John Collins

John is Director of Academic Engagement at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, based in our office in Vienna.

John also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Illicit Economies and Development (JIED), LSE Press, and Treasurer/Secretary of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSPD) and as a Fellow at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Hong Kong.

Before joining the GI, John was Founding Executive Director of the LSE’s International Drug Policy Unit (IDPU), a Fellow of the LSE US Centre and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Yale Centre for the Study of Globalization. He has led a number of policy projects while at IDPU, including a British Council Newton Fund Institutional Links grant with the Universidad de Los Andes, examining “illicit drug production and the search for peace in Colombia”; a GIZ partnership developing a Drugs and Development Hub; an ESRC-GCRF project examining illicit drug economies in the border regions of Afghanistan, Colombia, Myanmar; and several LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact (KEI) projects examining drug policy legislative reform in Ireland and the UK. John also led five successive major Open Society Foundations institutional support grants examining drug policies and sustainable development. He has served a number of Advisory roles, including as an Advisory Board member to the new Centre for Court Innovation Project, “Strengthening the Foundation for Drug Court Research”.

John’s historical research focuses on the political economy of international drug control. He earned a PhD from the Department of International History at the London School of Economics looking at Anglo-American relations and international drug control over the period 1939-1964, culminating in the creation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961. John’s contemporary policy interests focus on the political economy of international drug control and the evolving dynamics on national and international policy reforms.