Development, Coercion and Non-State Violent Actors in the Era of Globalization

This paper proposes a new way of theorizing non-state armed actors in relation to economic globalization. While my propositions emerge out of the experiences of a number of Latin American countries, which are ranked among those having the highest homicide rates in the world, the framework advanced is intended as an analytical tool that can be utilized to shed light on violent environments in many other parts of the developing world. An influential literature on the subject of violence in the era of globalization argues that violence today is urban and criminal (as opposed to agrarian and political), with the most frequently identified sources being drug-trafficking, urban slums, and gangs. These, in turn, are attributed to the rapid rural-to-urban migration, which is seen as an inevitable by-product of Latin America’s economic development. However, behind criminal organizations and gangs, lies a different type of violence that is neither criminal nor a tool of war. Paramilitary violence has been widely employed over the past 25 years in land appropriation, forced displacement, and the repression of social movements. This paper makes a critical intervention by addressing the limitations of several prominent clusters of literature found in the field of conflict and development, including works on: political violence; civil war as development in reverse; the weak state/failed-state thesis, the concept of ‘new wars’, and criminal violence. By exposing the role of non-state armed actors in securing and reproducing conditions for capital accumulation, with particular emphasis on land dispossession, my goal is to highlight the significance of paramilitary violence non only as an enabler of capital, but as a generator of social conditions characterized by propensity for structural and sexual violence, feminicide, human trafficking, organized crime, and gang membership, thus revealing the deeply-rooted causes that give violence its reproductive quality across time and social spaces.