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.

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 Álvaro Uribe’s advances in the wars on terror and drugs.

Jasmin Hristov is an advanced PhD candidate in sociology at York University, Toronto. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, Journal of Peasant Studies, Social Justice, and Latin American Perspectives.

Jasmin Hristov's profile page

Hristov presents a disturbing picture of a nation that exercises almost total control over the daily lives of its citizens–a situation that has resulted in one of the world’s highest populations of forcibly displaced people, a 65% poverty rate (with some 10 million homeless), and a police apparatus in which torture is the norm…Copies of Blood and Capital certainly belong on the Prime Minister’s reading list, and would no doubt be helpful to those Canadian business executives who remain clueless about (or willfully blind to) the human costs of high returns on Colombian investment.

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