Download Free Paramilitary Groups And The State Under Globalization Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Paramilitary Groups And The State Under Globalization and write the review.

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 extreme violence is a necessity for capitalist accumulation to occur in Colombia and beyond
This book examines the conditions under which the presence and use of militias result in an increase or a decrease in violence against civilians in intra-state conflicts. Showcasing the breadth and diversity of modern militias in the context of violence against civilians, the volume addresses the predation and repression that many such groups are infamous for, as well as increasingly important efforts by other militias at civilian protection in war-torn settings. The chapters examine militias from around the world, drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods as they cover groups as varied as gangs, death squads, grassroots community-defense groups, official state militias, and party-sponsored armies – groups on the "civic vice" side, the "civic virtue" side, and the wide and mixed in-between space where most cases fall. Taken as a cohesive unit, the work lays the foundation for an encompassing theory and interrogation of the causal chain between militia type and operating context and the levels of violence against civilians. It provides path-breaking theory-building and empirical scholarship. Policymakers and national security practitioners dealing with issues relating to armed groups will also benefit from the practical issues covered here, such as how different forms of sponsorship and training affect militia behavior. This book will be of interest to students of civil wars, political violence, counterinsurgency, civil-military relations, and security studies in general.
Across the globe, from mega-cities to isolated resource enclaves, the provision and governance of security takes place within assemblages that are de-territorialized in terms of actors, technologies, norms and discourses. They are embedded in a complex transnational architecture, defying conventional distinctions between public and private, global and local. Drawing on theories of globalization and late modernity, along with insights from criminology, political science and sociology, Security Beyond the State maps the emergence of the global private security sector and develops a novel analytical framework for understanding these global security assemblages. Through in-depth examinations of four African countries – Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and South Africa – it demonstrates how global security assemblages affect the distribution of social power, the dynamics of state stability, and the operations of the international political economy, with significant implications for who gets secured and how in a global era.
This book describes militias as significant and prevalent actors in today’s international security environment. To separate them from other types of violent non-state groups, such as terrorists, guerrillas and insurgents, the author describes militias as local guardians that use violence to fill a variety of political, social and security gaps, which have created vulnerabilities for their particular constituencies. Although militias are local in orientation, their effects are not contained to particular countries and have only added to the instability in the international system. This book explores how militias contribute to international security issues by furthering state fragility, undermining human rights and democratization, enabling illicit trafficking, prolonging internal conflicts and fostering proxy wars.
In The globalization of crime: a transnational organized crime threat assessment, UNODC analyses a range of key transnational crime threats, including human trafficking, migrant smuggling, the illicit heroin and cocaine trades, cybercrime, maritime piracy and trafficking in environmental resources, firearms and counterfeit goods. The report also examines a number of cases where transnational organized crime and instability amplify each other to create vicious circles in which countries or even subregions may become locked. Thus, the report offers a striking view of the global dimensions of organized crime today.
This book challenges the conventional wisdom that civil war inevitably stymies economic development and that ‘civil war represents development in reverse’. While some civil wars may have adverse economic effects, Civil War and Uncivil Development posits that not all conflicts have negative economic consequences and, under certain conditions, civil war violence can bolster processes of economic development. Using Colombia as a case study, this book provides evidence that violence perpetrated by key actors of the conflict – the public armed forces and paramilitaries – has facilitated economic growth and processes of economic globalisation in Colombia (namely, international trade and foreign direct investment), with profoundly negative consequences for large swathes of civilians. The analysis also discusses the ‘development in reverse’ logic in the context of other conflicts across the globe. This book will be an invaluable resource for scholars, practitioners and students in the fields of security and development, civil war studies, peace studies, the political economy of conflict and international relations.
This is the first book to offer a comprehensive analysis of the emergence, nature, and function of Serbian paramilitary units during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. The book investigates the nature and functions of paramilitary units throughout the 1990s, and their ties to the state and President Slobodan Milošević. The work relies on the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, which conducted dozens of trials relating to paramilitary violence, and records from judicial proceedings in the region. It discusses how and why certain important paramilitary units emerged, how they functioned and transformed through the decade, what their relationships and entanglements were with the state, the Milošević regime, and organized crime. The study thus investigates the interrelated ideological, political, and social factors and processes, fueling paramilitary engagement, and assesses the impact of this engagement on victims of paramilitary violence and on the state and society for which the units purportedly fought. It argues that coordinated action by a number of state institutions gave rise to paramilitaries tasked with altering borders while maintaining plausible deniability for the sponsoring regime. The outsourcing of violence by the state to paramilitaries led to a significant weakening of the very state these units and their sponsors swore to protect. The book also analyzes differences between the units and how they attacked civilians, arguing that the different forms of violence stemmed not only from the function they fulfilled for the state but also the ways in which they were set up and operated. The final chapter brings the different strands of the argument together into a coherent whole, suggesting avenues for further research, in the former Yugoslavia and beyond. This book will be of much interest to students of ethnic conflict and civil war, war crimes, Balkan politics, and International Relations in general.
Emphasizing the voices of activists, this book’s diverse contributors examine communities’ common experiences with environmental injustice, how they organize to address it, and the ways in which their campaigns intersect with related movements such as Black Lives Matter and Indigenous sovereignty. The global COVID-19 pandemic exposed the ways in which BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities and white working-class communities have suffered disproportionately from the crisis due to sustained exposure to toxic land, air, and water, creating a new urgency for addressing underlying conditions of systemic racism and poverty in North America. In addition to exploring the historical roots of the Environmental Justice movement in the 1980s and 1990s, the volume offers coverage of recent events such as the DAPL pipeline controversy, the Flint water crisis, and the rise of climate justice. The collection incorporates the experiences of rural and urban communities, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and Indigenous peoples in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The chapters offer instructors, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers a range of accessible case studies that create opportunities for comparative and intersectional analysis across geographical and ethnic boundaries.
Not so long ago, it seemed the intellectual positions on globalization were clear, with advocates and opponents making their respective cases in decidedly contrasting terms. Recently, however, the fronts have shifted dramatically. The aim of this publication is to contribute philosophical depth to the debates on globalization conducted within various academic fields – principally by working out its normative dimensions. The interdisciplinary nature of this book’s contributors also serves to scientifically ground the ethical-philosophical discourse on global responsibility. Though by no means exhaustive, the expansive scope of the works herein encompasses such other topics as the altering consciousness of space and time, and the phenomenon of globalization as a discourse, as an ideology and as a symbolic form.