Blood and Capital

WOLA-Duke Book Award Finalist In Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Jasmin Hristov examines the complexities, dynamics, and contradictions of present-day armed conflict in Colombia. She conducts an in-depth inquiry into the restructuring of the state's coercive apparatus and the phenomenon of paramilitarism by looking at its military, political, and legal dimensions. Hristov demonstrates how various interrelated forms of violence by state forces, paramilitary groups, and organized crime are instrumental to the processes of capital accumulation by the local elite as well as the exercise of political power by foreign enterprises. Issues of forced displacement, proletarianization of peasants, concentration of landownership, growth in urban and rural poverty, and human rights violations are viewed in relation to the use of legal means and extralegal armed force by local dominant groups and foreign companies to advance their economic interests.After documenting the penetration of major state institutions by right-wing armed groups and the persistence of human rights violations against social movements and sectors of the low-income population, Blood and Capital raises crucial questions about the promised dismantling of paramilitarism and the validity of the so-called demobilization of paramilitary groups, both of which have been widely considered by North American and some European governments as proof of current Colombian president Alvaro Uribe's advances in the wars on terror and drugs.

"Hristov's rich description of the Colombian conflict with information based on the author's fieldwork presents a valuable addition to the literature and presents an analysis that has become rare in the age of neoliberal ideological hegemony." - The Americas "This is a well-researched resource examining paramilitary-state repression and the underlying political and economic conditions in Colombia that drive it." - International Affairs "By making explicit the connections between neoliberal policies and paramilitarism, and the use of violence as a means of resource acquisition and the facilitation of a climate for its continuation, Hristov powerfully refutes attempts to oversimplify the conflict in Colombia and its justification as part of the 'war on terror.'" - H-Human Rights "The description of Colombia that Hristov provides is expressed in an almost 'structural-functional' account of the way in which neoliberalism and paramilitarism are mutually supportive, how large numbers of marginalized and disadvantaged people are dispossessed and forcibly removed from their subsistance economies, where they are replaced by the exploitation of Colombia's ample natural resources by dominantly foreign capital ably abetted by cunning comprador elites." - The Innovation Journal "Hopefully Blood & Capital will receive the attention that it deserves, and Hristov's meticulous research can be used to truly disarm the state coercive apparatus in Colombia." - Upside Down World "The connections between the paramilitary and members of the government, the judiciary and armed forces in fact have been well documented, but (Jasmin Hristov) adds to this documentation a very sharp class analysis of the political dynamics involved." - Socialist Studies

Jasmin Hristov is an advanced PhD candidate in sociology at York University, Toronto, and Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Latin America. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, Journal of Peasant Studies, NACLA, Social Justice, and Latin American Perspectives.Follow her research at: www.jasminhristov.ca