provides an intriguing combination of political science analysis and ethnographic research, merging multisite participative observation and theoretically informed models of sociopolitical governance, and mobilizing an impressive deal of documental, archival, statistical, and oral information ... Idler's intellectual contribution is undisputable. Borderland Battles should be commended for the vast amount of material and the multidisciplinary strategies pursued in amassing a vivid image of borderland regions and, despite the label, their centrality for understanding core dynamics and developments. * Javier Puente, H-Borderlands *
Unlike much political science and mainstream media narratives that show us a Colombian state struggling to regain security and overcome criminality in its margins, Idler's book shows us how it is relationships between guerrillas, paramilitaries and criminal gangs in the "marginal" borderlands - which truly compose the core regions of an informal, transnational, non-state governance system - that is a missing key to understanding the totality of security in Colombia. * Charles Beach, Border Criminologies *
"Recent research has problematized the boundaries between conflict and post-conflict. Anette Idler's grounded and meticulous investigation of Colombia's borderlands adds to this growing research area by showing why the marginal spaces, and the margins more broadly, deserve more scrutiny." -Stathis Kalyvas, Stathis N. Kalyvas
"A decade of multi-site fieldwork in four remote and dangerous border conflict zones underlies Annette Idler's sophisticated and thought-provoking study. She decenters prevailing state-centric perspectives on Colombia's profound and still ongoing disorders, and foregrounds the almost invisible realities of these borderlands, thus providing a 'wide-angled view' of the country's many faces. Her focus on the shifting relations between locally-based 'violent non-state groups' illuminates the precarious 'shadow citizenship' operating there. Policy prescriptions will only work if based on sound understanding of these unfamiliar borderland polities."-Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford University
"This represents a novel contribution to conflict studies, integrating a sophisticated understanding of borderlands with theorizing on local conflict dynamics of local conflicts and relations among violent non-state actors. Using detailed ethnographic fieldwork performed under dangerous conditions, Idler demonstrates how abstract, state-centered concepts such as sovereignty and borderlines guide the behavior of non-state actors in conflict, even in territories where the state is weak or absent." -Harold Trinkunas, Center for International Conflict and Cooperation, Stanford University
"Amidst a growing literature on organized violence and crime in Latin America, Idler's Borderland Battles stands out for its sharp focus on the fuzzy remote edges of the territorial state--the highly contested borderlands that receive too little scholarly, policy, and media attention because they are harder to access and 'see.' This is especially important in countries such as Colombia, where central state authority has long been notoriously weak. Idler shows that to fully understand Colombian security politics one must understand borderland security, where many of the key actors simultaneously compete and cooperate and nimbly crisscross and exploit borders. Through her grounded, 'bottom up' ethnographic research, Idler provides an impressively nuanced argument that 'brings borders back in' to contemporary security debates about weak and fragile states." -Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of Political Science and International Studies, Brown University
