Mediating order and accumulation in Mexico

This paper examines the relationship between violence and the war on drugs in Mexico through the dual lenses of Weberian and Marxist theory. While Weberian frameworks diagnose Mexico in terms of institutional failure, legitimacy deficits, and the absence of rational-legal order, Marxist accounts reveal how violence functions as a mechanism of capital accumulation under neoliberalism. Recent scholarship within both traditions, however, reaches a conceptual impasse in which Mexico appears either as a failed state defined by a dysfunctional political order or as a regime of accumulation in which state-criminal relations sustain neoliberal growth. This impasse obscures the mediated relationship between order and accumulation. This relationship is not structurally closed, but remains contingent, historically specific, and subject to mediation. What emerges is not a resolution of violence, order, and accumulation, but a historically specific mediation between them.