Why extreme violence is a necessity for capitalist accumulation to occur in Colombia and beyond

From the deserts of Sudan to the jungles of Colombia, from the streets of Belfast to the mountains of Kurdistan, paramilitaries have appeared in violent conflicts. Ungor presents a comparative and global overview of paramilitarism, showing how states use it to successfully outsource mass political violence against civilians.

WOLA-Duke Book Award Finalist In Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Jasmin Hristov examines the complexities, dynamics, and contradictions of present-day armed conflict in Colombia. She conducts an in-depth inquiry into the restructuring of the state’s coercive apparatus and the phenomenon of paramilitarism by looking at its military, political, and legal dimensions. Hristov demonstrates how various interrelated forms of violence by state forces, paramilitary groups, and organized crime are instrumental to the processes of capital accumulation by the local elite as well as the exercise of political power by foreign enterprises. Issues of forced displacement, proletarianization of peasants, concentration of landownership, growth in urban and rural poverty, and human rights violations are viewed in relation to the use of legal means and extralegal armed force by local dominant groups and foreign companies to advance their economic interests. After documenting the penetration of major state institutions by right-wing armed groups and the persistence of human rights violations against social movements and sectors of the low-income population, Blood and Capital raises crucial questions about the promised dismantling of paramilitarism and the validity of the so-called demobilization of paramilitary groups, both of which have been widely considered by North American and some European governments as proof of current Colombian president Álvaro Uribe’s advances in the wars on terror and drugs.

This book examines the phenomenon of paramilitarism across Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia, offering a nuanced perspective while identifying key patterns in the way paramilitary violence is implicated in processes of capital accumulation, state-building, and the reproduction of social power. Paramilitary violence, a key modality of coercion in the era of globalization, has been pursued by states and dominant classes in the Global South, to reproduce or extend their power over subaltern groups. Paramilitary groups are responsible for atrocities, including extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture, rape, and forced displacement. The book integrates empirically rich investigations into an emergent theory of political violence, capturing the relationship between parastatal armed actors, capital, and the state. The analysis sheds light on globally relevant phenomena such as the end of the Cold War, the shifting role of US hegemony, and evolving nature of the nation-state. The book is suitable for academics, graduate and upper-year undergraduate students, and policy-makers in development, human rights, and violence prevention. Given its interdisciplinary subject, it appeals to scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including political science, sociology, political anthropology, development, peace and conflict, security and terrorism, international relations, and global studies.

Why should we be worried about neoliberalism if we are not able to fully appreciate its deleterious effects? How can we fully appreciate its intricacies and power without attending to and seeking to potentially reconcile the various critical theorizations of how it actually operates? The Discourse of Neoliberalism offers a critical political economy-meets-poststructuralist perspective on the relationship between neoliberalism and power. By advancing a geographical approach to understanding the discursive formations and material consequences of neoliberalism, the book exposes how processes of neoliberalization are shot through with violence. It argues that reading neoliberalism as a discourse better equips us to understand the power of this variegated economic formation as an expansive process of social-spatial transformation that is intimately bound up with the production of poverty, inequality, and violence across the globe. It illuminates the vital and ongoing power of neoliberalism in order to open up a critical space for thinking through how life beyond neoliberalism might be achieved.

This volume explores the contents, forms, and actors that characterize current opposition to the corporate neoliberal agri-food regime. Designed to generate a coherent, informed and updated analysis of resistance in agri-food, empirical and theoretical contributions analyze the relationship between expressions of the neoliberal corporate system and various projects of opposition. Contributions included in the volume probe established forms and rationales of resistance including civic agriculture, consumer- and community-based initiatives, labor, cooperative and gender-based protest, struggles in opposition to land grabbing and mobilization of environmental science and ecological resistance. The core contribution of the volume is to theorize and to empirically assess the limits and contradictions that characterize these forms of resistance. In particular, the hegemonic role of the neoliberal ideology and the ways in which it has ‘captured’ processes of resistance are illustrated. Through the exploration of the tension between legitimate calls for emancipation and the dominant power of Neoliberalism, the book contributes to the ongoing debate on the strengths and limits of Neoliberalism in agri-food. It also engages critically with the outputs and potential outcomes of established and emerging resistance movements, practices, and concepts.

Interest in the study of state power, civil liberties, human rights, and state sponsored crime is growing and there is a need for a book which brings these topics together. This book, part of the Companions series, provides succinct yet robust definitions and explanations of core concepts and themes in relation to state power, liberties and human rights. The entries are bound by their inter-relatedness and relevance to the study of crime and harm and the volume draws upon established and emerging commentaries from other social and political disciplines. Laid out in a user-friendly A-Z format, it includes entries from expert contributors with clear direction to related entries and further reading. The contributors critically engage with the topics in an accessible yet challenging way, ensuring that the definitions go beyond a simple explanation of the word or theme. It will be suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students on a variety of courses such as Criminology, Criminal Justice, International Relations, Politics, Social Policy, Policing Studies, and Law as well as other researchers in these areas.