Colombia S Political Economy At The Outset Of The Twenty First Century

This volume examines Colombia’s political economy at the outset of the twenty-first century. A group of leading experts explores various issues, such as drug trafficking, organized crime, economic performance, the internal armed conflict, and human rights. The experts highlight the various challenges that Colombia faces today. This volume is a major contribution to the field and provides a current panorama of the Colombia conflict.

This volume examines the relationship between states and organized crime. It seeks to add to the theoretical literature for analyzing the criminalization of the state. The volume also explores the nature of organized crime in countries throughout the Americas from Central America to the Southern Cone.

In this succinct text, Jonathan D. Rosen and Hanna Samir Kassab explore the linkage between weak institutions and government policies designed to combat drug trafficking, organized crime, and violence in Latin America. Using quantitative analysis to examine criminal violence and publicly available survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) to conduct regression analysis, individual case studies on Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, and Nicaragua highlight the major challenges that governments face and how they have responded to various security issues. Rosen and Kassab later turn their attention to the role of external criminal actors in the region and offer policy recommendations and lessons learned. Questions explored include: What are the major trends in organized crime in this country? How has organized crime evolved over time? Who are the major criminal actors? How has state fragility contributed to organized crime and violence (and vice versa)? What has been the government’s response to drug trafficking and organized crime? Have such policies contributed to violence? Crime, Violence and the State in Latin America is suitable to both undergraduate and graduate courses in criminal justice, international relations, political science, comparative politics, international political economy, organized crime, drug trafficking, and violence.

This book examines the nature of transnational organized crime and gangs, and how these diverse organizations contribute to violence, especially in so-called fragile states across Central and Latin America. While the nature of organized crime and violence differs depending on the context, the authors explain how and why states plagued by weak institutions tend to foster criminal organizations and violence, and why counter-crime initiatives often result in higher levels of violence. By examining the consequences of tough on crime policies (e.g., mano dura) in places like Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia, the volume offers a new perspective on the link between state fragility, crime, and violence.

For some states in Latin America, corruption is not simply an industry, but rather it is part of the political system. This collection studies the nature of corruption and its recent trends through expert contributions from scholars from the region who have diverse scholarly backgrounds, theoretical orientations, and methodologies. Through case studies of countries throughout the Americas, the contributors analyze the links between corruption and organized crime, the main actors involved in corruption, governmental responses to corruption, and the impact that corruption has on governmental institutions and people’s faith in them.

Colombia's recent past has been characterized by what its Nobel laureate Gabriel García Marquez once called "a biblical holocaust" of human savagery. Along with the scourge of drug-related massacres facing the country, politically-motivated assassinations (averaging 30 per day in the 1990s), widespread disappearances, rapes, and kidnappings have run rampant through the country for decades. For many Colombians, the violence oft-invoked in today's immigration debate is a bleak and inescapable reality. And yet, with only eleven years of military rule during its 200 some years of independence, Colombia's democratic tradition is among the richest and longest-standing in the hemisphere. The country's economic growth rate over the last 75 years is among the highest in South America, the overall living satisfaction of its citizens is on par with citizens of France, and it is home to some of the continent's best universities and most dazzling fine and industrial arts. With such contradictions, even to experts, Colombia is one of the most confusing countries in the Americas. In this new addition to the popular What Everyone Needs to Know® series, Richard D. Mahoney links historical legacies, cultural features, and the relentless dynamics of the illegal drug industry to unravel the enigma. He explores the many key issues running through Colombia's history, distinguishing its national experience, and fueling its unquenchable creativity. With concerns surrounding immigration from the US's southern neighbors mounting to new heights, understanding the history and evolution of Colombia has never been more vital.

This book, which brings together scholars from the developed and developing world, explores one of the most salient features of contemporary international relations: South-South cooperation. It builds on existing empirical evidence and offers a comparative analytical framework to critically analyse the aid policies and programmes of ten rising donors from the global South. Amongst these are several BRICS (Brazil, India, China and South Africa) but also a number of less studied countries, including Cuba, Venezuela, the United Arab Emirates, Colombia, Turkey, and Korea. The chapters trace the ideas, identities and actors that shape contemporary South-South cooperation, and also explore potential differences and points of convergence with traditional North-South aid. This thought-provoking edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of international relations, international political economy, development, economics, area studies and business. /div

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative represented an unprecedented effort by Washington to stabilize fragile democracies in Latin America by shoring up the Colombian and Mexican security forces, respectively. From Peril to Partnership evaluates the extent to which the US government achieved its stabilization objectives. US assistance was more helpful to Colombia than Mexico, which adopted a more militarized approach. This book highlights the importance of the private sector, party system, and security bureaucracy in facilitating progress-and how their absence obstructs it.