The War on Drugs has lead to the incarceration of millions of people. Between 1965 and 2000 the prison population in the United States swelled by 600 percent. There are currently more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States. As astonishing as these current prison population figures are, they are also deceptive in that they mask the systematic targeting of poor black communities. Critics claim that the boom in U.S. prison population has gone unnoticed because the war on drugs has been fought primarily in African Americans communities. From this view, mass incarceration in America is just another system of racial oppression, which has roots in slavery and Jim Crow legislation. Since the start of the war on drugs more than 31 million people have been arrested for drug-related crimes. With this report, I have documented the cycle of incarceration that U.S. Drug War policies have created in the communities that inmates leave behind. / text

Since the early 1990s, maritime routes have been considered to be the main method used by Colombian smugglers to transport illicit drugs to consumer or transhipment countries. Smugglers purchase off the shelf solutions to transport illicit drugs, such as go-fast boats and communication equipment, but also invest in developing their own artefacts, such as makeshift submersible and semisubmersible artefacts, narcosubmarines. The Colombian Navy has adopted several strategies and adapted several technologies in their attempt to control the flows of illicit drugs. In this research I present an overview of the ‘co-evolution’ of drug trafficking technologies and the techniques and technologies used by the Colombian Navy to counter the activities of drug smugglers, emphasizing the process of self-building artefacts by smugglers and local responses by the Navy personnel. The diversity of smugglers artefacts are analysed as a result of local knowledge and dispersed peer-innovation. Novel uses of old technologies and practices of interdiction arise as the result of different forms of learning, among them a local form of knowledge ‘malicia indigena’ (local cunning). The procurement and use of interdiction boats and operational strategies by the Navy are shaped by interaction of two arenas: the arena of practice - the knowledge and experience of local commanders and their perceptions of interdiction events; and, the arena of command, which focuses on producing tangible results in order to reassert the Navy as a capable counterdrug agency. This thesis offers insights from Science and Technology Studies to the understanding of the ‘War on Drugs, and in particular the Biography of Artefacts and Practices, perspective that combines historical and to ethnographic methods to engage different moments and locales. Special attention was given to the uneven access to information between different settings and the consequences of this asymmetry both for the research and also for the actors involved in the process. The empirical findings and theoretical insights contribute to understanding drug smuggling and military organisations and Enforcement Agencies in ways that can inform public policies regarding illicit drug control.

New drug epidemics often unleash punitive campaigns to end them- highlighted by the 1980’s drug wars. However, the opioid crisis has been met with public-health driven policies, like clean needle programs and community-based substance abuse therapy. This thesis asks why policy responses to the opioid crisis are so different than those of the War on Drugs. First, as the cost of the drug war became clearer, policy makers across the political spectrum became less inclined to wage a new punitive war against opioids, especially as public-health responses proved to be more effective while also less costly. Second, the demographics of those addicted to opioids is different than those who were addicted to crack cocaine. The brunt of War on Drugs policies was felt by those in the lowest socioeconomic brackets and perpetuated poverty in low-income communities. Today’s softer approaches have been informed by a greater percentage of middle- to upper-class individuals affected by the opioid crisis. Third, as opioids have legitimate medical purposes, they are harder to demonize or ban, rendering it more difficult to declare total war against them. Further, the influence opioid manufacturers have has made policy makers less inclined to declare war, taking supply-side action. Public-health driven policies and policies that minimize supply-side action against pharmaceutical opioid manufacturers are duplicate representations of the United States’ departure from War on Drug tactics. As long as the “medical model” of health care, which emphasizes drugs, medical treatment, and surgery is ingrained in society and the economy, these patterns will continue.

All nation's foreign policy attempts to create social, economic, and political conditions in the world that most favor that nations interests. This thesis outlines the major decision points in U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, analyzing the reasoning behind the decisions and their impact. Recent U.S. counter-insurgency efforts have offered a different justification for intervention, and this thesis explores the authenticity of these new justifications in light of recent terrorist events.

