Paisaje antes de la batalla. Notas sobre el contexto de la guerra contra las drogas en México

Mexico’s security crisis and Felipe Calderón’s (2006-2012) security strategy had its roots in drug trafficking, the prohibition of drugs, contraband and the border shared with the United States. Standard accounts of the violence experienced in the country, which reduce it to confrontations between drug cartels, are of little use. This article presents part of the context in which the security crisis developed, putting it in a historical perspective, and attempting to take a step towards a more nuanced interpretation. It holds that drug trafficking between Mexico and the United States is a complex, many-sided reality which admits dense symbolic elaboration. Apart from the very concrete shipping of drugs, drug trafficking is part of Mexico’s relation with the United States, a register that imbues the asymmetry between both countries with meaning, a space of political negotiation and a resource of American global diplomacy which is crystallized in a clandestine foreign policy system. Furthermore, through the demystification of the imagery that envelopes organized crime, corruption and contraband are examined, conceiving these two as phenomena that are integrated organically into borderland society.     

PAKISTAN’S CRISIS OF GOVERNANCE AND THE RESURGENCE OF TERRORIST VIOLENCE SINCE AUGUST 2016

Fifteen years since joining the US-led anti-terrorism coalition, Pakistan’s response to the challenges of terroristic violence and extremist indoctrination and propaganda remain military-centric and kinetic. Since August 2016, after a brief lull, Pakistan has experienced a resurgence of terrorist activity and violence that has struck all of its provinces and placed its capital on high alert. The re-escalation in the level of terrorist violence began with the August 8, 2016, attacks in Quetta, which left over 70 dead and more than 100 injured. The lack of response from the provincial and federal governments to this carnage, led the Supreme Court of Pakistan to exercise its authority under Article 184(3) of the Constitution and establish an Inquiry Commission to examine the state of the investigation and report on the challenges faced in the struggle against terrorism and extremism. This inquiry assumed the form and substance of an audit of the performance of Pakistan’s institutions and exposed the link between the country’s crisis of governance and its incoherent response to terrorism and extremism at all levels of government. The implications of the inquiry report are both broad and deep, and reveal that Pakistan’s trajectory remains that of civilian administrative breakdown and institutional exhaustion. This indicates that Pakistan’s civilian-military balance continues to shift in structural terms in favour of the latter and that beneath a veneer of constitutional democracy, the arbitrary, unwise, and inefficient, exercise of power by the political class continues to hollow out the country’s administrative institutions.     

Is Narco‐Violence in Mexico Terrorism?

Mexico's drug ‘war’ produced 100,000 deaths between 2006 and 2012. The extreme violence has raised the notion that Mexico has become a failed state wracked by terrorism. We categorise the forms of narco‐violence in Mexico in light of the literature on terrorism and contemporary Mexican politics. Our study suggests three overlapping dimensions of narco‐violence that should be considered terrorism: (a) narco‐terror as a struggle for regional political control; (b) narco‐terror as a practice ordered by cartel leaders rather than spontaneous violence of foot soldiers; and (c) narco‐terror as an expansion strategy from solely drug trafficking to other kinds of organised crime.     

Economic Statecraft,Structural Power,and Structural Violence in Sino-Kyrgyz Relations

Abstract

This article employs the concepts of structural power and structural violence to a undertake critical study of China’s use of economic statecraft toward Kyrgyzstan. The article argues that China’s reliance on economic exchange to secure its strategic ends in Kyrgyzstan has resulted in asymmetric economic exchange between the two states. Through this asymmetric exchange, China has gained influence over Kyrgyzstan’s domestic structures. Chinese structural power, in turn, contributes to violence across Kyrgyzstan’s structures of economy, environment, and society and within the country’s state-society relations. Structural violence within Kyrgyzstan also results in periphery instability and domestic insecurity for China. As such, the article argues that China’s use of economic statecraft to achieve its strategic aims in Kyrgyzstan is self-defeating.     

Official Language Policies in Multilingual Societies: Evidence from the United States,South Africa,and Canada

This paper explores the resonance between Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands and McCarthy’s fifth novel Blood Meridian through a discussion of how scenes of violence are represented and rationalised in these two texts. Where Coetzee is impatient of realism and preoccupied with history as a discourse, McCarthy’s narrative seems photorealistic in its evocation of the real, but this effect is destabilised by stylised formal features and the trickster figure of Judge Holden. It is shown that in Coetzee’s egocentric protagonists the desire for detached power over others is expressed in the fantasy of an unchallenged gaze that conveys a broader anxiety about authorship and the writing of history, while in McCarthy’s text the narrator’s contextualisation of the characters’ violence against a harsh and indifferent desert environment limits psychological insight and underscores the impernanence of any historical record. Holden and Jacobus Coetzee, finally, are shown to be akin in enabling the metafictional reflections of these two novels.     

