Selective Security in the War on Drugs

"Selective Security" combines critical political economy and decolonial approaches to build a theory of state security practices, based on research in Colombia and Mexico. Different social groups, enjoying differentiated access to the state, influenced the state discourse on crime to very different extents.

The concept of the coloniality of state power in the so-called war on drugs highlights how the “security projects” of the 2000s—when the security provided by the state became ever more selective— were embedded in processes of land appropriation, transformed property relations, and global capital accumulation. Security practices—which oscillated between dispersed organization by a multiplicity of actors and institutionalization with the military—materialized as horrific insecurity for social groups thought of as disposable.

This book "is bound to become a fundamental reference for state, Latin American, and violence scholars" writes Professor Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín of the National University in Colombia.

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