Philip Luke Johnson

Updates on research, teaching, writing.

    • Lee Ann Fujii Article Award!

      Back in early 2023, Shauna Gillooly and I had an article published in Comparative Political Studies. The article, Grammar of Threat: Governance and Order in Public Threats by Criminal Actors, brought together my research on organized crime in Mexico with her work on violence in Colombia.

      Now, a couple of years later, this article has won the Lee Ann Fujii Article Award for Innovation in the Study of Political Violence. This is a bi-annual award, run by Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association (APSA). I’m particularly chuffed because this is such a great group doing creative work within political science – exactly the kind of readers I would want for any of my research.

      I first met Shauna back at the International Studies Association conference in Toronto in 2019. We connected through Twitter – back in what might have been the best years of the platform, when it was actually useful for making connections within academia. Since then, Shauna and I have caught up at conferences in Bogotá, Brighton, and Seattle. Shauna is a champion co-author and collaborator, and working on “Grammar of Threat” was about the most positive experience I’ve had with academic publishing.

      I’d hoped to attend the APSA conference in Vancouver this year, where I could have received our award in person. A few days before receiving news of the award, however, I made the difficult decision to withdraw from the conference. With no conference support available this year, there was no way I could make it to Vancouver. It sounds like a lot of people were in a similar position this year.

      Here’s the abstract for “Grammar of Threat.”

      Why do criminal actors publicly display threatening messages? Studies of organized crime emphasize that criminal actors rely on clandestine networks of influence. Subtle or coded threats are an effective means of extending that influence, but publicizing these threats appears to undermine their chief advantage. We argue that publicized threats broadcast an imagined order, delineating who has a place in society under criminal control, and who does not. To demonstrate this argument, we construct a “grammar of threat” and use this to analyze public threats broadcast by four criminal actors: two groups in Colombia and two in Mexico. The analysis demonstrates that every group projects an order through their threats, but that the order imagined varies by group. Some orders are more clearly ideological; some are more localized or more expansive. These findings highlight the important role of communication—distinct from but often combined with violence—in criminal governance.

    • New essay: Once Upon a Time in Tenoxtitlan

      In 2023 I set myself the goal of reading more Mexican fiction. It’s one of the few resolutions I’ve made that actually proved useful. I read work by Fernanda Melchor, Valeria Luiselli, Juan Rulfo, and devoured all of Yuri Herrera’s novels. When 2024 arrived, I decided to keep the resolution going and started the year by reading Álvaro Enrigue’s newly published You Dreamed of Empires. I was captivated by Enrigue’s imagining of Tenoxtitlan, capital of the Aztec empire and the future site of Mexico City.

      Then towards the end of 2024, a new novel by Yuri Herrera, Season of the Swamp, was published. I was struck by the unexpected parallels between Season of the Swamp and You Dreamed of Empires. Both novels focus on some of the most famous figures from Mexican history, but find small gaps in the historical record: Herrera looks at 18 months in the life of Benito Juárez, while Enrigue looks at a single day during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Both novels offer rich evocations of fantastic and violent cities, and do so from the perspective of outsiders who are enthralled but also threatened by these cities.

      Those surprise similarities could already have made for an interesting review, but there was another consideration (and complication) that felt very relevant. These novels came out in the last year of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s presidency in Mexico. López Obrador also happens to be a big fan (and published author) of Mexican history, but he seems much more interested in grandiose histories, and on inserting himself into the narrative.

      I kept telling myself that I absolutely didn’t have time to write something about this, especially as I wasn’t sure how it all fit together. Then I found a quote in another 2024 book on Mexico – Sovereignty and Extortion by anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz – that provided a bridge between what the novels were saying and what López Obrador was doing. I still didn’t have time to write an essay, but I couldn’t let the idea go.

      Eventually I pitched the essay to Public Books, who published a previous essay on Fernanda Melchor’s fiction (unlike this new one, that previous essay fell together quickly, in the immigration queue at JFK airport). The Public Books team did a fantastic job of tightening up and fact checking my sprawling draft. The finished piece came out at the very end of July.

      Read “Once Upon a Time in Tenoxtitlan.“

    • New pub: Criminal Communication

      At the start of the year, my article “Criminal Communication: Public Representations, Repertoires, and Regimes of Criminal Governance” was published by Perspectives on Politics. It was an absolute doozy of a process to get it out and into the world.

      “Criminal Communication” is the distillation of a lot of my dissertation research. The puzzle and case studies in the article are recognizable in my dissertation, but I had to boil down much of the dissertation to get to the absolute core of the argument. That’s about 73,000 words boiled and boiled down to a 13,000-word article (plus 5,000-word appendix).

      I submitted the manuscript to Perspectives in May 2023, while I was still based in New York and teaching at Princeton. I’d just accepted my job at Flinders Uni, and optimistically hoped I might have an article published around the time I started the new job. But the review process took a year longer than that, about 20 months. The process – the most detailed and rigorous I’ve ever been involved in – involved five reviewers and three rounds of revisions.