A Kingdom in Crisis – What’s All the Fuss About?

This article reviews Andrew MacGregor Marshall’s A Kingdom in Crisis: Thailand’s Struggle for Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, a book on how Thailand’s political challenges relate to the Thai monarchy. The review draws comparisons between the excitement surrounding the publication of the acclaimed book The King Never Smiles in 2006 and the recent reaction to the publication of A Kingdom in Crisis. It argues that the book is an important contribution because it informs a wide audience about the damaging political role of the monarchy, but it repeatedly ignores an already existing corpus of literature that deals critically with Thailand’s monarchy. Moreover, its focus on the succession as the key factor in the ongoing political crisis is unnecessarily narrow and should have been complemented by an analysis of structural forces as drivers of change.     

Material Things

In “Positive Bleeding,” I argue that allusions to blood in contemporary South African art and literature fruitfully link myriad stigmatized experiences and embodiments of self usually considered taboo, including HIV/AIDS, female sexuality, menstruation, and sexual violence. Through Mlu Zondi’s and Ntando Cele’s dance performance piece Silhouette (2005), Zanele Muholi’s mischievous and haunting photographic Period series (2006), and Makhosozana Xaba’s revisionist short story “Inside” (2008), blood is defiantly transformed from a remnant of personal and historic trauma into that which incites female–female pleasure and eroticism. I contend that the politics of visibility operate uncomfortably within all four texts; blood serves as both a reminder of and departure from sensationalized images of violence against lesbians.     

东亚经济地区主义的终结?——制度过剩与经济整合的困境

冷战结束以来,东亚的经济地区主义虽然取得了一些进展,但至今仍然没有发展出一个成熟稳定的区域制度框架来推动区域经济进行深度整合。该地区多重制度框架相互竞争,造成了一种"制度过剩"的特殊格局。这导致东亚地区在经济整合的过程中,缺乏有力的制度推动和有效的区域治理,具体表现为该地区至今仍难以建立有助于提高经济绩效的经济要素完全自由流动的统一经济区;难以采取集体行动,共同应对来自外部的各种经济风险和冲击。本文认为,东亚地区多重制度竞争的背后,是由于与该区域相关的主要行为体对塑造东亚经济秩序有着不同的利益偏好和战略诉求,他们各自极力推动对自身有利的区域机制,从而形成"制度过剩"。主要行为体在东亚的主导权竞争以区域制度竞争的形式展开。随着金融危机之后中国经济的加速崛起以及美国决心重返东亚,东亚经济整合中制衡与反制衡的矛盾将日益突出,从而带来更加激烈的制度竞争,这是东亚经济地区主义遭遇挫折而非取得成功的标志,东亚地区将因此继续沦为经济全球化进程中的"碎片"。     

Legal Inequality and Federalism: Domestic Violence Laws in the Argentine Provinces

This article shows that the institutional design of Argentine federalism allows for differences in the protective scope of the provincial domestic violence laws. It holds that the broad legislative capacities of subnational districts enable the working of political and social local factors, which, in turn, determine heterogeneity in these laws’ protective scope. It analyzes, compares, and measures 37 laws on domestic violence sanctioned between 1992 and 2009. It advances a methodology to measure their differences and it evaluates the impact local factors have on legal variations across jurisdictions. The article shows that the protective scope of these laws is determined by the intensity of the local electoral competition and by the strength of women's organizational capacity. Results also show that time matters insofar as it allows for the diffusion of more protective laws.     

Undemocratic Democracy: Venezuela and the Distorting of History

President Hugo Chávez has been the subject of much frenzied comment, as much at academic conferences as in the press. Criticism has been to a great degree personalised against his very visible public profile. The crisis of democracy in Venezuela has been widely ascribed to faults committed by the traditional parties since the early 1980s and reflected in the coterminous rise in crime and violence. Support for Chávez, or even objective comment, has been at a premium. This article looks at the crisis of democracy across a wider timescale and sees the ‘most stable democracy in Latin America’ to have been deeply flawed from the outset. It reflects an earlier propaganda campaign, similarly short on meaningful analysis, aimed at undermining the popularity of a previous unconventional leader of Venezuela, Marcos Pérez Jiménez. It is claimed that Venezuelans want to preserve democracy but are also ready to support military coups to oust corrupt or inefficient politicians. Is Chávez merely representative of transient anti‐party feeling or could the history of Venezuelan democracy have caused a more fundamental change in relationships between the mass of the people and their leader?     

