Karina Garcia Reyes
Lecturer in Criminology, University of the West of England Expert on the Global War on Drugs and Drug Trafficking Violence in Mexico
About this speaker
Karina García is a Mexican Internationalist and Political Scientist with a focus on drug trafficking violence.
In 2013 she completed her MA in Latin American Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Newcastle. Her thesis entitled 'The cognitive capacity and the infrastructural power of the State during Felipe Calderón´s administration: coping with the despotic war on drugs', analysed how the decision of launching the war on drugs in 2007 was based upon political interests rather than a response to an urgent national threat.
Her PhD dissertation entitled ‘Poverty, gender and violence in the narratives of former narcos: Accounting for Drug Trafficking Violence in Mexico’ won the prize for best doctoral thesis at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law 2018-2019 in the University of Bristol.
Karina’s research proposes a new critical approach to our understanding of drug trafficking violence by analysing the perpetrators’ perspective. Her work suggests that the worldview, and practices, of drug traffickers is informed by the interplay of pre-existing social conditions and discourses produced and reproduced by perpetrators. This, in turn, produces a particular logic, a narco discourse, which is key to understand the roots and potential solutions of drug trafficking violence in Mexico.
