Inspired by a U.S. Joint Forces Command Report from 2008 that labeled Mexico a state in risk of “rapid and sudden collapse,” in this talk, Dr. Amaya uses a discourse analysis of the concept of “failed state” to illuminate the connections between this concept, violence, and order. These connections are highly troubling. They reveal that contemporary ideas about orderly states and state failure cannot be understood without reference to the genealogy of order and its political economy. Order is not simply a normative value, but the outcome of particular ways of organizing political power and the economy. In the histories this talk engages, these particular ways of organizing political power and the economy are intertwined with the histories of colonialism and the racial and ethnic ideologies this colonialism depended on.