"This paper is based on detailed fieldwork (now in its sixth consecutive season) to explore the way that marginal rural communities in the province of Nangarhar in eastern Afghanistan experience and manage concurrent and repeated risks - including the effect of the ban on opium production that is now in its third consecutive year. The paper highlights that in rural Nangarhar many of the communities most likely to experience natural risks like drought, as well as risks that are the result of human activity, such as conflict are also those who have over the last decade been the most reliant on opium production. It suggests that the impact of a comprehensive opium ban across the province has hit those communities who are most vulnerable to repeated and concurrent risks the hardest. Where these risks are then compounded by the economic costs of illness, injury or death, or other life events such as marriage, households are left increasingly destitute, creating the conditions that foster further economic and political instability."--publ. note