Differentiated Rule and the Architecture of Anti-Anarchism: Governing Autonomy in Revolutionary Mexico

This paper argues that anti-anarchism functioned as a durable architecture of governance embedded in modern state formation. Through a comparative analysis of Zacapu (Michoacán) and Melchor Ocampo (State of Mexico), it demonstrates how anarchist and Indigenous projects of autonomy came to be governed as incompatible with sovereignty, territorial management, and political order across liberal, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary regimes in Mexico. The Mexican Revolution reorganized inherited security logics and reshaped the boundaries of governable politics. Drawing on diplomatic treaties, surveillance files, arrest circulars, and municipal records, the paper traces how anti-anarchism operated simultaneously across scales, from hemispheric legal coordination to everyday rural governance, producing differentiated techniques of rule shaped by local ecological and political contexts. At the hemispheric level, the 1902 Tratado de Extradición y Protección contra el Anarquismo formalized anarchism as a transnational security category governed through extradition and legal containment. Mexico’s participation in this Pan-American treaty situates the state within a broader liberal international order that defined anarchism through criminal law and security coordination rather than political debate. This legal architecture shaped the institutional environment through which revolutionary governance later took form. At the local level, postrevolutionary security files produced by federal and municipal authorities reveal the continued operation of these logics under governments claiming revolutionary legitimacy. In Zacapu, anti-anarchism took shape through ecological transformation and juridical reorganization. Drainage infrastructure, cadastral surveys, and land titling reorganized Indigenous territory and reshaped autonomous political life through spatial and legal means. In Melchor Ocampo, anti-anarchism operated through surveillance, arrests, and the regulation of syndicalist education, municipal governance, and mutual aid, situating autonomy within a policing and criminal justice framework. This paper conceptualizes this pattern as differentiated rule, a shared governing logic that generated distinct techniques of repression shaped by regional ecology, political history, and forms of resistance. Anti-anarchism targeted autonomy itself, including collective governance, refusal of state mediation, and alternative political futures, as the central object of governance. By foregrounding repression as infrastructural, legal, and spatial, this paper contributes to Resistance Studies by reframing how resistance is governed over time. It offers historically grounded insights into how states adapt security frameworks to manage autonomy under revolutionary conditions, with implications for understanding contemporary repression of movements that exceed institutional incorporation. The analysis draws on archival research developed in the fourth chapter of a dissertation titled Rethinking the Indigenous Proletariat: Land, Autonomy, and Resistance in Rural Mexico.