State Capacity and the Search Bloc in Narcos

From Narcos (Netflix)

Categories:

Run time: 1:55

Clip Description: With American money and intelligence behind them, Colombian special forces burn coca fields and cocaine laboratories across the country and seize product reported to be worth a billion dollars.

Comparative Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: A state exercising coercive capacity — Weber’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force, put to work. Two things make it useful rather than routine. The capacity is real but partial: it reaches the countryside in raids rather than holding it. And it is substantially borrowed, supplied by a foreign patron with objectives of its own. That combination — reach that arrives from outside and does not stay — is the ordinary condition in a great many states, and it connects directly to Michael Mann’s distinction between despotic and infrastructural power.

Possible Uses in Classroom: Pair it with the extradition clip to build a unit on state capacity, or with the Hunger Games repression clip to contrast coercion by a strong authoritarian state with coercion by a weak democratic one attempting the same thing.

Discussion Questions

Weber’s definition of a state turns on a monopoly of legitimate force within a territory, and Colombia plainly did not have one here — yet the raids show real coercive reach. Michael Mann’s distinction between despotic power, what a state can do without negotiating, and infrastructural power, what it can actually deliver through its territory, was built for exactly this case. Apply it, and say which one the Search Bloc demonstrates.
The capacity on display is substantially American: American money, American intelligence, American pressure. What happens to a state’s own institutions when its most effective coercive arm depends on a foreign patron, and what would you expect to observe when that patron’s priorities change?
Burning fields destroys the crop and the livelihood together. Where the state arrives as a raid rather than as a service, a peasant who loses a crop has nothing to turn to and a strong reason to prefer whoever offers something. Explain how a campaign that succeeds tactically can lose ground strategically, and name a case outside Colombia with the same structure.

Assignment

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has published annual coca cultivation surveys for Colombia since 1999, reporting hectares under cultivation by region, and they are free to download. Chart the series and mark the major eradication campaigns onto it. In two pages, say what the data show about whether eradication reduced cultivation, moved it, or neither. The hard part is the balloon effect: cultivation that vanishes from one department and reappears in another, or in Peru or Bolivia, looks like success in a national figure and like nothing at all in a regional one. Work at both levels, then say which picture you would put in front of a policymaker, and why.

Clip hosted on Critical Commons, uploaded by Amel Ben Abdesslem.

For AP Students

AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 1: Political Systems, Regimes, and Governments

Topics: 1.5 Sources of Power and Authority; 1.8 Political Legitimacy; 1.10 Political Stability
Skill: Concept Application; Country Comparison as a secondary
Big ideas: Power and Authority; Legitimacy and Stability
Course countries: Mexico, Nigeria

The raids show a government that can hit a target but cannot hold the ground around it or deliver much of anything across its own territory. That gap is state capacity, and it is the concept students need in order to explain how a regime can look formidable and be unstable at the same time. Colombia is not a course country, which is an advantage here: students have to carry the concept across to one that is.

Discussion questions

Define state capacity in your own words. Then give one piece of evidence from the clip that Colombia had it, and one that it did not.
Mexico has used the military against cartels for the better part of twenty years, and Nigeria has fought Boko Haram in the northeast. Choose one. Name two things it shares with this scene and one important difference.
A government that cannot control part of its own territory still claims sovereignty over it. Explain what the state loses when people living there look to someone else — a cartel, a militia, a traditional ruler — for protection.

Short activity

The capacity and legitimacy grid (15 minutes). Students draw a two-by-two grid, high and low state capacity across the top, high and low legitimacy down the side. They place Colombia as the clip shows it, then place Mexico, Nigeria, and Russia, writing one sentence to justify each placement. The justification is the graded part, not the placement. The grid exists to make one point that students routinely miss on the exam: capacity and legitimacy are separate variables, and a regime can be strong on one and weak on the other.