Living Dangerously: Confronting Insecurity, Navigating Risk, and Negotiating Livelihoods in the Hidden Economy of Congo’s Cannabis Trade

Abstract

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Keywords

• delinquency
• Narratives surrounding the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s rich natural resource base have been largely attentive to the way that resources shape the enduring violence in the region. Current policies regarding Congo’s cannabis trade
• which advocate for its continued prohibition
• exemplify such framings. Drawing on over sixteen months of qualitative fieldwork with those engaged in the production and trade of the drug
• this paper presents a direct challenge to the narrative of violence
• and greed that currently foregrounds most discussions of Congo’s cannabis economy. It reframes the cannabis trade as a response to Congo’s landscape of insecurity