This article asks whether democratization, under certain historical conditions, may relate to the deteriorating rule of law. Focusing on Mexico City, where police corruption is significant, this study argues that the institutionalized legacies of police power inherited from Mexico's one‐party system have severely constrained its newly democratic state's efforts to reform the police. Mexico's democratic transition has created an environment of partisan competition that, combined with decentralization of the state and fragmentation of its coercive and administrative apparatus, exacerbates intrastate and bureaucratic conflicts. These factors prevent the government from reforming the police sufficiently to guarantee public security and earn citizen trust, even as the same factors reduce capacity, legitimacy, and citizen confidence in both the police and the democratically elected state. This article suggests that when democracy serves to undermine rather than strengthen the rule of law, more democracy can actually diminish democracy and its quality.

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Historically, the study of state formation has involved a focus on the urban and national conditions under which states monopolize the means of coercion, generate legitimacy, and marshal sufficient economic resources to wage war against enemies while sustaining citizen allegiance through the extension of social programs, new forms of national solidarity, and citizenship. In Charles Tilly"s large body of work, these themes loomed large, and they have reemerged in slightly reformulated ways in an unfinished manuscript that reflected on the relationship between capital and coercion in which he also integrated the element of commitment or networks of trust-into to the study of state formation. This article develops these same ideas but in new directions, casting them in light of contemporary rather than historical developments. Taking as its point of departure the accelerating rates of criminal violence and citizen insecurity in cities of the developing world, this essay suggests that random and targeted violence increasingly perpetrated by" irregular" armed forces pose a direct challenge to state legitimacy and national sovereignty. Through examination of urban and transnational non-state armed actors who use violence to accumulate capital and secure economic dominion, and whose activities reveal alternative networks of commitment, power, authority, and even self-governance, this essay identifies contemporary parallels with the pre-modern period studied by Charles Tilly, arguing that current patterns challenge prevailing national-state forms of sovereignty. Drawing evidence primarily from Mexico and other middle income developing countries that face growing insecurity and armed violence, the paper examines the new "spatialities" of irregular armed force, how they form the basis for alternative networks of coercion, allegiance, and reciprocity that challenge old forms and scales of sovereignty, and what this means for the power and legitimacy of the traditional nation-state. 1 This essay is dedicated to the memory of Charles Tilly, a valued former colleague at the New School for Social Research and a great source of inspiration during my 14 years teaching there. His writings and insights have stimulated much of my own work on the relations between cites and state formation. Portions of the research for this paper, particularly those sections focused on private police and police corruption, were undertaken with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Rising criminality and violence in key neighborhoods surrounding Mexico City’s historic center have limited easy access to downtown public spaces that used to host much of the city’s social, commercial, and political life. In 2002 a group of powerful local businessmen hired the international security consultant Rudolph Giuliani to design security measures that might remedy the city’s crime problems. The Giuliani plan not only called for restrictions on free movement and intense scrutiny of public behavior associated with the strategy of “zero tolerance” but also suggested the criminalization of certain behaviors and made recommendations for police reform that called into question the distinction between public and private police. One of the principal consequences of its implementation was to circumscribe public access to downtown space. Stated simply, the widening of downtown’s public sphere brought a narrowing of access to it along class lines. An examination of the context in which the plan was pursued traces the Giuliani invitation to the dynamics of downtown real estate development and land-use collusion between elected officials and private developers in the name of security policy. El alza del crimen y la violencia en barrios claves rodeando el centro histórico de la Ciudad de México han limitado el acceso a los espacios públicos céntricos que antes recibían una gran parte de la vida social, comercial y política de la ciudad. En el 2002, un grupo de poderosos empresarios locales contrataron al asesor de seguridad internacional, Rudolph Giuliani para que volvieran a diseñarse medidas de seguridad que pudieran remediar los problemas del crimen de la ciudad. El plan Giuliani no solo recomendaba la restricción de la movilidad libre y escrutinio intenso del comportamiento público asociado con la “cero tolerancia” sino que también la criminalización de ciertos comportamientos y en donde se hicieron recomendaciones de reforma policiaca que cuestionan la distinción entre la policía pública y la particular. Una de las consecuencias principales de su implementación fue la forma en que se circunscriba el acceso público al espacio céntrico. Puesto simplemente, el anchar de la esfera pública del centro urbano conllevo al estrechar del acceso al mismo según líneas de clase. Un examen del contexto en el cual se prosigue en el plan traza la invitación que se le hizo a Giuliani con la dinámica del desarrollo urbano en bienes raíces y la colusión en uso de la tierra entre oficiales electos y empresarios urbanizadores en nombre de la seguridad.

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This introduction briefly reviews the intertwinement of ‘informality’ and ‘modernization’ and their implications for the theory and practice of the city. The editors identify the importance of recognizing uneven processes of informalization, emphasizing the need to compare the quality of state–citizen–market relations more than the quantity of ‘informality.’ In the process they ask whether and how informal and formal practices can help to rethink modern concepts such as citizenship, universal infrastructural access, organized resistance, and the state itself. One way to do so is to reposition these concepts as relational processes involving various actors, spaces, and temporalities rather than as essentialized objects. Such epistemological moves will shed light on the extent to which basic social needs such as the distribution of justice, the production of authority, and the regulation of class relations are not the sole terrain of the state, but negotiated relationally. The article concludes by proposing three epistemological devices – iterative comparison, ambiguous categories, and the use of hermeneutics – that can help scholars avoid the biases associated with essentialized categories.

Historically, the study of state formation has involved a focus on the urban and national conditions under which states monopolize the means of coercion, generate legitimacy, and marshal sufficient economic resources to wage war against enemies while sustaining citizen allegiance through the extension of social programs, new forms of national solidarity, and citizenship. In Charles Tilly's large body of work, these themes loomed large, and they have re-emerged in slightly reformulated ways in an unfinished manuscript that reflected on the relationship between capital and coercion in which he also integrated the element of commitment-or networks of trust-into the study of state formation. This article develops these same ideas but in new directions, casting them in light of contemporary rather than historical developments. Taking as its point of departure the accelerating rates of criminal violence and citizen insecurity in cities of the developing world, this essay suggests that random and targeted violence increasingly perpetrated by "irregular" armed forces pose a direct challenge to state legitimacy and national sovereignty. Through examination of urban and transnational non-state armed actors who use violence to accumulate capital and secure economic dominion, and whose activities reveal alternative networks of commitment, power, authority, and even self-governance, this essay identifies contemporary parallels with the pre-modern period studied by Charles Tilly, arguing that current patterns challenge prevailing national-state forms of sovereignty. Drawing evidence primarily from Mexico and other middle income developing countries that face growing insecurity and armed violence, the article examines the new "spatialities" of irregular armed force, how they form the basis for alternative networks of coercion, allegiance, and reciprocity Theor Soc (