Philip Luke Johnson

Every year here at Flinders Uni, I teach an undergrad class called “America and the World.” Although primarily about foreign policy, this is the most in-depth class we offer on US politics generally, and provides a baseline of knowledge for students interested in our Washington DC internship program.

The class has needed to look very different every time I’ve taught it. When I first taught it in 2024, Biden was still president (remember that?) and a federal election was approaching which would pit the 45th against the 46th president. In 2025, Trump had just been inaugurated and DOGE was running riot. That year, we started each workshop with a discussion of the most current events in the US (sometimes the urgent events we discussed in the Tuesday workshop were old news by the time we had our Wednesday workshop).

For 2026, further changes were needed. US military intervention and possible regime change had become a dominant foreign policy trend. I could plan for this before the semester began. The US midterm elections also emerged as a vital topic, as the federal government moved to assert greater control over elections, and an unprecedented outbreak of partisan re-districting changed the electoral field. We had to make changes during the semester to give more attention to the midterms.

Two of the readings that I added in 2026 turned out to be particularly helpful; students and I referred back to them often. One was Hannah Arendt’s essay, “Lying in Politics,” which responds to the Vietnam War and the release of the Pentagon Papers – both the papers and Arendt’s essay were published in 1971. There were obvious reasons for setting this reading, but I’d forgotten just how much of the essay is about self-deception; how supposed brilliant political strategists can buffer themselves from the reality that much of the public can readily see.

The other reading was Lindsey O’Rourke’s book, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War, published in 2018. This book provides invaluable data on US efforts at international regime change, as well as a framework for breaking down the many, many cases into different types of change. This was vital for situating contemporary politics within larger history, and demonstrating that even seemingly exceptional events often fit within longer-running patterns.

“America and the World” is always exhausting but also rewarding the teach. I get pushed to update my thinking by the students in this class. For now I’m trying not to think about just how much of the class I’ll have to revise for 2027.

A partial reading list for the 2026 class:

• Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics.” 1971.
• Barbara Crane & Jennifer Dusenberry, “Power and Politics in International Funding for Reproductive Health: the US Global Gag Rule.” 2004.
• Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. 2004.
• Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide and Empire: A History of the Greater United States. 2019.
• Nick Kapur, “William McKinley’s Values and the Origins of the Spanish-American War: A Reinterpretation. 2011.
• Matthew Lassiter, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs. 2023.
• Timothy Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy.” 2009.
• Lindsey O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War. 2018.
• Thea Riofrancos, “The Security-Sustainability Nexus: Lithium Onshoring in the Global North.” 2022.
• David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State. 2020.

I was so badly stuck in the middle of 2025. I had been writing and rewriting book chapters for about three years. Almost nothing remained of my original dissertation – which was a good thing – but I was started to write in circles. Adding in new material and then chucking it out again at the very next read.

Things only started to move and improve once I stopped writing in isolation. It had been awfully easy to slip into a kind of hermitic writing habit – especially after I moved from New York to Adelaide and found myself on the far side of the world from most of my academic colleagues and collaborators. It was only through reconnecting with all these good people that my book project started to make sense again. We formed a writing group that spanned an improbable range of time zones (although Adelaide was by far the most inconvenient). I picked the brains of friends who had recently gone through the whole academic publishing process. I studied their proposals.

At the very end of 2025, I finally pushed everything else aside. Book writing usually has to wait for every other deadline, but over the break I let the book be my only deadline. I scratched together a proposal. I gave myself one final revision of my theory chapter and then called it done. I realized that my conclusion actually contained another chapter, and finally finally got both of these committed to text.

And somehow, by early March, I had a full manuscript for Outlaw Infamy: Making and Marketing Cartels in Mexico. I delivered it to an academic press, and Outlaw Infamy is now on its way out for review.

Abstract

Outlaw Infamy examines the puzzling phenomenon of public communication by organized crime. Most scholarship expects criminal actors to maintain a low profile, wielding power through corruption and clandestine networks. If organized crime does engage in public activity, it is supposed to let violence do all the talking. Yet a rich empirical record – from newspapers ads published by prison gangs in Brazil to YouTube videos posted by gangs in Haiti – shows that criminal actors often engage in written or spoken forms of public communication. Outlaw Infamy offers an in-depth examination of narco-messaging, a well-known form of public communication by cartels in Mexico. The book asks: why do supposedly secretive criminal actors engage in risky communication to broad, public audiences? Why did cartels in Mexico start communicating publicly under the most unlikely conditions, as the government declared war on narcotrafficking in 2006? What do criminals gain from advertising their violence and criminality?

I argue that criminal actors use public communication to market themselves as an alternative source of authority and order. These actors aim to generate power by capturing public attention, thus shaping public discourse about security. Organized crime has particular incentives to embrace publicity when the state makes securitizing claims, portraying criminal actors as dangerous outlaws. I call this dynamic Outlaw Infamy. This argument is supported by original data and a novel methodology. During field research in Mexico, I pieced together transcriptions for over 6,000 narco-messages, the largest ever collection of message data and the first to pinpoint the emergence of this practice. The breadth of data allows me to deploy historical, comparative, and ethnographic discourse analysis to examine exactly how criminal actors derive power from public communication and infamy.

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.

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.“