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This book argues that borderlands intensify security threats at the conflict-crime nexus. It demonstrates the multiple insecurities that arise from complex interactions among rebels, criminals, and other violent non-state groups. Challenging urban biases and state-centric views, it draws on unprecedented multi-year fieldwork in the war-torn marginalized Colombian-Ecuadorian and Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands.
About the author
Annette Idler is the Director of Studies at the Changing Character of War Centre, Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, and at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. She holds a doctorate from the Department of International Development, University of Oxford, and an MA in International Relations from King's College London's Department of War Studies. Her research focuses on security, conflict, and transnational organized crime. Idler has published numerous scholarly articles, policy briefs, and op-eds, advised governments and international organizations, and provided frequent media commentary.
Summary
The post-cold war era has seen an unmistakable trend toward the proliferation of violent non-state groups-variously labeled terrorists, rebels, paramilitaries, gangs, and criminals-near borders in unstable regions especially. In Borderland Battles, Annette Idler examines the micro-dynamics among violent non-state groups and finds striking patterns: borderland spaces consistently intensify the security impacts of how these groups compete for territorial control, cooperate in illicit cross-border activities, and replace the state in exerting governance functions. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with more than 600 interviews in and on the shared borderlands of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, where conflict is ripe and crime thriving, Idler reveals how dynamic interactions among violent non-state groups produce a complex security landscape with ramifications for order and governance, both locally and beyond. A deep examination of how violent non-state groups actually operate with and against one another on the ground, Borderland Battles will be essential reading for anyone involved in reducing organized crime and armed conflict-some of our era's most pressing and seemingly intractable problems.
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"Amidst a growing literature on organized violence and crime in Latin America, Idler's Borderland Battles stands out for its sharp focus on the fuzzy remote edges of the territorial state--the highly contested borderlands that receive too little scholarly, policy, and media attention because they are harder to access and 'see.' This is especially important in countries such as Colombia, where central state authority has long been notoriously weak. Idler shows that to fully understand Colombian security politics one must understand borderland security, where many of the key actors simultaneously compete and cooperate and nimbly crisscross and exploit borders. Through her grounded, 'bottom up' ethnographic research, Idler provides an impressively nuanced argument that 'brings borders back in' to contemporary security debates about weak and fragile states." -Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of Political Science and International Studies, Brown University
