Original Manuscript Logics of Violence in Criminal War Benjamin Lessing 1 Abstract What kind of war is Mexico’s drug war? The prominent ‘‘criminal insurgency’’ approach helpfully focuses attention on cartel–state conflict, but unnecessarily redefines insurgency as ‘‘state-weakening,’’ eliding critical differences in rebels’ and cartels’ aims. Whereas rebels fight states, and cartels fight with one another, to conquer mutually prized territory and resources, cartels fight states ‘‘merely’’ to constrain their behavior and influence policy outcomes. This distinction yields a typology with theoretical consequences: decisive victory plays an important role in most models of civil war but is impossible or undesirable in wars of constraint. Theories of criminal war must therefore explain how ongoing coercive violence can be preferable to pacific strategies. I distinguish two such coercive logics of cartel– state conflict: violent lobbying and violent corruption. Lobbyings’ more universalistic benefits elicit free riding, so turf war among cartels should make it rarer than violent corruption. This prediction accords with qualitative and quantitative evidence from Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. Keywords conflict, civil wars, bargaining, game theory, internal armed conflict, terrorism, use of force In the study of war, ‘‘criminal’’ may be the new ‘‘civil.’’ Since 2006, Mexico’s drug war has claimed 60–70,000 lives (Shirk and Wallman in press), as many as 16,000 a year (Shirk et al. 2013), an order of magnitude larger than the common 1 Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Corresponding Author: Benjamin Lessing, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Pick Hall 528, 5828 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, USA. Email: blessing@uchicago.edu Journal of Conflict Resolution 1-31 ª The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0022002715587100 jcr.sagepub.com by guest on June 5, 2015 jcr.sagepub.com Downloaded from