      These reviews pummeled the bandit out of manuscript. My first version of the manuscript leaned heavily on some concepts – roving bandit and stationary bandit – which are well-known in political science, but aren’t really about crime at all. Or about crime only in the sense that all politics could be said to share something with crime and banditry. The concepts were a distraction, but I had a hard time moving past them. I defended their inclusion. Eventually the reviewers convinced me to just cut them out. Pummeling the bandit out, leaving me more room for what I’d actually wanted to get to all along.

      Here’s the bandit-free abstract:

      Criminal actors are widely assumed to maintain a low profile, exerting power through coercion and clandestine networks. Scholarship addressing public action by criminal actors focuses largely on visible violence. However, an ample empirical record demonstrates that criminal actors also communicate publicly to broad audiences. To better understand this practice, my study focuses on campaigns of narco-messaging in Mexico. I ask: how do criminal actors represent themselves when they speak publicly? How does such self-portrayal interact with other practices of criminal governance and control? I identify three patterns of self-representation: Ruler of territory, Scourge of enemies, and Guardian of people. Overall, public communication expands the repertoires of criminal actors, offering ways to modify public perceptions of better-known practices such as costly signaling through violence. Different representations are deployed strategically in the contexts of establishing regimes of governance, maintaining regimes, and fighting criminal wars.

    • Field work in Mérida

      I wrapped up my second semester and first full year at Flinders Uni in early November, and a few weeks later I was on my way to Mérida (via Sydney, Auckland, New York, and Mexico City). I was returning to Mérida to continue my research on the Tren Maya megaproject in southeastern Mexico. I’d visited the city a year and a half earlier, in the very earliest stage of the study. I was pretty relieved to return in the winter, when the region is only mildly sweltering.

      Much had changed since my previous visit. Parque de la Plancha was a dusty construction site on my last visit, but now it is a lush park, frequented by joggers and dog walkers in the cooler morning hours. Old train engines and carriages dot the park, a reminder that the Tren Maya is not the first effort to link the city to distant parts of Mexico, and to the fact that seemingly permanent rail infrastructure can still rust and crumble into disuse.

      The redevelopment of some streets in the city center has also progressed. What were open trenches and road detours are now widened sidewalks. Central Mérida is a concrete grid that has ceded as much space as possible to traffic, leaving narrow pedestrian ways and very little shade. The redeveloped streets aim to change this, if the newly planted trees can hold on. These redeveloped streets are also cluttered with tourist-friendly businesses, bringing a specific Instagram-friendly aesthetic to downtown. I’ve heard from a few people now that it feels like the center caters more to tourists and seasonal expats, rather than local residents.

      The biggest change, at least for my purposes, is that the train is now up and running in this part of the region. On my first visit, the entire train system was still under construction. On my second visit, I focused on areas where constructed was ongoing. This was my first opportunity to visit stations that were open for business. I went to Mérida-Teya, to Tixkokob, to Izamal. I saw a train leave, buses arrive, passengers wait, and construction continue. There are virtually no stores installed in the pristine glass booths at Tizkokob and Izamal yet. The club lounge at Mérida-Teya is empty apart from a few folding chairs.

      The stations are located on the outer fringes of the towns they serve. The road to Tixkokob station narrows and narrows, becoming ever more cratered, before reaching the very edge of town and suddenly widening out into a two-lane sweep of smooth asphalt. The Tren Maya has been heavily advertised as a project to “detonate” development in the region, but at the moment the stations feel largely disconnected from their surrounds. The government has never been very clear about how this will occur, but it seems a little cynical to plonk a station on the outskirts of town without a clear plan for how it articulates with local society.

      Back in Mérida, I sipped xtabentún in the slow evenings, keeping my field notes and trying to peer into the future of this project. This will probably be my last trip to the region for a while. The next step is funding applications to allow me to return for longer stays, to continue tracking the outcomes of this megaproject. By the time I can return again, the entire train system should be up and running. We’ll see if the promised detonation has occurred.

    • Mexico has a new president

      On October 1, Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as president of Mexico. She is the first woman head of state and first Jewish head of state for the country. She’s also a climate scientist, academic, and former mayor of Mexico City. Basically, she’s a big deal and her election is a big deal.

      I wrote a short piece about Sheinbaum’s presidency for The Conversation. Presidents in Mexico only have one six-year term, but wield considerable power during that period. Sheinbaum comes in with more power than most, given the dominant position of her political party. At the same time, however, it’s possible that the policies of her predecessor will undermine that power, particularly in the way he weakened some parts of the state while empowering the military.

      In the background of this article is something I’m going to be thinking about a lot in the next few months (and maybe years). Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has so dominated Mexican politics for the past six years – and he’s been active and influential for decades before this – that it’s been hard to think about the future without getting caught up on him.

      My ongoing research project in the Yucatán Peninsula was shaped by López Obrador’s policies, but the project will unfold almost entirely across Sheinbaum’s presidency. Although I’m interested in López Obrador’s legacy, he’s not going to be the main actor over the next six years. I need to make sure I’m not getting caught in the past, and limiting the current president by thinking about her only in terms of the previous president. A lot of journos and scholars are going to have the same challenge.

      My first big research project focused on the presidency of Felipe Calderón, 2006 to 2012. I’m excited to have my second project under way, focusing on the presidency of Claudia Sheinbaum, 2024 to 2030.