Abstract
The scale of violence in Mexico and some other Latin American countries is comparable to that in some of the deadliest contemporaneous civil wars, and criminal violence is now firmly on the agenda of conflict studies, International Relations (IR) and political science. Significant attention has been paid to the similarities and differences between criminal violence and political insurgencies, but less has been paid to the international legal regulation of state responses to organized crime. In principle, international humanitarian law (IHL) regulates the conduct of hostilities in armed conflict contexts, and international human rights law (IHRL) applies in full in peacetime. The (in)applicability of IHL has important implications for, inter alia, who can use force, whom they can use force against, and the conditions under which they can use lethal force. Through analysis of the discourses and practices of domestic and international actors regarding organized criminal violence in Mexico, this paper argues that the “criminal wars” there are treated as a legal grey zone, regulated neither as war nor as peace. Even though the violence in Mexico is not formally classified as a non-international armed conflict, selective quasi-IHL thinking underpins public discourse and militarized responses, in particular in official designations of who is a legitimate target and who deserves protection from violence.