Speakers Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs George Washington University; Global Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center. Alke Jenss, Head of the research cluster State and Contested Governance, Arnold Bergstraesser Institute in Freiburg, Germany.

The inability of Latin American states to curtail violence is one of the most pressing questions in the region.

This event examines the case of Mexico where a plethora of state and nonstate actors are historically and contemporarily involved in the daily production of violence. Gema Kloppe-Santamaría will begin with a reflection on the central role of violence in Mexico’s process of state building during the formative decades of the post-revolutionary period. Rather than a manifestation of state absence, she will discuss how extralegal forms of violence and intra-community conflicts were often heightened by the presence of state authorities that were considered disruptive, abusive, and illegitimate.

She will then argue that recognizing the generative role of violence in state making and vice versa can help us recalibrate the country’s current security crisis and our understanding of its causes, consequences, and potential solutions.

We then turn toward the present with Alke Jenss’ interpretation of the “security project” of the 2000s—after Calderón’s declaration of the ‘war on drugs’, 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 Mexico (and Colombia), she 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? Alke argues that one possibility to study these security practices is through the lens of the coloniality of state power—linking political economy and decolonial approaches. This way, she builds a theoretical lens to study state security practices.