Profiles of Parish Mobilization

This chapter traces commitment and capacity’s ability to facilitate local parish intervention in the process of Drug War violence. The chapter begins by introducing an original, parish-based survey of Drug War response, with an index comprised of thirteen discrete actions parishes could take to protect communities. Quantitative measures of commitment and capacity from the prior chapters independently correlate with more comprehensive Drug War response in parishes. Next, to gain a more textured idea of how commitment and capacity interact to speed or impede Drug War response, the authors present four extended parish case studies to capture representative combinations of commitment and capacity (low-low, low-high, high-low, and high-high). The chapter’s final section probes two “outlier” cases where protective interventions were higher than the initial combination of commitment and capacity would predict, emphasizing the role of contingency and agency in Drug War response.