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Governance Beyond the Law pp 67–83Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Use of Language in Blurring the Lines Between Legality and Illegality

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Part of the book series: International Political Economy Series ((IPES))

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the legitimation process of illegal hashish production in a northern Kyrgyz village, Toolu. It argues that language has played an important role not just in neutralising the illegal nature of hashish production but in transforming the meaning of hashish harvesting, which allowed people to reflexively question the illegality of this practice. Words taken from everyday culture, without negative connotations and links to the criminal culture, are used by people to transform the meaning of hashish harvesting, shifting it from illegal and negative into a grey area, where it could be socially accepted. The ‘grey area’ between legal and illegal practices is the framework that lets us to develop a nuanced approach to il/legality and suggests that it is not always possible to separate the legal from the illegal and therefore clearly demarcate the boundaries between them.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Nasha [hashish] user.

  2. 2.

    Poppies were cultivated around the Issyk-Kul of Turkistan region which happened later to become part of Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast within the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR) in 1924, Kyrgyz Autonomic Republic within RSFSR in 1926, Kyrgyz Soviet Socialistic Republic in 1936 (Djakishev 2004; Amanaliev 2004), and the Kyrgyz Republic independent from the Soviet Union in 1991.

  3. 3.

    Wild-growing hashish was a constant feature of parts of the Kyrgyz countryside. In 1974, 2500 hectares of wild-growing hashish were detected, and, in 1984, the identified area increased to 4000 hectares (Amanaliev 2004). In the late 1990s, a programme funded by the UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes) conducted a survey mapping the areas of wild-growing cannabis plants. It found 8322 hectares of wild-growing cannabis in Kyrgyzstan alone (Zelichenko 2003).

  4. 4.

    Similar patterns of almost non-presence of law enforcement in the 1990s has been described by Paoli et al. in relation to drug trafficking in neighbouring Tajikistan (Paoli et al. 2007: 966).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Roehampton, London, UK

    Gulzat Botoeva

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  1. Gulzat Botoeva
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Law & Government, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Abel Polese

  2. Institute of International Studies, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia

    Abel Polese

  3. Centre Émile Durkheim, Sciences Po Bordeaux, Pessac, France

    Alessandra Russo

  4. DIRPOLIS Institute of Law Politics and Development, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy

    Francesco Strazzari

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Botoeva, G. (2019). Use of Language in Blurring the Lines Between Legality and Illegality. In: Polese, A., Russo, A., Strazzari, F. (eds) Governance Beyond the Law. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05039-9_4

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