As recent developments in alcohol and other drug (AOD) policy and research continue challenging normative ideas around drug use and users, the concept of recovery finds an ever-growing ubiquity both on theoretical and practical sites. The interdisciplinary studies suggest that recovery is a contested area both for research and practice, while the definition of the concept remains unclear as policy-makers and researchers vigorously debate on what it means ‘to recover’ within a range of social, cultural, medical, and material perspectives. Drawing on the scarcity of research investigating the recovery needs of youth in different contexts, this research maps how recovery needs emerge in the daily lives of youth who have consumed illicit drugs for more than two years. It follows the multiple accounts of recovery to suggest a definition of the term after a thorough analysis of the various recovery contexts, forms of recovery, and assembling of different material, physical, and social capacities of youth living in Azerbaijan and Germany.

The project had a series of methodological commitments, enmeshing (1) a non-standard comparative design following Isabelle Stengers and other STS scholars in attending to multiplicities and dynamic contexts instead of national boundaries and cultural contexts, (2) placing specificities of being a young drug user and dependencies as well as choices relating to treatment, (3) and finally a materialist ontological framework informing relational, dynamic, socio-material practices and experiences of recovery. Three questions guided these perspectives: what entanglement of human and nonhuman actors make recovery possible, how youth make and re-make sense of their experiences, and can recovery be understood as an assemblage? The study argued for a contingent, arbitrary, and relational character of recovery that is not possible to define in any temporal or spatial manner. Moving away from linear explanation of recovery as a straight line from drug use through abstinence, the study instead defined recovery in an entanglement and existence with drug use. Through mobilizing a number of approaches such as ontological politics, assemblage thinking, and Actor-Network-Theory, the study analyzed recovery in four fluctuating forms. The results point that the future of drug treatment programs can potentially be subject to explorative changes if drug use and recovery are approached simultaneously. It is the idea of locating recovery inside the drug use, which could potentially render a closer investigation of bodily capacities, spatial properties, and relations as altogether galvanizing a certain habit.