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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.

International audience; This special issue aims to explore organised crime and counter-crime responses through the lens of spatiality. We focus on islands—i.e., bounded spaces that are territorially discontinuous vis-à-vis mainland—but we reject geographic determinism and adopt John Agnew’s definition of spatiality as ‘how space is represented as having effects’ (1994: 55). Islands are commonly associated with the idea of laboratory and self-contained experimentation: this happens in very diverse disciplinary fields—ranging from biology to anthropology, and even archaeology. How their peculiar spatial features impact on social and political configurations and practices, however, is a less explored subject. Yet, there is no lack of insightful evidence: islands are historically used to pursue strategies of displacement, containment and seclusion and colonisation (e.g., penal colonies, detention camps, military facilities). Insular spaces are often built as zones of exception and extraterritoriality (Mountz, 2015: 641-642). The present collection of articles thus seeks to investigate whether there is anything distinctive about organised crime dynamics in islands: what role do islands play in today’s maps of transnational organised crime?

This publication is funded under the EU-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/693337/EU/Good intentions, mixed results – A conflict sensitive unpacking of the EU comprehensive approach to conflict and crisis mechanisms/EUNPACK/

This publication is funded under the EU-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/693337/EU/Good intentions, mixed results – A conflict sensitive unpacking of the EU comprehensive approach to conflict and crisis mechanisms/EUNPACK/