Geology & Geography Faculty Work

Title

Politics Squeezed through a Police State: Policing and Vinculación in Post-1968 Mexico City

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2015

Publication Title

Political Geography

Volume Number

47

DOI

10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.01.003

Abstract

Contemporary political geographers accommodate everyday practice in accounts of state power but arguably tend to retain a bias towards sites easily identified with the state. This bias complements a frequent conflation of policing and the state in recent scholarship on the post-political. This article challenges these assumptions by showing how rituals of anti-stateness may themselves paradoxically give to the senses a partitioned world of state domination and non-state resistance that delimits political possibility. I specifically examine activist participation in such policing through analysis of student-left commemorations of 1968 in Mexico City. My analysis of such activism also reveals tension in processes that consolidate a partitioned state/non-state world. I show that, through vinculación, some activists establish unaccounted-for solidarities that exceed the categories through which state power has in the past been exercised, reconfiguring relations between people whose place vis-à-vis the state would otherwise be predictable. I therefore reveal ongoing interplay between processes of politics and policing, not a “post-political condition” that would demand, as politics, the negation of any social-spatial order.

ISSN

0962-6298

First Page

1

Last Page

10

Link Out URL

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.01.003

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