Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty

Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty

Teun Voeten

Small Wars Journal is pleased to announce the release of Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty.  This new Small Wars Journal–El Centro book by Dr. Teun A. Voeten examines the violence in Mexico’s drug war.  Voeten, an award winning photojournalist specializing in war and conflicts and anthropologist, received his PhD from Leiden University in the Netherlands.  Mexican Drug Violence contains original research and analysis, a foreword: “Mexican Drug Violence” by Robert J. Bunker, and an afterword: “Crime Wars, Criminal Insurgency, and State Transformation” by John P. Sullivan.

Voeten argues it is a new type of war called hybrid warfare: multidimensional, elusive and unpredictable, fought at different levels, with different intensities with multiple goals.  He interprets drug cartels as ultra-capitalist predatory corporations thriving in a neoliberal, globalized economy.  They use similar branding and marketing strategies as legitimate business. He also looks at the anthropological, individual level and explains how people can become killers. Voeten compares Mexican sicarios, West African child soldiers and Western jihadis and sees the same logic of cruelty that facilitates perpetrating ‘inhumane’ acts that are in fact very human.  Together, the text provides a template for placing Mexico’s drug war in global context. SWJ

Source: Teun Voeten, Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty, A Small Wars Journal–El Centro Book. Bloomington: XLibris, 2020.