A Century of Revolution

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Grandin, Greg and Gilbert M. Joseph, Eds. 2010. A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Selections]

I wish I’d had more time to devote to A Century of Revolution edited by Greg Grandin and Gilbert Joseph. Unfortunately, I had to skip around, but I’ll certainly come back to this book for years. I’ll definitely give it the read it deserves soon. The title of the book itself is significant because the authors argue that periodization of the Cold War for Latin America should be broadened, repositioning its start at least with the first spark of the Mexican Revolution, if not before (1898), while ending with Central America’s conflicts of the 1980s. Latin America’s “Long Cold War” is defined not so much by the superpower contest between Russia and the United States (the Cold War proper) as it is by U.S. efforts at political containment. Beyond this, though deeply related, is the editors’ demand that political violence be historicized; otherwise, it ends up being cast as beyond explanation and analysis, ineffable or (worse) aestheticized. Continue reading →

Posted in Historical Materialism, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Peace, Post-Colonial, Power, Scale, Sovereignty, Terror, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

On the Trail of Latin American Bandits

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Joseph, Gilbert M. 1990. “On the Trail of Latin American Bandits: A Reexamination of Peasant Resistance,” Latin American Research Review 25(3): 7-53; & Various Authors. 1991. “Debate on Banditry in Latin America,” Latin American Research Review 26(1): 145-174.

Gil Joseph argues that scholars have focused too narrowly on Hobsbawm’s definition of social banditry as a “primitive form” of peasant rebellion that often lead into the blind alleys of “inconclusive taxonomic debate” (18). The model has become too constricting and Latin Americanists would do well to turn toward then-newer work being done by scholars in the realms of peasant resistance, consciousness and social action, as in the work of Ranajit Guha and James Scott. If Hobsbawm’s critics have taken him to task for ignoring the larger socio-political universe in which peasants exists, particularly their relations with elites, then the banditry revisionist deny or underplay the peasant-bandit connection. Joseph’s conceptual framework seeks to provide an approach that answers the following questions: “How can social scientists place peasants at the center of bandit studies without marginalizing elites? And what inspiration and models does recent comparative discourse provide?” Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Bandits, Boundaries, Dialectics, Hegemony, Historical Materialism, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Marxism, Nation/Nationalism, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Terror, The State, Violence | Comments Off on On the Trail of Latin American Bandits

Bandits, Peasants, Politics

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Sánchez, Gonzálo and Donny Meertens. 2006. Bandoleros, gamonales y campesinos: El caso de la Violencia en Colombia. Bogotá: Alfaguara.

Latin America has been the epicenter of banditry studies. After Hobsbawm’s pioneering survey, Gonzálo Sánchez and Donny Meertens’ study of banditry in the waning years of Colombia’s mid-century civil war known as “La Violencia” (ca. 1945-1965) is one of the most celebrated histories of banditry. Hobsbawm himself praises this book, even though in many respects it provides some pretty strong counter-argument to many of his central claims. More than “social banditry,” the authors argue that the Colombian context produced what they call “political banditry.” If the former places the emphasis of bandits dependence on the sociality of peasant life—the social—then the latter signals Colombian bandits necessary relationship to more formal structures of power (particularly political parties, the state, and landowners). In the Colombian case, the bandits’ “political subordination” is not a mere accident of their careers; it is what motivates and defines their actions (53). Banditry in Colombia is not the product of a deep social crisis; it presupposes such a crisis. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Bandits, Boundaries, Dialectics, Frontiers, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Terror, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Bandits, Peasants, Politics

Hobsbawm’s Bandits

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Hobsbawm, Eric J. 2000. Bandits. New York: The New Press.

Hobsbawm develops his essay on “social banditry” from Primitive Rebels into a book-length exploration in this book, and in this reworked edition responds to some of the critics of the original publication (1969). As in the previous book, social bandits are a product of intransigent agrarian class relations. They operate within the bounds of a peasant moral universe, while their political aims are normally inchoate, ambiguous, malleable, and/or reformist. “Banditry simultaneously challenges the economic, social and political order by challenging those who hold or lay claim to power, law and the control of resources” (7). Bandits exist within a particular socioeconomic and political order, but they do so while acting out a living critique of that same public law and order. Banditry is “about class, wealth and power in peasant societies” (9). Hobsbawm wants to understand social banditry as a form of “social protest and rebellion” (21). Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Bandits, Boundaries, Everyday Life, Forests, Frontiers, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Territory, Terror, The State, Violence | 2 Comments

Primitive Rebels

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Hobsbawm, Eric. 1959. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Century. New York: Norton

