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Abstract

This dissertation explores the forms of knowledge production and circulation around Mexico’s so-called war on drug trafficking amid the chronic opacity that defines it. Given the drug war’s scale, internal distinctions, enduring violence, and elusiveness of its protagonists, the drug war largely resists being captured epistemically. The dissertation delves into the different shapes this epistemic murk takes and the forms of knowledge emerging from them. Rather than a militarized confrontation between the state and criminal organizations, it frames the drug war as a conceptual struggle over the shape that these two entities have taken in a context of generalized violence. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research in and around Mexico City—a site where discourse on the drug war takes on a self-consciously ‘national’ dimension—it explores how this conceptual struggle plays out in Mexico’s public sphere. By tracing key narrative instances on the drug war, the forms they take, and the effects they exert in their circulation, the dissertation argues that Mexican publics make sense of such a war by attending to the symptomatic traces that haunt its violence. Produced in a variety of ‘genres’—conspiracy theory, public secrecy, fiction, myth, spectacle—public knowledge on the drug war privileges displacement, affective force, fantasy, and mystification. It is, however, in these forms that such knowledge conveys the war’s psychosocial and political effects, which are rendered visible in the ways that the state, criminality, and drug warfare are culturally constructed. These cultural forms, it argues, illuminate the war’s internal contradictions: 1) the state’s use of lethal force against its citizens, thus appearing like a repressive entity; 2) its indistinction from its criminal enemy; and 3) its incapacity to subjugate the drug world’s charisma. In so doing, the dissertation theorizes a feature of contemporary governance that is sharpened by Mexico’s drug war: the increasing centrality of the affective dimensions of political authority.

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