Selective Security in the War on Drugs: The Coloniality of State Power in Colombia and Mexico (Transforming Capitalism) - Hardcover

Jenss; Alke

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 153815109X ISBN 13: 9781538151099

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2022

Synopsis

Paramilitaries, crime, and tens of thousands of disappeared persons—the so-called war on drugs has perpetuated violence in Latin America, at times precisely in regions of economic growth. Legal and illegal economy are difficult to distinguish. A failure of state institutions to provide security for its citizens does not sufficiently explain this.

Selective Security in the War on Drugs analyzes authoritarian neoliberalism in the war on drugs in Colombia and Mexico. It interprets the security projects of the 2000s—when the security provided by the state became ever more selective—as embedded in processes of land appropriation, transformed property relations, and global capital accumulation. By zooming in on security practices in Colombia and Mexico in that decade and juxtaposing the two contexts, this book offers a detailed analysis of the role of the state in violence. To what extent and for whom do states produce order and disorder? Which social forces support and drive such state practices?

Expanding the literature on authoritarian neoliberalism and the coloniality of state power—thus linking political economy to postcolonial approaches—the book builds a theoretical lens to study state security practices. Different social groups, enjoying differentiated access to the state, influenced the state discourse on crime to very different extents. Security practices—which oscillated between dispersed organization by a multiplicity of actors and institutionalization with the military—materialized as horrific insecurity for social groups thought of as disposable. In tendency, putting security centerstage disabled dissent. The security projects exacerbated contradictions driven by a particular economic model and simultaneously criminalized precisely those that this model had already radically disadvantaged.

About this title

About the Author

Alke Jenss is senior researcher at Arnold-Bergstraesser Institute Freiburg.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 153815109X
• ISBN 13: 9781538151099
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288