In Eric Hobsbawm’s famous book, primitive rebels are those engaged in “pre-political” or “blind and groping” forms of social agitation; their politics are often ambiguous and perhaps even reformist, if not conservative; and they are more often rural and poor, coming on the scene on the cusp of dramatic socio-economic transformations. The social bandit is their archetypical outlaw form. “Social banditry, a universal and virtually unchanging phenomenon, is little more than endemic peasant protest against oppression and poverty: a cry for vengeance on the rich and oppressors, a vague dream of some curb upon them, a righting of individual wrongs. Its ambitions are modest… Social banditry has next to no organization or ideology, and is totally inadaptable to modern social movements” (5). It’s clearly a book of its time, abeit a very important one. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Bandits, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Power, Primitive Accumulation, Spatiality, Terror, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

Mercenaries, Pirates & Sovereigns

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Thomson, Janice E. 1994. Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

The main task of Janice Thomson’s Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns is to reveal how non-state violence became monopolized in its legitimate form by the state. How did the state achieve exclusive claim to the external purveyance of violent force? For the six centuries before 1900, she notes, “global violence was democratized, marketized, and internationalized… Individuals and groups used their own means of violence in pursuit of their particular aims, whether honor and glory, wealth, or political power” (3). Through an ad hoc and largely inadvertent process, Thomson argues that non-state transnational violent actors were effectively disarmed through the (mostly) mutual accord of states themselves. Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Frontiers, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Pirates, Post-Colonial, Power, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, Terror, The Sea, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

Villains of All Nations

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Rediker, Marcus. 2004. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon Press.

The dialectics of violence on the eighteenth century Atlantic were spurred by three sources of terror: pirates, violent state repression against piracy, and the oppressive prison-like conditions of merchant ships. Piracy was as much a parasite of a burgeoning maritime capitalism, as it was a direct response to the oppressive conditions experienced by the sailors of merchant ships—those machines of that era’s globalism. Marcus Rediker’s Villains of All Nations shows how the pirate ship became a world turned upside down that “limited the authority of the captain, resisted many of the practices of capitalist merchant shipping industry, and maintained a multicultural, multiracial, and multinational social order” (17). Meanwhile, pirates turned terror against terror (13). The hoisting of the Jolly Roger was often enough to induce the surrender of merchant ships.
Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Frontiers, Gender, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Pirates, Political Economy, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Spatiality, Territory, Terror, The Sea, The State, Violence | 2 Comments

The Enemy of All

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Heller-Rozen, Daniel. 2009. The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations. Boston: Zone Books.

Daniel Heller-Rozen’s The Enemy of All departs from a deceptively simple question: How is it that the pirate came to be the original enemy of human kind? His genealogy spanning from classical antiquity to the early modern era shows us how the pirate became “an unjust antagonist unworthy of [normally constituted] rights” (10). He finds four main historical threads that form the controversial fabric of the piratical paradigm: a geographical space of exceptional legal rules (e.g. the sea or air space), an open and generalized social antagonism (especially viz. states), a blurring of the criminal and the political, and, finally, a transformation of the concept of war, particularly by blurring internal and external security procedures. Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Frontiers, Gender, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Pirates, Power, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, Terror, The Sea, The State | 4 Comments

The Many-Headed Hydra

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press.

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s groundbreaking book uncovers the history of the many Motley Crews—the many-headed hydras—across the Atlantic Ocean that forcefully fought against the building of state, empire, and capitalism. The Atlantic’s circular winds and currents not only propelled the movement of commodities and ships; they also moved (and instigated) rebels, non-conformists and consciousness as well as ideas and lived experiences of more just and equitable ways of life. Slaves, sailors, pirates, religious heretics and liberationists, “witches,” prostitutes, workers, and servants are the motley, multiethnic lots, who against all odds have sustained the ebb and flow, the crests of revolution and resistance across the Atlantic. Africa, the Americas, and Europe are brought to life through the radical political connections made through these “planetary currents of humanity” (6). Continue reading →

Posted in Bandits, Everyday Life, Frontiers, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Networks, Pirates, Race & Ethnicity, Territory, Terror, The Sea, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

Turning Another Page

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Attentive readers may have noted yet another shift in recent posts. Beginning with Marx on the theft of wood and then onto the Warwick crew (E.P. Thompson et al) on all sorts of illegal communal actions, the blog will be turning toward the outlaw geographies of “Motley Crews”: commoners, pirates, bandits, and all other sorts of fugitive tricksters.

From there, I’ll wade into the dialectics of political violence by focusing on insurgency and counter-insurgency, followed up by a series of texts on what I’m calling “seeing like a mafia”—that is, the intricate relations between mafias and state development. That will help me end up on the more general shore of global criminal networks, particularly the trafficking of illegal goods and money.

Your humble correspondent, kind readers, will be reporting (more religiously) from a countryside hammock, meaning that posts—though probably written daily—will be published online in batches with slightly less frequency. The latter depends entirely on the mood of my trusty stead, a.k.a. “El Rucio,” who has a somewhat sour and lazy disposition.

Thankfully, there are indeed still places in the world without Internet access.

Posted in Everyday Life | Comments Off on Turning Another Page