Ambitious Goals,Deficient Output: Tax and Fiscal Policies of the Conservative–Liberal Government, 2009–13

Tax policy was at the heart of the Merkel II government's reform agenda. The CDU/CSU and FDP promised significant tax cuts and simplifications of the tax system. During their term, however, they remained the least active of all German governments of the last four decades. Why? This article argues that a combination of factors relating to the dynamics of electoral competition and structural problem pressure can explain this outcome: The new constitutional debt brake and the Euro Crisis foreclosed the traditional ‘solution’ of glossing over the conflict within the coalition between its economically liberal constituency (FDP and parts of CDU/CSU) and pro-welfare state constituency (other parts of CDU/CSU) by combining tax reductions with continued high spending. The result was a devastating loss for the FDP in the 2013 elections, and a victory for the CDU/CSU which profited from positioning itself as a moderate and stabilising political force in uncertain times of crisis.     

Inscriptions of Violence in Northern Yemen: Haunting Histories,Unstable Moral Spaces

The article investigates the so-called ‘Huthi crisis’ in northern Yemen, centering on the recent confrontation between Zaydi Shi‘is and the government. The crisis is analysed in the context of local contestations over moral authority and regional developments since the late 1970s. The article shows how regional and global dynamics, notably Cold War strategic alliances, Saudi Arabia's aspirations to contain Shi‘ism on the Arabian Peninsula and American security concerns since 2001, have impacted local politics and configurations of power. The article argues that anxieties over the past remain, against the backdrop of the politicisation and repression of the Zaydi revivalist movement, depicted by the government as aiming to restore the imamate. The government was open to accusations of ambivalence towards Sunni militants, by using them alongside the army and giving them positions of power while at the same time claiming to counter their influence. Action against the Zaydis established its credentials in the ‘war on terror.’     

Drugs Around the Corner: Domestic Drug Markets and Violence in Colombia and Mexico

Over the past decade, drug consumption has increased in Colombia and Mexico, countries traditionally concerned with drug production and trafficking. Governments and observers have associated this growth with spikes in violence. Drawing on drug consumption surveys and fieldwork in four cities, this study argues that contrary to this perception, there is no automatic connection between domestic drug markets and violence. Violence depends on whether large drug‐trafficking organizations (DTOs) control low‐level street dealers and on whether those DTOs have a market monopoly at the local level. When dealers are independent, violence might be sporadic, but when DTOs control dealers, violence can explode (given competition between DTOs) or implode (if one organization holds a monopoly). Control over dealers provides DTOs not only income but also informants and armed muscle. This article also shows that domestic drug markets are not new, and have grown incrementally in the past two decades.     

特朗普时期美朝关系变化轨迹与未来走向

特朗普就任美国总统以来,美朝关系经历了对抗与危机时期、缓和与蜜月时期以及僵持时期三个阶段。在对抗与危机时期,美国对朝采取经济制裁、军事演习等极限施压举措;在缓和与蜜月时期,美国对朝采取首脑峰会、工作磋商的接触政策;在僵持时期,美国对朝"谈压并举"。新冠肺炎疫情也没有给美朝关系改善提供机会之窗。而贯穿始终的是美国对朝制裁毫不放松。特朗普本人及其幕僚对奥巴马政府的对朝政策十分不满,积极应对突飞猛进的朝鲜核导技术,掌握在东北亚地缘战略竞争中的主导权。这成为特朗普政府对朝政策的动因。特朗普政府对朝政策推动了无核化谈判的展开和朝鲜半岛局势的缓和,但美朝无核化谈判依然陷入梗阻。     

Social Darwinism as History and Reality: “Competition” and “The Weak” in Early Twentieth-Century Korea

ABSTRACT

By the time of Korea’s forced integration into the Japanese Empire in 1910, Social Darwinism was established as the main reference frame for the modernizing intellectual elite. The weak had only themselves to blame for their misfortune, and Korea, if it wished to succeed in collective survival in the modern world’s Darwinist jungles, had to strengthen itself. This mode of thinking was inherited by the right-wing nationalists in the 1920s–1930s; their programs of “national reconstruction” (minjok kaejo) aimed at remaking weak Korea into a “fitter” nation, thus preparing for the eventual independence from the Japanese. At the same time, in the 1920s and 1930s some nationalists appropriated the slogan of solidarity and protection of the weak, nationally and internationally, in the course of their competition against the Left. After liberation from Japanese colonialism in 1945, “competition” mostly referred to inter-state competition in South Korean right-wing discourse. However, the neo-liberal age after the 1997 Asian financial crisis witnessed a new discursive shift, competition-driven society being now the core of the mainstream agenda.     

