Governing the Mexican drug war : a political geography of public security and the organisation of everyday violence

Abstract

To make a contribution to the literature on governmentality and space, this thesis asks how does the War on Drugs (WoD) in Mexico produce spaces within which individual subjects are formed and controlled? More specifically, it demonstrates how the spatial organization of the northern border city of Tijuana and the aims of the WoD constitute distinctive identity formations and policing practices. Thus, the thesis advances the understanding of how urban space in Mexico has been imagined as a battlefield, shaping the territorial deployment of federal security personnel, and the military policing of strategic urban centres. To make this contribution, the thesis focuses on three concepts that are at the core of the analysis of governmentality: government, power, and space. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis and four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico, the everyday intimate spaces of the WoD ground the analysis of key geographical imaginaries and the spatial practices of security personnel and ordinary residents of Tijuana. Overall, the thesis underscores the centrality of controlling urban spaces for the WoD, showing how this has been achieved from individual households to the streets. In drawing attention to the spatiality of the WoD, the thesis thus offers a critical account of how entire territories and groups of people in Mexico, irrespective of their social class or ethnicity, have become subjects of an overarching project to discipline and kill.