@article{MediationsofWar:Statehood:4817,
      recid = {4817},
      author = {Mondragón Celis Ochoa, Agnes},
      title = {Mediations of War: Statehood, Criminality, and the  Politics of Knowledge in Mexico. La Guerra Mediatizada: El  Estado, la Criminalidad y la Dimensión Política del  Conocimiento en México},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-08},
      pages = {206},
      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. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4817},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4817},
}