This compact volume is an indispensable study of state imaginaries and the political economy of development in Colombia's contemporary internal conflict. In contributing to a growing literature that contests metanarratives of the Colombian state's absence or failure, Teo Ballvé also accounts for the power and persistence of right-wing paramilitarism. Ballvé convincingly argues that the supposed absence of the state in northwestern Colombia's banana-growing frontier region of Urabá does not explain the violence that gripped the region for decades. Instead, those “clashes between insurgency and counterinsurgency . . . were conflicts over the form and content of statehood itself” (p. 35).
Ballvé’s key conceptual intervention is “the frontier effect,” which he defines as the process by which “claims of statelessness . . . shape the imaginaries, practices, institutions, and relationships of political life” (p. 5). The book follows the frontier effect's enactment from roughly the 1960s until the late 2010s, through...
