Thomas Grisaffi

Thomas Grisaffi is a social anthropologist focusing on drug crops, social movements, and democratic governance in Peru and Bolivia. He is currently Visiting Professor at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, prior to this he was Associate Professor of Human Geography at the University of Reading. Grisaffi is the author of Coca Yes, Cocaine No: How Bolivia's Coca Growers Reshaped Democracy (Duke University Press, 2019) and co-editor of Cocaine: From Coca Fields to the Streets (Duke University Press, 2021).

My field setting

My research focuses on the Chapare region of lowland Bolivia, a coca-growing zone with a long history of social mobilisation and conflict over drug policy. The Chapare is characterised by an uneven state presence, strong peasant unions, and a hybrid economy in which legal coca cultivation coexists with illicit cocaine production. Between 2006 and 2019, Evo Morales, formerly a leader of the Chapare coca growers' unions, served as President of Bolivia, positioning coca growers as key intermediaries with the state. Since his forced departure by a right-wing coup in 2019, relations between coca growers and the state have deteriorated.

My key research questions

My research focuses on how drug traffickers must co-operate in highly complex and volatile environments with few guarantees. Transactions are based on personal relationships rather than formal contracts or legal systems. How then are these illicit economies governed internally? My key questions include: how is trust built and maintained? Who extracts rents from coca and cocaine economies, through what mechanisms, and with what claims to legitimacy? How do coca growers' unions, local authorities, police, and criminal networks participate in or resist extortionary practices? And how do these dynamics affect violence, governance, and community support for illicit economies?

My research findings

My research shows that cocaine production and trafficking in the Chapare do not operate as purely predatory criminal enterprises. Instead, the illicit economy is embedded in local systems of governance. Coca growers' unions control access to land, regulate participation in the illicit economy, and enforce informal contracts, thereby limiting open violence and external criminal domination. Coercion does occur, particularly at higher levels of the trade, but it is often understood as part of ongoing exchange of favours and money rather than indiscriminate extortion. These findings challenge conventional narratives that equate drug trafficking with state absence, chaos, and violence. Instead, they reveal a fragmented regulatory environment in which unions, municipal authorities, police, and trafficking actors work together to maximise mutual benefits. While union oversight has constrained the emergence of violent criminal groups, it has also normalised certain forms of illicit taxation and protection. Overall, the research demonstrates how coca and cocaine economies are governed through hybrid arrangements that blur the boundaries between legality and illegality, and between political authority and criminal power.

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