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This thesis locates the global heroin trade within a world-systems theoretical framework. While the thesis identifies some of the factors responsible for the success of the international heroin trade, the primary aim is to focus on one facilitating aspect – global financial flows of ‘illegal’ or ‘hot’ money. Central to the argument is that international production and trade in illegal heroin are buttressed by cycles of economic contractions within the world economy and by a global financial system that provides the means for the heroin trade’s profits to be easily laundered and invested in the legal economy. To illustrate the utility of these approaches in terms of a world-systems context, the thesis employs a global commodity chain perspective and elaborates the case study of Hüseyin Baybasin, a highly prominent convicted Kurdish businessman who has sometimes been identified as the world’s leading international heroin trafficker. This particular case study permits us to examine not only the complex web of historical, cultural, social, economic and political interactions within the international heroin trade, but also how the global heroin commodity chain is relevant to the broader debate about secessionist ethnic nationalism and development in the Third World. Focusing on Turkey, the thesis outlines the early historical periods in which different traditional patterns have prevailed for the majority of Kurdish people, and explains the disappearance of these patterns through the process of modernisation and globalisation, and how this relates to the global heroin trade. The argument thus provides an alternative, world-systems perspective to the more familiar accounts of international heroin trafficking that tend to focus on conventional interpretations of supply and demand and the activities of law enforcement agencies in physical interdiction.