Neoliberal globalization and the war on drugs: Transnationalizing illiberal governance in the Americas

Abstract

The augmentation of the state's “illiberal” capacity to govern in the Americas has occurred in tandem with the rolling back of its capacity to govern global capital (Peck, 2003, “Geography and public policy: mapping the penal state.” Progress in Human Geography 27(2): 222–232), and both processes have been catalyzed by the imperiality of the U.S. state ( Slater, 2004, Geopolitics and the post-colonial. Oxford: Blackwell). I examine the militarization and transnationalization of the U.S. “war on drugs” as a liberal technique for identifying populations that must be governed in other ways. This critical engagement with the war on drugs in the Americas begins by placing its relationship with the rise of the “penal state” in the context of neoliberalism in the U.S., then examines the geopolitics of its transnationalization in context of neoliberal governance in the Americas, and finishes by examining some of the empirical outcomes of this articulation between neoliberalization and punitive “illiberalization” in the Americas. I argue for political geographical research on globalization and criminalization that engages with the relationship between criminalization and socioeconomic exclusion across scales, and maps out the geographically particular and historically continuous ways in which neoliberal and illiberal governance articulate to produce excluded populations as subjects that “need” to be governed in other ways.