Logistics and supply chain management are currently well-structured, stabilized fields dominated by normative, technicist and performance-oriented approaches. Classical themes such as flow and process optimization, rationalization of logistics infrastructure, supply chain resilience, global supply chains and sustainability, emerging technologies and digital transformation of data flows have contributed to establishing the scientific and managerial legitimacy of the discipline. However, such normalization carries a risk of reducing analytical perspective, leading to the invisibility of practices, actors and dynamics that are nonetheless constitutive of logistics logics.
In response to this observation, this special issue proposes to explore another path: that of heterodox logistics, understood as a scientific approach aimed at questioning the blind spots of the field, displacing analytical frameworks and opening new, even iconoclastic perspectives. The goal is to move beyond conventional approaches to understand logistics as a social fact traversed by historical, political, cultural and sometimes transgressive issues.
From this perspective, logistics is not limited to the efficient management of licit and visible flows of products and information. It can also be examined through fields and objects considered 'non-standard' or 'sensitive': informal economies, parallel networks, illicit circulations, clandestine systems, controversial historical devices or marginal social practices. Such configurations, often relegated to the margins of academic discourse, nevertheless offer powerful empirical spaces for understanding the materiality of flows, alternative forms of coordination and power logics that structure supply chains.
Research can interrogate the logistical dimensions of phenomena such as trafficking (drugs, weapons, organs, counterfeits, etc.) or human trafficking economies (past or contemporary slavery systems, sexual exploitation, forced labor, constrained begging, irregular migration, as well as parallel circuits and black markets during wartime). These contexts highlight highly sophisticated organizational forms, capable of articulating physical constraints, human coordination and informational devices in uncertain or even hostile environments.
Beyond these different fields, heterodox logistics also invites revisiting more classical objects from a renewed perspective: long history of infrastructures, military logistics, colonialism and resource circulation, logistics of humanitarian crises, or governance of flows in fragile institutional contexts. These approaches reveal continuities and ruptures between so-called 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' logistics, as well as increasing hybridizations between the two.
This special issue aims to gather ambitious interdisciplinary contributions, mobilizing varied theoretical frameworks (sociology, history, geography, industrial economics, economics, politics, anthropology, legal sciences, political science, etc.) to enrich understanding of logistical phenomena. Critical, reflexive and exploratory approaches are particularly encouraged. Theoretical, empirical or methodological contributions proposing original and rigorous analyses are invited. Works based on atypical fieldwork, historical archives, in-depth qualitative surveys or comparative approaches will be particularly valued. Purely descriptive or strictly normative articles do not correspond to the spirit of this special issue, which aims to contribute to broadening the scope of research in logistics and supply chain management, assuming an exploratory and critical posture. It addresses researchers wishing to question established views, displace the boundaries of the field and propose alternative readings of contemporary and past logistical phenomena.