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Tom Long, Borderland battles: violence, crime, and governance at the edges of Colombia's war, International Affairs, Volume 96, Issue 2, March 2020, Pages 562–564, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa003
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Extract
Annette Idler's new book on the Colombian conflict is the product of truly extraordinary research. Idler illustrates how the country's interwoven political and criminal violence is experienced by people in peripheral regions. To do so, she immersed herself in those regions, many of them difficult-to-access, frequent sites of violence, at the margins of state control and directly or indirectly governed by a range of insurgent and criminal actors. She is also deeply engaged with the stories of the people who live and fight in those regions, including former rebels, paramilitaries and victims. Seen from the borderlands, the Colombian conflict is infinitely more complex than what is often presented and involves more actors than the state, insurgent armies, cohesive paramilitaries and drug cartels. Idler shows the diversity and fluidity of armed actors and the blurry and shifting relationships among them. Perhaps most strikingly, Idler presents the communities that are often overlooked when the focus is on the people with guns. Her impressive research unflinchingly shows how prolonged, multidimensional insecurity reshapes and often sunders the social fabric.
