José Ciro Martínez

2024-2025

François Chevalier Fellow

University of York

Sovereign Haze: Hashish, Trafficking and the Illicit in the Western Mediterranean

Biography

José Ciro Martínez is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of York. He received his doctorate in Politics from the University of Cambridge (King’s College, 2018) and then held a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He has been a visiting researcher at the Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados (IESA-CSIC) and the University of Jordan. José Ciro is also a recipient of the Watson, Herchel Smith, Fulbright and Gates Cambridge fellowships and has conducted fieldwork in Jordan, Syria, Morocco and Spain.

In addition to articles in several leading journals, José Ciro is the author of an award winning monograph, States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022).

He also occasionally writes for a general audience. This work has appeared in Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Jadaliyya, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and the Times Literary Supplement.

Research project

During his stay at MIAS, José Ciro will complete the historical portion of a new monograph provisionally entitled Sovereign Haze: Hashish, Trafficking and the Illicit in the Western Mediterranean. The project explores practices of government and the exercise of authority in southern Spain and northern Morocco by way of the production and trafficking of hashish. Drawing on archival methods and multi-sited ethnography, it seeks to analyze the relationship between state power, illegal economies and the local communities in which these phenomena are embedded. More broadly, it explores how patterns of governance and exchange that take place in the state’s absence or paucity—the political life of one commodity—can illuminate theorizations of law-making, law-breaking and sovereignty.

Selected publications

2024. “Pursuing Opacity: Geographies of Visibility in the Western Mediterranean”, Antipode, 56(4), pp. 1378-1398.

2023. “Bureaucraft: Statemakers in Amman and Baghdad”, Cultural Anthropology, 38(3), pp. 386-410 (co-written with Omar Sirri).

2023. “Ambivalent States: Paradoxes of Subjection in the Jordanian South”, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 41(2), pp. 392-407.

2022. States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan, Palo Alto, Stanford University Press.

2020. “Of Bakeries and Checkpoints: Stately Affects in Amman and Baghdad”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(5), pp. 849-866 (co-written with Omar Sirri).