Ms Margarita Dimova
BA (American University in Bulgaria), MA (Utrecht)
Overview
- Name:
- Ms Margarita Dimova
- Email address:
- marg_dimova@soas.ac.uk, marg.dimova@gmail.com
- Thesis title:
- Dealing with the State: The Heroin Trade in Kenya
- Year of Study:
- 2
Internal Supervisors
Biography
Born and raised in Bulgaria, Margarita has lived on a few continents, trying to deepen the topography of her knowledge. She is currently on fieldwork, navigating a challenging research terrain and mastering Kiswahili among other things.
PhD Research
Over the past decade, Kenya has become the locus of opiates trafficking and consumption in East Africa. Nairobi and Mombasa, already culturally and politically circumscribed by a thriving underworld, are now opening up to the multifaceted ambit of hard-drugs trade. This PhD research project focuses on the workings of the sprawling heroin market in the Kenyan urban setting. Using an ethnographer’s toolkit, Margarita examines the ways in which the social organisation of drug-distribution networks moulds new interfaces of interaction between transboundary illicit economies, local entrepreneurship, and state-mandated institutions of policing and control. Thus, the claims of the postcolonial state of control over its body politic are re-interrogated.
Broadly speaking, Margarita’s PhD research occupies the cross-disciplinary space of studies on order and disorder, control and policing, crime and authority in postcolonial Africa. Its contribution to this interdisciplinary debate will be to elaborate a positive-space conception of the African state, in contrast to the predominant scholarly work that defines it by the qualities it does not have. The departure point for such an analytical framework is a more anomic theory of centralised authority that challenges conceptions of state fragility and binary juxtapositions of the legal/illegal and formal/informal.
PhD Conferences
‘On the Limits of Control: Crime Containment Mechanisms in the Slums of Nairobi’, ASAUK Biennial Conference 2012, Leeds
‘Underground as Overground: The Drug Economy in Urban Kenya‘, Pondering the Political 2012, SOAS
PhD Affiliations
Royal African SocietyCentre of African Studies
BISA Africa and International Studies Working Group
British Institute in Eastern Africa
Research
Transboundary illicit economies, drug trade, local entrepreneurship, order and disorder, control and policing, crime and authority in postcolonial Africa.
