Sovereignty and Extortion - Incite at Columbia University

Claudio Lomnitz’s Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico was published in August 2024.

This book is an adaptation of his 2021 lecture series, Nuevo Estado, nuevas soberanías (New State, New Sovereignties), delivered at El Colegio Nacional. He critically examines the Mexican state amidst unprecedented levels of violence and explores how neoliberal reforms, free trade agreements, and the rise of the drug economy have reshaped governance and sovereignty in Mexico. Below is the publisher’s official description of the book:

Over the past fifteen years in Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been murdered and 110,000 more have been disappeared. In Sovereignty and Extortion, Claudio Lomnitz examines the Mexican state in relation to this extreme violence, uncovering a reality that challenges the familiar narratives of “a war on drugs” or a “failed state.”

Tracing how neoliberal reforms, free trade agreements, and a burgeoning drug economy have shaped Mexico’s sociopolitical landscape, Lomnitz shows that the current crisis does not represent a tear in the social fabric. Rather, it reveals a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state and the economy in which traditional systems of policing, governance, and the rule of law have eroded.

Lomnitz finds that power is now concentrated in the presidency and enforced through militarization, which has left the state estranged from itself and incapable of administering justice or regaining control over violence. Through this critical examination, Lomnitz offers a new theory of the state, its forms of sovereignty, and its shifting relation to capital and militarization.