Book Review: Borderland Battles: Violence, Crime, and Governance at the Edges of Colombia’s War

Guest post by Charles Beach, anthropologist and doctoral candidate at University College London. His work, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, investigates petrol smuggling and the informal economies of the Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands.

Review of Borderland Battles: Violence, Crime, and Governance at the Edges of Colombia’s War by Annette Idler (Oxford University Press 2019).

Colombia’s border with Venezuela, which includes my own field site, the city of Cúcuta, became headlines in international news in early 2019 when American-backed and self-declared Venezuelan president Juan Guaidó attempted to deliver aid to Venezuela across the closed border. The attempt ended in violence, days of pitched battles between protesters and the Venezuelan national guard, and an increase in Venezuelan migration into Colombia.

For a brief moment, a global audience got an insight into one of the world’s most conflictive borders.  Borderland Battles by Annette Idler focuses on Colombia’s border with Venezuela as well as Ecuador. Building on current approaches in border studies (e.g. Stoddard; van Schendel; Piliavsky) this monograph aims to use the concept of borderlands as an analytical lens for studying the conflicts that arise where two jurisdictions meet. Its focus is on the many ways violent non-state actors in Colombia’s internal armed conflict (paramilitaries, guerrillas, emergent criminal gangs) interact.

The book is at its core a political science study that also shares 'many elements with an ethnography' (Idler 2018, p.14) and promotes a 'human-centred' approach to security studies. Unlike many ethnographies that focus intensely on a highly localized and singular research population and area, Borderland Battles is exceedingly ambitious in its scope and range, covering a vast area of three countries with a target population of everyone from civilians and community leaders to armed actors and security forces.

According to Idler, political science is too state-centric, and violent armed groups are mostly analyzed through their relationships to the state rather than the relationships they maintain between themselves. She advocates for a focus on relationships between non-state actors, going against what she calls a 'world politics' paradigm. As Idler argues, '[o]ur understanding of social order and security dynamics is only partial if we neglect the behavioral patterns of non-state actors out of the state’s sight' (p.31). Borderland Battles redresses this aptly self-described 'blind spot' through using a 'borderland lens' as an analytical tool.

Idler argues that the qualitative data shows that we should be theorising border phenomena through their borderlands, the sub-national regions on either side of the border that 'manifest distinct social, political and economic structures shaped by their geographic location' (Idler 2018, p.78) Like how border patrols in the US seep deep into the interior of the nation-state territory, borders have a zone of influence that needs to be studied in combination with the border. This borderland lens acts to decentre the state in research: we know how the state enacts policies about the border, but how do borderlands deal with the state?

Conversely, Idler also focuses on the four effects of the border itself. Firstly, as a facilitator where the border is used to obscure illegal activity through cross border jumping, and secondly, as a deterrent. Although armed groups often cross the border with impunity there are problems with trust when interacting with groups in other territories. Thirdly, borders act as a magnet. The state shows restraint in acting against groups on the border as not to cause diplomatic problems. This combined with the profitability of cross border trade draws many armed groups from across Colombia. Lastly, the border acts as a disguise, where the distance of the border from the state centre is used by criminal entities to their advantage.

Idler’s 'human-centric' approach to local security dynamics, in contradistinction to a “state-centric” approach, nonetheless, places a large emphasis on the state’s margins and state failure. As Idler says in these marginal areas 'People are invisible. At best forgotten, at worst banished, from the rest of society' (p.66). Idler treats this as fact from the get-go, but I think a missed opportunity is to analyse why borderlanders say such things as ‘the state has forgotten us’ and to understand what they mean by it. Such statements are as much a value judgement about what a state should be, as they are statements that the state has literally forgotten a group of people. An analysis of this discourse of abandonment could ultimately have given us more insight into border security and non-state actors participating in it.

Ultimately, Idler’s work returns to a question that has been thoroughly thought through by postcolonial scholars and dependency theorists alike: What exactly are the margins? What is it to be marginal? Idler says that her concept of transnational borderlands 'questions the notion of the territorial state altogether' (p.67), but these questions of marginality never get explicitly analysed. The concept of transnational borderlands could have been deployed critically to challenge the notion of the centre-margin divide which is itself a technology of the nation-state that she is intentionally calling into question.

Overall Borderland Battles proposes a convincing argument for the human-centric study of borders and border security which often means thinking less about state policies towards border regions and more about on the ground interactions. Unlike much political science and mainstream media narratives that show us a Colombian state struggling to regain security and overcome criminality in its margins, Idler’s book shows us how it is relationships between guerrillas, paramilitaries and criminal gangs in the “marginal” borderlands – which truly compose the core regions of an informal, transnational, non-state governance system - that is a missing key to understanding the totality of security in Colombia.

Borderland Battles engages with many key topics in contemporary Colombia but may prove lacking in the current Colombian academic debates for those who specialise in the region. However, scholars of multi-actor armed-conflicts and border theorists will find the arguments in this book compelling and enlightening.

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Beach, C. (2019). Book Review: Borderland Battles: Violence, Crime, and Governance at the Edges of Colombia’s War. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2019/10/book-review-1 (Accessed [date])