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Drawing on political-ecological vulnerability theory, this paper analyzes the impact of illegal-drug cultivation and its related violence on smallholder agrobiodiversity in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Oaxaca is a global agrobiodiversity hotspot where cannabis and opium poppy have been widely cultivated for decades. The study is based on 76 structured/semi-structured interviews with imprisoned farmers, harvest gatherers, and former soldiers in four state prisons. Results show that illegal-drug crops and native-food crops complement each other until a threshold of violence is crossed, which leads to the abandonment of agriculture due to murder, imprisonment, and out-migration. The specialization of smallholder agriculture in illegal-drug crops tends to favor crossing the threshold of violence. In most municipalities in this study, however, rather a diversification process took place in which illegal-drug crops were incorporated to food production systems, reducing both the exposure and the sensitivity of smallholders to structural and direct violence. Other adaptation strategies involved local organization and militarization of smallholders for collective-risk management and territorial control. Ultimately, by comparing five vulnerability scenarios, this paper argues that the combination of peasant organization, militarization, and crop/livelihood diversification in Oaxaca mitigates the violent agrarian change associated with this illegal economy, while conserving agrobiodiversity.

The analysis of agrobiodiversity has mostly neglected conditioning by violent conflict and related processes of social and agrarian change. Similarly, the violent conflicts literature has rarely considered interactions with agrobiodiversity, which involves social as well as biophysical processes. Considering their frequent spatial overlaps around the world, this paper introduces a themed issue investigating how agrobiodiversity and violent (post)conflicts transform each other and are often interdependent. To do so, we bring into dialogue previously disparate lines of research and present the empirical and theoretical contributions of the papers included in the themed issue. Based on this collective work, we call for further synthesis, whereby research working on agrobiodiversity meet and converge with research on violent conflict from various disciplines. The papers that compose this issue evidence how an integrative approach is not only analytically beneficial but also necessary for research supporting the sustainable resolution of conflict, the related conservation of agrobiodiversity and equitable human-environment relations.