Jenss, Dr. Alke

Research on authoritarian connections beyond the state requires a transregional practices approach. This special issue is an invitation to combine critical approaches to the study of authoritarian power by paying attention to spaces of contestation, authoritarian practices, as well as non-state actors and agency below and beyond the scale of the state. We focus on authoritarian practices and their spatial and temporal articulations in (1) transregional infrastructures, (2) global processes of capital accumulation and (3) nature-society relations.

Paramilitaries, crime, and tens of thousands of disappeared persons—the so-called war on drugs has perpetuated violence in Latin America, at times precisely in regions of economic growth. Legal and illegal economy are difficult to distinguish. A failure of state institutions to provide security for its citizens does not sufficiently explain this. Selective Security in the War on Drugs analyzes authoritarian neoliberalism in the war on drugs in Colombia and Mexico.

This contribution combines literature on logistics with literature on the articulation between racism and the securitization of migration. Studying security infrastructures in Mexico in conjunction with the Mesoamerican Project, a massive transnational infrastructure plan, I show how security and trade infrastructures become intertwined in what governments have called a ‘secure trade corridor’ between Colombia and the United States.

How to rethink authoritarian power in ways that better account for authoritarian connections beyond nation-state boundaries? By reconceptualizing the context in which to analyze authoritarian power, we bring to light transregional authoritarian connections between the secondary port cities Aqaba/Jordan and Buenaventura/Colombia.