Alan Knight

One of the most influential historians of modern Mexico, best known for his two-volume The Mexican Revolution (1986). His essay “Narco-Violence and the State in Modern Mexico” in Wil Pansters’s edited volume Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Stanford, 2012) is the key theoretical intervention with which the new narco-historians are in dialogue.

Knight argues that narco-violence must be understood within the broader context of Mexico’s historically coercive and violent state formation — the “Other Half of the Centaur,” the coercive dimension of Mexican rule that has always accompanied (and often outweighed) consent. Under the centralization of state power after 1940, a criminal order reigned in Mexico based on state-crime negotiated alliances, corruption, and coercion. The state-narco imbrication, in Knight’s phrase, became “incestuous” — transcending simple “corruption” because state actors actively coordinated and became embedded in narcotics.