modern trafficking in illegal goods. Illegal trades in Mainland Southeast Asia are numerous, extremely diverse, and most likely increasingly complex. Of course, human trafficking and drug trafficking are two of the most prominent illegal trades of the area: human trafficking, in relation to the huge regional prostitution market it feeds—Thailand being worldwide infamous for that reason; and drug trafficking, in relation to opium and heroin produced in bulk in the ill-famed Golden Triangle. Complexity arises from the fact that human trafficking and drug trafficking can be said to be linked in some places and to some extent, whether drug consumption by prostitutes—and by many of their clients—is concerned or whether economic havoc created by excessively brutal and rapid eradication of illicit crops pushes women into prostitution. However, as we will see, complexity is even increased by the fact that many other illegal trades feed off these two major trafficking activities and their existing, and sometimes congruous, networks. Some of these trades may, at some point, contribute to one another; they may also proceed, to some extent, from propitious specific regional dynamics (trafficking in drugs and arms in the context of armed conflicts for example). It is this great diversity and complexity of illegal trading of Mainland Southeast Asia that this paper deals with, focusing on two of its most pervasive phenomenon: drug trafficking and human trafficking.
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy / 2010 /Harvard University Press.
The book sets out to expose the politics of opium. In particular it explores the world’s two major regions for illicit production of opium and heroin – the Golden Triangle of Burma, Laos and Thailand and the Golden Crescent of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. These remote mountainous regions of Southeast and Southwest Asia produce more than 90 per cent of the world’s illicit opium. The book reveals how, when and why illicit opium production emerged and what sustains it. The text exposes the real drivers of the modern day trade in opium and shows why a century of international effort, and forty years of a US-led war on drugs, have failed to eradicate it.
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