While addiction narratives have been a feature of American culture at least since the early 19th century’s temperance tales, the creation of the Johnson Intervention in the late 1960s and the corresponding advent of the War on Drugs waged by U.S. Presidents have wrought significant changes in the stories told about addiction and recovery. These changes reflect broader changes in conceptions of agency and the relationship of subject to culture in the postmodern era. In the way that it iterates the imperatives of the War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon, the rhetoric of successive U.S. Presidents provides a compelling heuristic for analyzing popular and literary texts as reflective of the changing shape of addiction and recovery narratives over the last half century. Johnson, by defining addiction, not intoxication, as a break with reality, argued that confronting addicts with narratives of the potential crises could convince them to seek treatment before they hit bottom. Johnson’s version of “reality therapy” thus presented threatened or simulated crises, rather than real ones. Examining presidential rhetoric and popular culture representations of addiction—in horror movies, “very special episodes,” and reality television—this dissertation identifies features of the postmodern Intervention and recovery narrative in fiction by William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, David Foster Wallace, and Jess Walter. I demonstrate how the Intervention is key to understanding the cultural products of the War on Drugs and its continued salience in American culture.

On the 14th of July 1969 president Richard Nixon informed the United States Congress, how drugs had become a serious threat to the nation’s wellbeing. He called for a new drug policy that would be applied to both state and federal levels. This would be the start of a political campaign that has resulted in new legislation, mass incarceration and in recent year an overwhelming criticism. This essay intends to review the newspaper New York Times reporting of this political campaign. The purpose is to study the role of language in the political discourse, this through a rhetorical analysis. The thesis intends to identify the discursive process framed by the selected news articles at hand. How the magazine’s approach has changed in 20 years will not only be examined by its explicit reporting, but also through the shaping and reflecting function of language. In my analysis, I identify key themes in the general metaphorics and a reproduction of a certain role distribution that leaves the reader with a certain understanding of its contemporary time. I have also come to the conclusion that the idea of American identity is central to the war on drugs as a linguistic domain. / I ett meddelande till den amerikanska kongressen den 14 juli 1969, informerade den dåvarande presidenten Richard Nixon om hur drogerna utgjorde ett allvarligt hot mot landets välmående. Han efterlyste en ny drogpolitik som skulle gälla på både delstatlig och federal nivå. Detta blev starten på en politisk kampanj som resulterade i ny lagstiftning, massfängslande och på senare år en överväldigande kritik. Jag har i denna uppsats för avsikt att granska tidningen The New York Times rapportering av denna politiska kampanj. Syftet är att studera språkets roll i den politiska diskursen genom en retorisk analys. Jag har för avsikt att kartlägga de diskursiva processer som de valda nyhetsartiklarna ramar in. Hur tidningens förhållningssätt från har förändrats under drygt 20 år kommer inte bara granskas genom den explicita rapporteringen, utan också genom språkets formande och speglande roll. I min analys identifierar jag nyckelteman i den övergripande metaforiken och hur en reproduktion av en viss rollfördelning lämnar läsaren med viss förståelse av sin samtid. Jag har även nått slutsatsen att idén om den amerikanska identiteten är central för kriget mot droger som språklig domän.

