Regionalism

1.5 hours writing, 3.5 hours reading, page count = 127

Having spent a lot of time on the theoretical and methodological chapters, I decided to focus today on one of the empirical chapters - especially given that I need to be very clear on what data I still need in anticipation of my upcoming research trip to Colombia.

So I worked on the chapter on the 19th century, the "critical antecedents" that lead into and shape the "critical juncture" when security forces were configured. One of these is regionalism, the tendency of Colombian politics to be organized around multiple geographic and cultural centers, and as a result (purportedly), to tend toward decentralization and fragmentation. Turns out the story is not that straightforward. Going back to a source I re-read over the summer, Nancy Appelbaum's Muddied Waters, regionalism is an outcome of the state formation process, rather than necessarily a cause. That is, the borders of regions change significantly over time, and no one can agree on exactly how many regions there are or even what constitutes one. Putting this alongside another source, it appears that the broad borders of Colombian states were established in 1863, at the very height of 19th-century Liberal federalism, and that subsequent centralizing Conservative administrations essentially kept those broad borders, only gradually subdividing them into smaller units. One could therefore argue that the regions represented by state borders were developed and consolidated in the course of the state formation process, rather than preceding and independently shaping it. Or is it that regionalism was so strong that the borders of the states couldn't be touched? I'll need to explore further...