In the Name of Drugs: Security, Morality and Contested (Dis)engagements in Iran’s Drug Diplomacy With the EU

The EU and the UN have often praised Iran’s fight against drug trafficking, because Iran is the country in the world seizing the highest amount of opium. This paper will discuss the trajectories of drug diplomacy between Iran and the EU after 1997, and the political and moral agendas, which the drug cooperation has legitimized and fueled. Using Ghassan Hage’s notion of crisis as a governing principle it will discuss how drug control turned from being an arena for cooperation to a contested field of disengagement.

With the 1997 reform movement drug control became a political tool to break Iran’s political isolation, and calling for international cooperation against drugs was one of the ways in which President Khatami enabled his ‘dialogue among civilizations’. The intensified drug diplomacy also opened up human rights related interventions on treatment of drug users and debates about state responses towards the socially marginalized.

However, the presidency of Ahmadinejad changed the status of drug diplomacy. As the nuclear negotiations collapsed in 2005 and the EU-Iran human rights dialogue came to an abrupt hold, cooperating on drug control became one of the few remaining, relatively neutral arenas for the EU to sustain a dialogue with Iran. The urgency to do so was further stressed by the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, which also escalated its opium production dramatically.

However, after 2009 drug control also became a much more contested policy field. This was partly due to the sanctions imposed on Iran’s dual-use technology, explicitly challenging cooperation on border control. Partly it was due to a mounting critique in the Western media of Iran’s escalating use of capital punishment (coinciding with the clampdown on the Green Movement and the securitization of domestic politics). At present no EU countries support Iran’s fight against drug trafficking. The paper will explore what the drug diplomacy between Iran and EU has implied and how the issue of drugs, once termed a relatively neutral avenue for cooperation, has become a heated and morally charged arena for mutual human rights accusations.