Aldo Civico: The Para-state: An Ethnography of Colombia's Death Squads. In : « Analyses bibliographiques »
Résumé
Book review.
Abstract of the review:
Civico’s work is motivated by a query about the mutual relation between armed groups and the state. This inquiry stands at the crossroads of political science, anthropology and development studies: what do the experiences of paramilitary violence suggest about the notions of modernity, state and democracy? His study thus builds on existing literature on violence as a feature of modern states, including democracies (Aretxaga 1999; Paley, 2001). For Civico, the two-ways process in which a state’s margins are controlled through intertwinement with paramilitary groups expresses the state’s function of capture. The author could certainly have expanded his analysis through such notion and its related literature. He only briefly refers to the economy of capture, hopefully inspiring scholars to further research through the Colombian case.