The Ideas Letter

The recent killing of Jalisco narcotics trafficker “El Mencho,” one of the most wanted drug lords alive, was a landmark event in the history of Mexican organized crime. For Mexican scholar Carlos Pérez Ricart, the murder marked a moment of deepening chaos in a violent military confrontation that has already lasted over twenty years. The debased yet mutually reinforcing cycle of drugs to the north and guns to the south, Pérez Ricart writes, has led to countless atrocities and a lost generation. Yet it persists. Can President Claudia Sheinbaum mitigate the violence without El Norte’s cooperation to tackle the demand side of this structural problem?

Writing from Nairobi, Christine Mungai then takes us on a tour d’horizon of democratic disfigurement in l’Afrique. My colleague, historian Nils Gilman, has long argued that modernization theory has never really gone out of style. Mungai would agree and seeks to ‘rediagnose’ our thinking on democracy’s assumptions by making it clear there are countless ways to achieve or lose democracy. We need far less hubris and much more modesty about the outcomes of “democratization.”

The Bulgarian political scientist Dimitar Bechev complements Mungai’s exploration of damaged quasi-democracies by looking at the bloated yet (for some) alluring concept of illiberalism. Has too much airtime been given to the concept, and does it need a rest? Are we overstating the coherence of the illiberal project both as theory and as global phenomenon? Is the illiberal paradigm too riven by its own contradictions to sustain itself?

Our curated section kicks off with an Aeon essay on the scholarship of Argentine decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo by Federico Perelmuter, a sharp young Argentine writer. Perelmuter suggests that Mignolo flattens conceptions of the West and perilously essentializes complex conditions.