Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the processes and practices of a Mexican anti-war social movement in relation to the socio-political and spatial context. The aim is to better understand current relationships and entanglements between activists, state politics and wider civil society in Mexico.

Paper long abstract:

In March 2011 the social 'Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity' (MPJD) emerged in Mexico as a civil society response to the tremendous consequences of the so-called 'War on Drugs'. Activists have started mobilising against the drug-war politics and continuously engage in protest activities to sensitise for its political claims.

This paper investigates the processes of MPJDs practices by adopting an assemblage perspective on social movements. Such a non-reductionist analysis exceeds analytical shortages of more traditional movement approaches and is simultaneously sensitive to spatial dynamics. Through such an integrative view on the complex 'coming together' of diverse and spatially distributed elements in social movements, an assemblage view is able to provide crucial insights into the relationship and entanglements between activists, state institutions/politics and wider civil society in Mexico.

The paper will discuss two main characteristics regarding the MPJD:

(1) The role, evolution and spatiality of the movement as an indispensable site for engagement with personal fates for victims who feel excluded and disobeyed by state institutions.

(2) The becoming of the heterogeneous constitution of 'moments of possibility' that influenced fulfilments of political claims, e.g. the consolidation of a victims' law.

The aim of this discussion is to show that the proposed conceptualisation is an adequate perspective to understand current civil society dynamics in the political 'War on Drugs-context' that transcend traditional explanatory categories of class, race and/or spatial fixities. Furthermore, the paper discusses an assemblage specific notion of politics against the more common a-political stance of poststructuralism.