What Is Cartel–State Conflict?

Abstract

This chapter delineates the concept of “cartel–state conflict” and its relationship to other conflict types and the theories scholars have advanced to explain them. The militarized drug wars of Colombia, Mexico, and Rio de Janeiro have caused destruction on par with some of the most violent civil wars; the peaks of violence involved both intense fighting among cartels for turf and sustained armed confrontation between cartels and state forces. Nonetheless, cartel–state conflict and inter-cartel turf war are logically and causally distinct conflict types: each can exacerbate the other, but each can also occur in the absence of the other, or in widely differing proportions. Cartel–state conflict is also distinct from civil war, a fact which the popular “criminal insurgency” concept has obfuscated. I present a framework for analysis that distinguishes conflict types by central goals and battle aims; introduces the key logics of violence that operate within each conflict type; and discusses the (imperfect) mapping between conflict types, logics, and observed patterns of violent events, i.e., the “microdynamics of conflict.” FRAMEWORK FOR THE STUDY OF CONFLICT AND CRIMINAL VIOLENCE This chapter delineates the concept of cartel–state conflict: what it is, what it is not, and where it stands in relation to other conflict types and the theories scholars have advanced to explain them. The study of drug war and criminal conflict in general is relatively new and under-theorized, and a dearth of clear concepts has led some scholars to conflate cartel–state conflict with other conflict types, or treat it as a mere by-product. The conceptual brush-clearing undertaken here clarifies the similarities, differences, and potential causal linkages among conflict types, setting the stage for the theory of cartel–state conflict I develop in Chapters 3 and 4 (see also Lessing 2015). In the process, I explain my analytic approach and place it within a framework for the broader study of conflict and criminal violence. The drug trade is a violent business. Though well-known, this fact is quite puzzling: trafficking is based on voluntary economic transactions, and so does not logically require violence. Extant scholarship on drug violence, focused on consumer markets in first-world settings, generally attributes such “systemic violence” to a lack of enforceable contracts and property rights (Goldstein 1985; Skaperdas 2001).