Category Archives: Drugs

Panel on Drug-Fueled Violence in the Americas

I’m back in the San Francisco Bay Area this week for the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) conference. I organized a panel titled, “Contando lo narco: Research, Methods, and Narratives of Narco-Fueled Violence.” Contando is a play on words; it … Continue reading

Posted in Drugs, Violence | 1 Comment

Interweb Motley # 3

Michael Lima, founder of Visual Complexity, which I follow, makes a great addition to the RSA Animate videos with an animated talk on the power of mapping knowledge and patterns of information. Trees are soooooo last century. (ᔥ Explore) I … Continue reading

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Development-Security Nexus, Part I: And the Drug War…?

The new issue of Development Dialogue has a great line up of authors and speaks to a lot of issues I’m thinking about. Its main title is “The End of the Development-Security Nexus.” I’ve been reading some of the lit … Continue reading

Posted in Drugs, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Security | 2 Comments

The Branding of U.S. Development Aid

In my journalistic investigations, I’ve given the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) a hard time for negligently funding the agribusinesses of drug-trafficking paramilitaries as part of its anti-drug efforts. Right, it’s like “War on Terror” money going to al-Qaida, … Continue reading

Posted in Agriculture, Art, Drugs, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Media, The State, Violence | Comments Off on The Branding of U.S. Development Aid

Op-Ed: Summit of the Americas Post-Mortem

Last week, I published an op-ed on the recent Summit of the Americas recently held in Cartagena, Colombia. By now, you’ve probably heard about it because of the media frenzy around Secret Service scandal (don’t get me started on that … Continue reading

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Geographies of the Outlaw

The word “outlaw”—outside of the law—implicitly articulates the intimate relationship between geography and the law. From the perspective of state-makers and capitalists, the groups of outlaws I’m collectively labeling “Motley Crews” (as a shorthand) pose a grave ideological and spatial … Continue reading

Posted in Bandits, Carl Schmitt, Drugs, Elites, Forests, Frontiers, Gender, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Karl Marx, Land, Law, Michel Foucault, Networks, Pirates, Post-Colonial, Power, Primitive Accumulation, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, Terror, The Body, The Sea, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Geographies of the Outlaw

Global Outlaws

Nordstrom, Carolyn. 2007. Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carolyn Nordstrom’s book is an ethnography about the extra-legal, as she calls them, flows and networks, which she sees as constituting a … Continue reading

Posted in Drugs, Elites, Forests, Frontiers, Illegality, Law, Networks, Power, Scale, Sovereignty, Spatiality, The Sea, The State | Comments Off on Global Outlaws

The Sicilian Mafia

Gambetta, Diego. 1996. The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Diego Gambetta’s hugely important book conceptualizes the Sicilian mafia as not an organization but as an industry that’s in the business of producing, promoting, and … Continue reading

Posted in Agriculture, City, Drugs, Elites, Illegality, Law, Political Economy, Scale, The State, Violence | Comments Off on The Sicilian Mafia

Traffick

Bhattacharyya, Gargi. 2005. Traffick: The Illicit Movement of People and Things. London: Pluto Books. Gargi Bhattacharyya argues that the wave of global politics marked by the creation of Bretton Woods financial institutions provided ripe conditions for the explosion of illicit … Continue reading

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The Global Criminal Economy

Castells, Manuel. 2000. “The Perverse Connection: The Global Criminal Economy.” In End of Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. III. Oxford: Blackwell. [Chapter 3] Manuel Castells sums up the scope, scale, and importance of the global criminal … Continue reading

Posted in Drugs, Elites, Illegality, Law, Networks, Political Economy, Scale, The State | 1 Comment