My PhD is a study of the politically charged literary and visual works that have emerged in response to escalating violence in contemporary Mexico. Providing close, comparative readings of fictional, theoretical and documentary works by critically-acclaimed authors Jorge Volpi, Cristina Rivera Garza, Mario Bellatin and Juan Pablo Villalobos, and award-winning filmmakers Carlos Reygadas, Amat Escalante and Natalia Almada, my chapters examine explicit and oblique cultural engagements with topics such as the political assassinations of the 1990s, the dispossession brought on by the neoliberal restructuring of the economy, and the violence prompted by the so-called ‘War on Drugs’. The cultural texts I examine share a concern with visualising and deconstructing the close relationship between death and power that marks the contemporary political terrain. I contend that narrative has become a critical site of cultural contestation, and discuss the ways in which experiments with the assemblage and frustration of narrative intertwine with issues related to visuality, embodiment and the nonhuman. Through my discussion of these themes, I trace out the ways in which cultural texts frequently employ narrative strategies that are rooted in dispersal, displacement and loss when engaging with destructive power. These strategies, I argue, pose urgent questions about the interrelation of violence and aesthetics, speak to critical shifts in the relationship between culture and the nation-state, and are marshalled to launch tentative appeals to forms of politics and ethics that work through spaces of shared dispossession. My thesis offers an innovative framework through which to theorise these cultural processes by reframing the notion of ‘excess’, a foundational concept in scholarship on death and power that has seen a resurgence in contemporary political philosophy. In dialogue with authors such as Georges Bataille, Achille Mbembe, Adriana Cavarero, Roberto Esposito, Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, and with close reference to the ‘necropolitical’ theory and cultural texts authored in Mexico, I posit excess as an analytical term that can encompass both reflexive critiques of spectacular violence and latent forms of resistance to this violence that proceed through loss and displacement.

Abstract Mass incarceration is a popular term in today’s society that is means to describe the high incarceration rate in the United States. Because of this, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. Mass incarceration is a movement that truly began to make headway during Reagan’s presidency and his declaration of a War on Drugs. The sensationalization of the dangers of crack cocaine sparked a “tough on crime” mentality and a long series of punitive measures that would come to disproportionately affect the black community. Today, mass incarceration has become an extremely controversial topic. The debate has centered on whether this country is too punitive and how current policies may be disproportionately affecting black men as they make up 33% of the prison population but only 12% of the general population (Alexander, 2010). However, regardless of the controversy, mass incarceration continues to affect millions of individuals in this country. Thus, the question is why individuals continue to be imprisoned at such alarming rates. Not only has the prison system take a strong foothold in this country but its power and influence continue to grow with the prison industrial complex. Therefore, ensuring that future generations will continue to be affected. In order to stop mass incarceration, we must consider alternatives to our prison system, such as a focus on rehabilitation rather than deterrence. Or perhaps an abolition of our prison system altogether.

This thesis interrogates gangsta hip-hop for the unique attention it plays to the drug trade. I read theories of hypervisibility/invisibility and Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation alongside hip-hop feminist theory to examine the Black female criminal subjectivity that operates within hip-hop. Using methods of discourse analysis, I question the constructions of gangster femininity in rap lyrics as well as the absences of girlhood on Season 4 of HBO’s television drama The Wire. In doing so, I argue that the discursive construction of Black female subjectivity within gangsta hip-hop provides a hypervisibility that portrays Black women as violent while simultaneously erasing the broader social processes that impact the lives of Black women and girls. Hip-hop feminism allows the cultural formations of hip-hop to be read against the politics that structure the lives of women of color in order to provide a lens for analyzing how their criminality is constructed through media.

The growth of the drug war and rates of narco-violence in Mexico has captured the attention of the international community, leading to international debates about the validity and effectiveness of the War on Drugs mantra. Since 2006, the Mexican government has been actively combating the cartels with armed troops, leading to high rates of human rights abuses as well as growing opposition to official prohibition policies. This thesis explores three movements advocating for alternatives to the Mexican drug war that have their foundation in civil society organizations: the movements for human rights protection, for drug policy liberalization and for the protection and restitution of victims of the drug war. These movements are analysed through a theoretical framework drawing on critical political economy theory, civil society and social movement theory, and political opportunity structures. This thesis concludes that, when aligned favourably, the interplay of agency and political opportunities converge to create openings for shifting dominant norms and policies. While hegemonic structures continue to limit agency potential, strong civil society advocacy strategies complemented by strong linkages with transnational civil society networks have the potential to achieve transformative changes in the War on Drugs in Mexico.