Borders, One-Dimensionality, and Illusion in the War on Drugs

Abstract

In this paper I argue for the necessity and value o f using critical theory to review tripartite politics across North and South America in the war on drugs. In particular, Herbert Marcuse's concept o f one-dimensionality-a description o f social structures and behaviors incapable o f perceiving alternatives to existing realities-is elaborated. Using a Marcusian lens, I unpack key policy documents within the Merida II Initiative, and the United States Northern Command and the United States Southern Command. The paper examines the mechanisms through which particular 'realities' emerge as prominent. In doing so, discursive and material tactics, embedded in political strategies which construct tangible problems to be solved, are highlighted. In the course of prescriptive policy measures, three regulating fictions materialize. First, Merida II is cast in terms o f a paradigm shift. Second, unilateral policies become bilateral agreements. And third, the hemispheric scale unfolds into regional divisions. All are tied in with a historical legacy o f enacting symbolic illusion and a pattern o f thought and behavior reduced to the given system. There are at least two significant outcomes. The first is the rendering of oppositional alternatives as utopian or illusory. The second is the deployment of difference which continuously reproduces North-South divisions and upholds the status quo.

Towards a theory of the discordant border

“…On the Mexico‐Guatemala border, border security has been toughening along the same lines. Southern border security strategies have received US support under ‘Pillar 3’ of the Mérida Initiative aid package, including investment in non‐intrusive inspection equipment, biometric kiosks and technology, facilities construction for the National Migration Institute, Customs, Marines, Federal Police and personnel training in border security (Walker, ). In July 2014, the Mexican government announced the Southern Border Program, aimed at increasing apprehensions and deportations of U.S.‐bound migrants crossing through Central America into Mexico.…”

Map the gap: alternative visualisations of geographic knowledge production

“…Each year when Walker () prepares the syllabus for a course on the History and Philosophy of Geography, we are simultaneously reminded of the unwieldy nature of the subject and its reification in temporal and paradigmatic form. The course begins with the institutionalisation of the discipline and proceeds through various schools of thought with the label critical cropping up following the ‘quantitative revolution’ (Burton ).…”

“…The information was used to produce a preliminary mapping of the geographies of e‐waste. In another example, researchers witnessed crossers at the Mexico–Guatemala border for weeks on end to gain insights into the strategies employed by Central American migrants travelling northward (Walker ; Walker and Winton ). In South Asia, a team of scholars aided by local consultants investigated the relationship between water provision and gender.…”

Narcotecture

“…But the drug wars themselves have not received much geographical attention. Extant research on drugs details the politics of borders (Berndt, 2013; Walker, 2015), public health (McCann, 2008), land (Ballvé, 2012; Hough, 2011), and violence (Ceccato et al., 2007; Wright, 2013), but this relative silence on the built form itself has allowed scholars of security (Hansen, 2011; Landman and Schönteich, 2010; Lemanski, 2004; Low, 2004; Rodgers, 2004) and citizenship (Atkinson and Blandy, 2008; Blakely and Synder, 1997; Polanska, 2010) to drive debates, framing most every context as a so-called “city of walls”: “[E]veryday life in the city is becoming a daily management of barriers and suspicion, marked by a succession of little rituals of identification and humiliation” (Caldeira, 2001: 314). While fortified enclaves are critically important to current conversations over the built form (O'Neill and Thomas, 2011), scholarship to date stops short of addressing the War on Drugs as a recognizable driver for development.…”