Theoretically innovative and empirically detailed, this book offers a fresh take on the ‘war on drugs’ in Latin America. By asking, ‘for whom do states produce order and disorder?’ Alke Jenss reveals the classed, raced, and gendered social struggles that lie at the heart of contemporary security policies. This text stands as a vital contribution for understanding the basis of state violence in the region.

Chris Hesketh, Oxford Brookes University

This book is an extraordinarily valuable contribution to our understanding of the failed ‘war on drugs.’ It provides new and theoretically sophisticated insights from both Colombia and Mexico and a fascinating focus on the role of the state security apparatuses and their selective deployment in reproducing colonial violence and capitalist extractivist imaginaries. This book succeeds in its ambitious combination of political economy analyses with decolonial ones.

Julie Cupples, University of Edinburgh

Alke Jenss’s book—which, through a systematic comparison between Colombia and Mexico, considers state and state policies as producers of violence in the context of the war on drugs—is bound to become a fundamental reference for state, Latin American, and violence scholars. Empirically rich and theoretically dense, it presents a convincing story about the ways in which global forces—the ‘war on drugs,’ neoliberalism, etc.—interacted with post-colonial states and regional and local dynamics to produce specific power distributions and extraordinarily brutal outcomes.

Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín, Universidad Nacional de Colombia