Fragmented sovereignty and the geopolitics of illicit drugs in northern Burma

The study of the relationship between illicit drugs and state formation opens new directions for empirical inquiry into modalities of sovereignty. This article investigates the process of state formation in northern Burma, a highland notorious for illicit drugs for several decades, by examining how the drug trade both lubricates the Burmese state's territorial expansion and coercive control, and undercuts its sovereignty in the highland. Building upon Gramsci's theory of hegemony, I argue that illicit drugs foment domestic tensions and external intervention, and thus bolster a condition of fragmented sovereignty in which the Burmese state's crisis of hegemony is protracted. Regarding the role of illicit drugs in the process of state formation in source countries, we must transcend the debate on state failure or state consolidation and take fragmented sovereignty seriously as the dysfunction of state hegemony in relation to multiscalar political struggles among relatively autonomous, sometimes competing, cores of power.