Recent research on post-revolutionary struggles to consolidate a sovereign Mexican State and how these legacies laid the foundation for contemporary problems of state-cartel complicity, endemic violence, and the rising numbers of `disappeared' in Mexico. In empirical terms, the research focuses on the evolution of policing institutions and practices, particularly the ways that different factions within the revolutionary movement developed conflicting, competing, and overlapping coercive powers, leading to the fragmentation of security institutions. It then shows how this fragmented assemblage of security practices, which themselves began in Mexico City but moved to the regions and back, laid the foundations for the declining capacity of the Mexican state to monopolize the means of coercion, thus leading to a fragmentation of sovereignty more generally. In conceptual, theoretical and methodological terms, the research suggests that scholars must take into account historical, territorial, and institutional legacies of policing if they want to understand contemporary patterns of impunity and corruption, including state-cartel complicity. The larger argument is that beyond a focus on democratization and/or its absence, scholarship must take seriously longer-term processes of state formation and how they limit contemoorary efforts to minimize violence, reduce criminality, and strengthen the rule of law.

Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Development and former Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). Trained as a sociologist (BA in Sociology & Geography, Northwestern University; Ph.D. in Sociology, UCLA). Davis’s research focuses on relations between cities and development, particularly as mediated by spatial structure, social composition, governance arrangements, and political conflict. She is author of Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in the Urban Realm (Indiana University Press, 2011); Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2004; named the ASA’s 2005 Best Book in Political Sociology); Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Temple University Press 1994; Spanish translation 1999). In 2023 Davis was named a Fellow and Co-Director of the Humanity’s Urban Future program funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Her forthcoming book on the history of impunity and corruption in Mexico will be published by Oxford University Press in 2027.