The data that we do (not) have: studying drug trafficking and organised crime in Africa

An increasing amount of reports highlights the growing salience of drug trafficking in Africa. Yet the evidence-base for this claim remains problematic. Stemming from a critical approach to social sciences’ epistemology, the paper explores how drug trafficking data are framed, produced and shared. Building on an extensive literature review and key interviews, it provides an in-depth analysis of both the main open source drug trafficking metrics (at UN, US and EU level), and the inner working of anti-drug trafficking agencies in key African countries, i.e. Nigeria, Senegal and Mali. The analysis shows that politicised framings, practical challenges and methodological inconsistencies affect drug trafficking knowledge production, especially in Africa. The paper therefore suggests to treat drug trafficking data – both quantitative and qualitative ‘evidence’ – not as proxies that would reveal ‘the reality’ of criminal under- and over-worlds ‘out there’, but performances whose appearance and disappearance is part and parcel of the mechanics of state (un)making. Anchoring the interpretation of drug trafficking data to the dynamics of protection and extraction characterising parallel modes of governance in the post-colonial world leads to the acknowledgement that the absence of reliable data is not a mere knowledge gap, but a datum in itself that calls for interpretation and investigation.