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Drug Trafficking, Corruption and States is cutting edge research. Garay Salamanca and Salcedo-Albarn, along with their contributing authors help document the transition from economic to political imperatives within transnational drug cartels. The break from the Zetas by La Familia Michoacana is one example contained in their empirical survey. Social Network Analysis is their tool for illuminating the varying dynamics of cartel-state inter-penetration and reconfiguration. In doing so they clearly discern between State Capture (StC) and Co-opted State Reconfiguration (CStR). As the drug wars and criminal insurgencies rage in the Americas and beyond, this seminal framework will facilitate efforts by scholars, law enforcement officials, intelligence analysts and policymakers to understand shifts in sovereignty, and to illuminate the mechanisms of transnational illicit networks and their interaction with the state.
By embedding Guatemala in recent conceptual and theoretical work in comparative politics and political economy, this volume advances knowledge about country’s politics, economy, and state-society interactions. The contributors examine the stubborn realities and challenges afflicting Guatemala during the post-Peace-Accords-era across the following subjects: the state, subnational governance, state-building, peacebuilding, economic structure and dynamics, social movements, civil-military relations, military coup dynamics, varieties of capitalism, corruption, and the level of democracy. The book deliberately avoids the perils of parochialism by placing the country within larger scholarly debates and paradigms.
What should we make of the outsized role organized crime plays in conflict and crisis, from drug wars in Mexico to human smuggling in North Africa, from the struggle in Crimea to scandals in Kabul? How can we deal with the convergence of politics and crime in so-called 'mafia states' such as Guinea-Bissau, North Korea or, as some argue, Russia? Drawing on unpublished government documents and mafia memoirs, James Cockayne discovers the strategic logic of organized crime, hidden in a century of forgotten political--criminal collaboration in New York, Sicily and the Caribbean. He reveals states and mafias competing - and collaborating -- in a competition for governmental power. He discovers mafias influencing elections, changing constitutions, organizing domestic insurgencies and transnational terrorism, negotiating peace deals, and forming governmental joint ventures with ruling groups. And he sees mafias working with the US government to spy on American citizens, catch Nazis, try to assassinate Fidel Castro, invade and govern Sicily, and playing unappreciated roles in the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This second Small Wars JournalEl Centro anthology signifies the important debate that this new forum, focusing on the crime wars and criminal insurgencies taking place in Mexico and other regions of the Americas, is helping to generate in U.S. defense and homeland security circles. The debate comes at a time when neither of the two major U.S. presidential candidates were willingly to candidly discuss this issue and at the end of the recent Felipe Caldern administration which saw over 80,000 dead, 20,000 missing, and 200,000 internal refugees stemming from gang and cartel violence during its tenure in Mexico. Dave Dilegge SWJ Editor-in-Chief
This work marks the 3rd Small Wars Journal—El Centro anthology. Its analyses, crafted by over thirty contributing authors, forms a compilation of the violence and corruption in Mexico plaguing the first year of Enrique Peña Nieto’s presidency. Instances of spillover violence in the United States and the gang and cartel crime wars in other Latin American countries are also chronicled. Spanish language article appendices are additionally incorporated in this important anthology. Dave Dilegge SWJ Editor-in-Chief
Much has been written about the many economic benefits of globalization and the triumph and spread of democratic liberalism with the end of the Cold War, following the demise of the Soviet Union. This work takes issue with such "wine and roses" perspectives about the future of the Western democracies and their faith-based views on the moral purity of a globalized marketplace. It also questions many of the assumptions found in the status quo reinforcing discipline of international political economy (IPE)—a discipline that focuses on the formal and legitimate economies and the façade they present that international relations and commerce is still dominated and dictated solely by the old Wes...
This book tells the story of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, an emblematic grassroots social movement of peasant farmers, who unusually declared themselves ‘neutral’ to Colombia’s internal armed conflict, in the north-west region of Urabá. It reveals two core narratives in the Community’s collective identity, which Burnyeat calls the ‘radical’ and the ‘organic’ narratives. These refer to the historically-constituted interpretative frameworks according to which they perceive respectively the Colombian state, and their relationship with their natural and social environments. Together, these two narratives form an ‘Alternative Community’ collective identity, ...
This book examines the political, economic, and military factors that have contributed to thirty-seven years of protracted violent conflict in Colombia. Using four years of field research, and more than two hundred interviews, Nazih Richani examines Colombia's "war system"—the systemic interlacing relationship among actors in conflict, their respective political economy, and also the overall political economy of the system they help in creating. Several key questions are raised, including when and why do some conflicts protract, and what types of socioeconomic and political configurations make peaceful resolutions difficult to obtain? Also addressed are the lessons of other protracted conflicts, such as those found in Lebanon, Angola, and Italy. In this expanded second edition Richani contributes new chapters looking at developments in Colombia since the book's initial publication a decade ago and a look at the challenges for peace that lie ahead.
Comprehensively laying out the concept of crimilegality, this book presents a novel perspective on the relationship between what is conventionally termed organised crime and political order in the contemporary developing world. In hybrid crimilegal orders the moral, normative and social boundaries between legality and illegality-criminality are blurred, and through the violation of the official law, the illegal-criminal sphere of social life becomes legitimate and morally acceptable, while the legal turns illegitimate and immoral. Several examples of crimilegality and crimilegal governance in Colombia and Nigeria, including in relation to armed conflict termination, are used to illustrate these complex processes.