Endogenous Network Mechanisms in the Mexican “War of Conquest”

• In Event: Mathematical Sociology Section Flash Talks
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4. Endogenous Network Mechanisms in the Mexican “War of Conquest”

Abstract

Interorganizational conflict and competition amongst drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) for territorial control in Mexico have taken countless lives and inflicted violence throughout Mexico. In comparison to disputes in the licit economy, drug trafficking organizations typically deploy violent strategies to dispute claims of territorial control, such as armed conflict. The once spatially clustered conflict has spread into new municipalities and produced areas of contested territorial control. Given the increasing diffusion of the “war of conquest”, this paper asks the following research question: “Why has drug trafficking violence in Mexico, a once spatially clustered social phenomenon, diffused into new municipalities?” We put forward a network-based approach to examine the endogenous network processes that potentiated the spread of the Mexican “war of conquest” and created the current network structure. This paper uses data from the Organized Criminal Violence Event Data (OCVED) dataset, which contains two-mode relational event data on the violent presence of organized criminal groups (i.e., sender) at the municipality-level (i.e., receiver). Employing the actor-oriented relational event model to understand the temporal network dynamics of organizational criminal violence in Mexico from 2010 to 2018, we find that drug trafficking organizations invoke the framework of generalized violence through offensive mechanisms, such that organizational violence spreads into contested and new territories as a retaliatory mechanism to maintain their relative social status within the social hierarchy and “payback” the offending organization.

Author

• Kevin Anthony Carson, University of Arizona