Drug trafficking organizations have grown into transnational entities with geographic reach, economic power, and political influence that rival those of sovereign states. This article argues they should be understood as international relations actors.
Greed, corruption, and the erosion of state authority are not new features of international politics — but the actors driving them are evolving. Narcotics trafficking organizations, commonly referred to as cartels or narcos, have grown into transnational entities with geographic reach, economic power, and political influence that rival those of sovereign states. This article argues that narco organizations should be understood as international relations actors in a multipolar world — specifically, as a category of non-state actor whose operations have systemic consequences for states, international law, and great power competition.
Recent events in Mexico illustrate how narco power transcends domestic criminality and enters the realm of international affairs. The killing of Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as "El Mencho" and leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), was coordinated by Mexican special forces operating with complementary U.S. intelligence support (Sakellariadis, 2026). The operation reflects the degree to which cartel suppression has become a matter of binational security cooperation rather than purely domestic policing.
The aftermath was telling. Cartel retaliation swept across Mexico — infrastructure was destroyed, goods seized, and civilians subjected to extortion and violence (Sheridan, 2026). The scale of the response prompted the United States, India, and other nations to issue formal travel advisories instructing citizens in Mexico to shelter in place (Sheridan, 2026). When a criminal organization's internal power struggle generates official diplomatic responses from foreign governments, it has crossed into the domain of international relations.
The corruption dimension reinforces this point. As Sheridan (2026) notes, the case of Mario Villanueva, former governor of Quintana Roo, who pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal court in 2012 to laundering millions of dollars in cartel bribes, demonstrates that narco influence reaches into the highest levels of state governance. When cartels can shape who governs and how, they are exercising a form of political power that IR theory must account for.
The first and most visible criterion of IR actorhood is the capacity to project power across national borders. Major cartel networks — the Sinaloa Cartel, CJNG, and others — operate distribution networks across multiple continents, maintaining supply chains, financial flows, and enforcement operations in dozens of countries simultaneously. This transnational operational footprint mirrors the geographic reach of states and multinational corporations, two categories of actor whose IR significance is not in dispute.
Like states, cartels engage in something analogous to trade — the movement of goods across borders at scale, relying on logistics networks, financial intermediaries, and political connections in multiple jurisdictions. Some organizations operate with the structural sophistication of commercial enterprises, blending illegal shipments into legitimate commercial channels and maintaining relationships with corrupt officials across multiple national governments.
A second criterion is the capacity to exercise authority over territory — one of the defining features of statehood in the Weberian tradition. In significant portions of Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America, cartel organizations do not merely operate alongside the state: they replace its functions. They provide security, arbitrate disputes, regulate economic activity, and extract revenue.
The piso system is illustrative. Piso refers to the fee or quota that businesses, informal workers, and even local officials must pay to cartel-controlled organizations for the right to operate in their territory (Morán Breña, 2024). This functions as a parallel taxation system. In Mexico, where over half of total employment is informal (Morán Breña, 2024), the cartel's ability to extract fees from this sector gives it economic leverage that competes directly with the state's own revenue base and authority.
The piso system is not mere extortion — it is a form of governance. When people pay for protection and services, they are participating in a political economy that rivals the state's own.
This is not precisely analogous to the state-as-organism theory in classical IR — which treated states as biological entities with survival imperatives — but the parallel is instructive. Like an organism expanding into available territory, cartel organizations continuously seek to extend their operational zones into new markets, municipalities, and foreign states, driven by the logic of profit maximization and competitive pressure from rival organizations.
A third indicator of IR actorhood is being treated as a relevant actor by states themselves. The U.S. accusation that China has facilitated the smuggling of fentanyl precursor chemicals through cartel networks is significant not merely as a law enforcement matter but as a geopolitical one. It suggests that a great power has assessed cartel infrastructure as a useful instrument of strategic competition — that narco organizations have sufficient operational capacity and reach to be worth engaging as a tool of statecraft.
Whether or not China's involvement is deliberate strategic policy or the byproduct of inadequate export controls, the accusation itself reflects how states perceive cartel networks: as entities with meaningful international agency. When states engage with, respond to, or weaponize non-state actors, those actors acquire de facto IR significance regardless of their formal legal status.
Non-state actors acquire IR significance not only through what they do but through how states respond to them. Cartel violence has prompted formal diplomatic responses, bilateral security cooperation frameworks, extradition treaties, travel advisories, and UN-level discussions on transnational organized crime. The UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) represents an international legal response to the cross-border challenge cartels and similar organizations pose — acknowledging implicitly that the problem exceeds any single state's domestic jurisdiction.
Recognizing narco organizations as IR actors has practical implications. First, it supports the case for stronger multinational frameworks targeting cartel finance, logistics, and political corruption — treating the problem as a shared international security challenge rather than a domestic law enforcement failure in individual states.
Second, it demands more sophisticated international legal instruments. The current framework of domestic criminal law, supplemented by bilateral extradition treaties, is insufficient for organizations that operate across dozens of jurisdictions simultaneously. IR-level engagement — through the UN system, regional security organizations, and multilateral financial regulation — is necessary to meaningfully constrain transnational criminal power.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, it forces a more honest accounting of how power actually operates in the contemporary international system. A multipolar world is one in which power is distributed across more actors and more dimensions than traditional state-centric IR theory anticipated. Narco organizations are among the clearest illustrations of this diffusion — wielding geographic reach, economic power, and political influence that would have been unimaginable to the architects of the Westphalian state system.
The argument here is not that cartels are equivalent to states, nor that they should receive the legal recognition that statehood confers. It is that their power, reach, and impact on international politics is real enough that IR theory and international policy must take them seriously as actors — not merely as objects of law enforcement. In a multipolar world, power comes in many forms. Understanding all of them is the task of serious international relations analysis.
Morán Breña, C. (2024). [Full article title]. El País. [URL — add when available].
Sakellariadis, [First initial]. (2026). [Full article title]. [Publication name]. [URL — add when available].
Sheridan, [First initial]. (2026). [Full article title]. [Publication name]. [URL — add when available].
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (2000). United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (Resolution 55/25). United Nations. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/organized-crime/intro/UNTOC.html