Assembling Market B/Orders: Violence, Dispossession, and Economic Development in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
Christian Berndt
Additional contact information
Christian Berndt: Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland
Environment and Planning A, 2013, vol. 45, issue 11, 2646-2662
Abstract:
Using an ongoing land conflict in Ciudad Juárez as a case study, I seek to show how maquiladora decision makers stabilize a regional development model even at times of extreme social and economic crisis. I argue that the current killings associated with drug trafficking play an ambivalent role in the reproduction of order in Juárez. At first sight, the violence is represented as a threat, unmasking as it does a regional development model as failure. Decision makers accordingly respond by doing everything possible to distance the maquiladora industry from the violence. On the one hand, this is being done by familiar means, not unlike in previous moments of crises. But on the other hand the events around Lomas del Poleo additionally assume a new quality, as maquiladorization goes hand in hand with an explicit strategy of spatial distanciation, integrating places and people that have hitherto been linked only marginally to the industry. And it is here that the narco-related violence plays different roles: As a convenient veil that allows what might be termed ‘ordinary’ assertions of brute force to be used under the cover of extraordinary, excessive, violence; and as a welcome excuse in moments of emergency that legitimize violent measures for the sake of a greater good.
Keywords: marketization; dispossession; modernization; Maquiladora; Mexico (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a45690 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:45:y:2013:i:11:p:2646-2662
DOI: 10.1068/a45690
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().