Presentation on Non-State Armed Actors, Economic Globalization, and the State: Towards an Emergent Theory of Violence
On March 30, 2019 Jasmin Hristov will present the paper “Non-State Armed, Actors, Economic Globalization, and the State: Towards an Emergent Theory of Violence” at the International Studies Association (ISA) 60th Annual Convention in Toronto.
This paper exemplifies the contributions of global sociology to the field of International Studies by capturing new modalities of coercion that have emerged as transnational forces interact with local structures and actors. Violence has been commonly dealt with as unrelated to basic economic processes in our contemporary world. Over the past ten years, there has been a growing awareness of human rights abuses associated with extractive industries and agribusiness, carried out by state and non-state actors across the Global South. Nevertheless, such findings are mostly produced by non-academic writers, with the exception of few scholarly interventions. Consequently, even though there has been an alarming level of attacks against social activists and human rights defenders in Latin America lately, violence is still perceived primarily as criminal or domestic. This paper offers an emergent theory of violence that encapsulates the relationship between non-state armed actors, economic globalization and the state, through an examination of core patterns revealed across violent environments in Latin America. In the tradition of grounded theory, the idea of parastatal violence is abstracted from the descriptive level and transformed into a conceptual tool that identifies an emergent social process – capital-enabling violence in a globalized world.
