This compact volume is an indispensable study of state imaginaries and the political economy of development in Colombia's contemporary internal conflict. In contributing to a growing literature that contests metanarratives of the Colombian state's absence or failure, Teo Ballvé also accounts for the power and persistence of right-wing paramilitarism. Ballvé convincingly argues that the supposed absence of the state in northwestern Colombia's banana-growing frontier region of Urabá does not explain the violence that gripped the region for decades. Instead, those “clashes between insurgency and counterinsurgency . . . were conflicts over the form and content of statehood itself” (p. 35).
CITATION STYLE
Karl, R. (2023). The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia. Hispanic American Historical Review, 103(1), 185–186. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-10216786
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