convergence

How Illicit Networks Impact Sovereignty
40 Alfredo Corchado, “Drug cartels taking over government roles in parts of Mexico,” Vancouver Sun, May 4, 2011.
41 Ibid.
42 Alma Guillermoprieto, “The Narcovirus,” Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, Spring 2009, 3–9,
available at . Also see Alma
Guillermoprieto, “Days of the Dead: The New Narcocultura,” The New Yorker, November 10, 2008, available at
.
43 Pamela L. Bunker and Robert J. Bunker, “The Spiritual Significance of ¿Plata O Plomo?” Small Wars Journal,
May 27, 2010, available at .
44 See Eric Hobsbawn, Bandits (New York: The New Press, 2000).
45 See John P. Sullivan, “Policing Networked Diasporas,” Small Wars Journal, July 9, 2007, available at .
46 See John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus, “Border zones and insecurity in the Americas,” openDemocracy.
net, November 24, 2009, available at .
47 See Ivan Briscoe, “Trouble on the Borders: Latin America’s New Conflict Zones,” Madrid: FRIDE, July 2008,
available at .
48 Sullivan and Elkus, “Border zones and insecurity in the Americas.”
49 Border zones are potential incubators of conflict. Criminal gangs exploit weak state presence to forge a parallel
state and prosecute their criminal enterprises sustained by fear, violence, and brutality. See Sullivan and Elkus,
“Border zones and insecurity in the Americas.”
50 The Institutional Revolutionary Party (known as the PRI in Spanish) traditionally set all power boundaries in
Mexican political and economic life, both legal and illicit. That changed with the implementation of a true multiparty
state. The criminal mafias exploited that new power-generating opportunity. See Nik Steinberg, “The Monster and Monterrey:
The Politics and Cartels of Mexico’s Drug War,” The Nation, May 25, 2011, available at .
51 See Max G. Manwaring, “Sovereignty Under Siege: Gangs and other Criminal Organizations in Central
America and Mexico,” Air & Space Power Journal—Spanish Edition, July 1, 2008, available at .
52 Michoacán was an early example of emerging cartel political action. In that state, La Familia forged a parallel
government generating employment, keeping order, providing social and civic goods, collecting (street) taxes, and
co-opting legitimate governmental administrative and security functions. See George W. Grayson, La Familia Drug
Cartel: Implications for U.S.-Mexican Security (Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies
Institute, December 2010). Los Zetas started providing similar social goods in 2010–2011, leading the author to
observe that they were acting as “accidental insurgents.”
53 See Shawn Teresa Flanigan, “Violent Providers: Comparing Public Service Provision by Middle Eastern
Insurgent Organizations and Mexican Drug Cartels,” 52nd Annual ISA Convention.
54 John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus, “Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” Defense and the National Interest and
Small Wars Journal, November 9, 2008, available at .
55 Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (New York: Knopf, 2002); and
Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Knopf, 2008).
56 David Ronfeldt and Danielle Varda, “The Prospects for Cyberocracy (Revisited),” Social Science Research
Network, December 1, 2008, available at .
57 See John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus, “Security in the network-state,” openDemocracy.net, October 6, 2009,
available at .
58 See Saskia Sassen, “The new executive politics: a democratic challenge,” openDemocracy.net, June 28, 2009,
available at ; and Sullivan
and Elkus, “Security in the network-state.”
59 Saskia Sassen, “Neither global nor national: novel assemblages of territory, authority and rights,” Ethics &
Global Politics 1, no. 1–2 (2008), 61.
60 Gary King and Langche Zeng, “Improving Forecasts of State failure,” World Politics 53 (July 2001), 623–658.
61 John P. Sullivan, “Fusing Terrorism Security and Response,” in Countering Terrorism and WMD: Creating
a Global Counter-terrorism Network, ed. Peter Katona, Michael D. Intriligator, and John P. Sullivan, 272–288
(London: Routledge, 2006).
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