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The War on Drugs in Mexico: a failed state?

Abstract This article focuses on the continued attractiveness of ‘failed state’ strategic thinking that stretches across policy-making and academic circles and links it to the issue of the War on Drugs in Mexico. It does so in order to challenge, if not reject, caricatured representations of ‘failed states’. Moreover, it offers an alternative understanding of the War on Drugs and issues of state crisis in Mexico. Rather than assume that state power is rooted within clear and immobile boundaries, it is more fruitful to rethink transformations in state space that cannot be isolated from underlying historical patterns of development and political economy. A political economy approach to state space is therefore better able to draw attention to the twin geopolitical processes shaping the War on Drugs in Mexico: (1) the geographic restructuring of the trade in cocaine and (2) the coeval onset and consolidation of neoliberalism.