Teo Ballvé
Graduate Student
B.A. Anthropology/History, Colorado College, 2001; M.A. International Affairs, The New School, 2009
Regional focus: Latin America
Broadly, my academic interests include political economy, Latin America, social movements, violence, and development.
More specifically, the bulk of my current research has involved questions about violence and statehood in a region of northwest Colombia. I've been doing fieldwork that examines how paramilitary warlords created territorial forms of quasi-government that operate parallel to the state. These cases cannot be seen in terms of the usual tropes of state breakdown and its associated loss of control over the monopoly on violence. Instead, the warlords are profoundly dependent on the continuance of the state, and, in fact, often function as the local arm of the state. Colombia's paramilitaries are not somehow anathema to projects of liberalization – usually associated with the imperatives of “institution-building” or “good governance” – but are profoundly linked to initiatives to expand global trade and attract foreign capital. Now, what I want to integrate into this panorama is how social movements are trying to intervene in this violent system. I also like to examine these issues through my work as a journalist.
Selected publications
"The Dark Side of Plan Colombia," The Nation, June 15, 2009. About how Washington unknowingly subsidized paramilitary narco-traffickers with drug-war dollars to cultivate biofuel crops on stolen lands.
Co-Editor (with Vijay Prashad) of Dispatches from Latin America: On the Frontlines Against Neoliberalism (Boston: South End Press, 2006; New Delhi: LeftWord, 2006).
All of my journalistic writing (op-eds, feature articles, etc.) is archived on my site.