Autorentext
Benjamin Lessing studies criminal conflict organized armed violence involving non-state actors who do not seek formal state power. Prior to beginning graduate work at University of California, Berkeley in 2005, Lessing lived in Rio de Janeiro for five years, conducting field research on arms trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean for international organizations including Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Viva Rio, Brazil's largest NGO. He was a Fulbright Grantee in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. His Ph.D. dissertation, the basis of Making Peace in Drug Wars, was awarded the 2012 UNODC/INEGI Best Dissertation Prize. He has received awards from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. He is a contributor at The Monkey Cage, the Brookings Institution, the Inter-American Dialogue, among others.

Klappentext

Over the past thirty years, a new form of conflict has ravaged Latin America's largest countries, with well-armed drug cartels fighting not only one another but the state itself. In Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil, leaders cracked down on cartels in hopes of restoring the rule of law and the state's monopoly on force. Instead, cartels fought back - with bullets and bribes - driving spirals of violence and corruption that make mockeries of leaders' state-building aims. Fortunately, some policy reforms quickly curtailed cartel-state conflict, but they proved tragically difficult to sustain. Why do cartels fight states, if not to topple or secede from them? Why do some state crackdowns trigger and exacerbate cartel-state conflict, while others curb it? This study argues that brute-force repression generates incentives for cartels to fight back, while policies that condition repression on cartel violence can effectively deter cartel-state conflict. The politics of drug war, however, make conditional policies all too fragile.

Zusammenfassung
Drug wars have ravaged Latin America, from Pablo Escobar in Colombia and El Chapo in Mexico to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. This book helps social scientists, area specialists, and policymakers understand why state crackdowns often backfire, and why deterrence-based approaches have been successful but hard to implement and sustain.

Inhalt

1. Introduction; Part I. A Theory of Cartel-State Conflict: 2. What is cartel-state conflict?; 3. Logics of violence in cartel-state conflict; 4. Modeling violent corruption and lobbying; Part II. Case Studies: 5. Colombia: conditionality to contain a killer; 6. Rio de Janeiro: conditionality, one favela at a time; 7. Mexico: conditionality abandoned; Part III. Conditional Repression as Outcome: 8. The challenge of implementing conditionality; 9. Explaining reform efforts' success: key factors and alternative hypotheses; 10. The challenge of sustaining conditionality; 11. Conclusion.