Courting the Voters? Policy Implications of Party Competition for the Reform Output of the Second Merkel Government

Understanding party competition as a ‘political market’, we explore its characteristics during the second Merkel government, 2009–13. On the demand side, analysing opinion polls and the Länder election results, we find that the outcome of the next Bundestag election was uncertain. Thus, electoral competition was likely to be intense. On the supply side, opposition parties presented credible alternatives to government policies with regard to social as well as environmental policy. Regarding the Euro crisis, however, a consensus across the established parties existed. Studying three of the most salient policy issues, we identify party competition as a crucial determinant of decision-making. While the debate on minimum wages was substantially shaped by party competition, resulting in ‘anticipatory obedience’, nuclear energy only became affected by electoral considerations after the ‘Fukushima shock’ which resulted in a major policy shift. Regarding the response to the Euro crisis, however, party competition was essentially suspended.     

Excessive Use of Deadly Force by Police in the Philippines Before Duterte

ABSTRACT

Under President Duterte the Philippine National Police have killed several thousand suspects in so-called legitimate encounters. While this has engendered much media attention and scientific research, earlier police violence is still a black-box in many respects. This article provides at least a partial filling of this void. It establishes several indicators for measuring lethal police violence. Moreover, it presents a detailed mapping of regional and sub-regional patterns of armed police encounters for the decade from 2006 to 2015. The spatial and temporal comparisons show that even though actual levels of deadly police violence have been quite low in several Philippine provinces and cities, the Philippine National Police almost always shot to kill suspects and not to incapacitate them. While there was significant variation over time and between sub-national units, neither the magnitude nor the levels of lethality of the violence are related to the threat levels to which the police officers were exposed.     

The crisis in Somalia: Tragedy in five acts

Somalia's catastrophic humanitarian crisis of 2007, in whichup to 300,000 Mogadishu residents were displaced in fightingpitting Ethiopian and Transitional Federal Government (TFG)forces against a complex insurgency of clan and Islamist opposition,was the culmination of a series of political miscalculationsand misjudgements on the part of Somali and external actorssince 2004. They resulted in a cascading sequence of politicalcrises which plunged Somalia into increasingly intractable conflicts.This ‘tragedy in five acts’ includes the flawedcreation of the TFG in late 2004, which emerged as a narrowcoalition rather than a government of national unity; the failureof a promising civic movement in Mogadishu in summer of 2005to challenge the power base of warlords and Islamists in thecapital; the disastrous decision by the US government to encouragean alliance between its local counter-terrorism partners inMogadishu, producing a war which led to the victory of the Councilof Islamic Courts (CIC) in June 2006; the radicalization ofthe CIC over the course of 2006, which guaranteed a war withEthiopia; and the Ethiopian offensive against the CIC in late2006, leading to its occupation of the capital, a complex insurgencyagainst Ethiopian forces and armed violence which produced whatthe UN described as a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’.In virtually every instance, key actors took decisions thatproduced unintended outcomes which harmed rather than advancedtheir interests, and at a cost in human lives and destructionof property that continues to mount.     

From neighbours to deadly enemies: excavating landscapes of territoriality and ethnic violence in Jos,Nigeria

Jos, a central Nigerian city engulfed by deadly violence in September 2001, offers a unique case study for exploring what happens when a modern metropolis lacks the institutional capacity to regulate its competing groups, and latent rivalries ignite into widespread, systematic brutality. Emerging from combined political and cultural dynamics radically different from those of better-known examples, such as Jerusalem and Belfast, Jos provides fresh insights into the roles of group concentration and conflict framing in engendering territoriality and violence in the city. As this paper shows, Jos’ colonial history in tin mining, waves of migration, and an urban policy of sociospatial differentiation have shaped and intersected with the contemporary politics of ethnicity to foster explosive relations between Christians and Muslims. Building on literature and primary data from interviews and discussions with surviving residents, the paper explicates how group geography and conflict became so entangled, leading to the so-called ‘Jos crisis’.     

Outsourcing state violence: The National Defence Force, ‘stateness’ and regime resilience in the Syrian war

This article engages with and contributes to a nascent debate on state-sponsored militias by way of an analysis of the formation and deployment of the Syrian regime’s National Defence Force (NDF). This militia emerged from the regime’s rich repertoire in outsourcing violence and allowing ‘heterarchical orders’ to serve regime maintenance purposes at home and abroad. During the Syrian war (2011–…), the key rationale for using such militias is primarily to address manpower shortages. For an important but limited period, the NDF served this goal well as it contributed to the regime’s military advances. The regime’s devolution of its violence to militias including the NDF brought about a sharp contraction of its ‘stateness’ but this did not constitute ‘state failure’ or its collapse. In this context, the regime’s elaborate measures to manage or counter the risks and downsides of deploying non-state militias such as the NDF underscore its general adaptability in its authoritarian governance.