Individualization and collectivization in contexts of organized criminal violence: the case of Mexico’s War on organized crime

Abstract

Most lethal violence now occurs outside of war zones. In Latin America, countries like Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia have often had yearly homicide rates far exceeding those in Afghanistan or Syria. The use of military force or militarized police has become widespread in such contexts, although they do not meet the international humanitarian law (IHL) thresholds for non-international armed conflict (NIAC) and formally fall under a law enforcement paradigm, where international human rights law (IHRL) applies in full. Through a case of study of Mexico’s ‘war on organized crime’, Pablo Kalmanovitz and Miriam Bradley show how the qualification of a situation of organized violence as NIAC or as below the NIAC threshold has major implications for how individualization processes operate. Starting from an IHRL baseline, processes of collectivization are identified and analysed in reverse analogy with processes of individualization in armed conflicts. The authors find that, while collectivization takes place in contexts of organized criminal violence, there is no international legal framework to underpin it, and consequently not the same level of protection as there is in war. Their analysis sheds light on the structure of processes of individualization in contexts of armed conflict, as it shows how much of the individualization process in armed conflicts is not a move towards peacetime regulation of violence under IHRL.