Narco-Violence and the State in Modern Mexico

Knight’s contribution to Wil Pansters’s edited volume Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Stanford, 2012). The essay is the theoretical intervention with which the newer narco-historians (Smith, Pérez Ricart, Morris) are most explicitly in dialogue. Knight situates narco-violence within the longer history of Mexico’s coercive state formation — the “Other Half of the Centaur” — and argues that the post-1940 centralization of state power produced a refracted process of state formation based on negotiated state-crime alliances. The state-narco imbrication became, in his phrase, “incestuous,” transcending simple corruption.