Cien (again)

1.5 hours writing, 1 hour meeting, 1.5 hours processing data, 1 hour reading, 0.5 hours emailing, page count = 142

I worked on my presentation for Monday, developing charts that lay out the causal framework and that map the differences among politicized, militarized, and autonomous security-force configurations.

In terms of processing data, I continued to update my database on police deployment in Antioquia, and transferred my three tape-recorded interviews from 2003 into digital format.

I had a great meeting with a professor at CUNY who writes on the police. He had very helpful references for Honduras, one of my comparison cases, and contributed an interesting problematization of my concept of regime stability. I talk about how the decision to militarize or politicize security forces generates a "susceptibility" to certain types of armed challenges, either from within the state in the form of coups or from within society in the form of insurrections. Both of these are about armed challenges to the state. But there's another type of susceptibility that's generated by how the state is configured with regard to security forces, and that's the susceptibility of citizens to crime, including vigilantism and banditry. As I thought about it more, it seems as though there are parallels between the susceptibility of the state and that of citizens on the different paths I lay out: under militarized security forces, the state is susceptible to coup and citizens are susceptible to repression by agents of the state, as military logic begins to dictate security; whereas under politicized security forces, the state is susceptible to insurrection and citizens are susceptible to crime, as the ineffectiveness of state agents creates a vacuum in which common delinquency can flourish. I'll need to tease out this suggestive idea further.

In terms of reading, I continued checking out the post-mortems on Sunday's elections. The other big piece of the story is the continued infiltration of politics by the paramilitaries. While much like the infiltration of politics by drug traffickers, this has been something of an open secret, the true extent of paramilitary infiltration is now coming to light - so much so that "parapolitica" is the buzzword of the year in Colombia. Troublingly, several of the candidates elected to mayorships and municipal councils on Sunday have ties to the parapolitica scandal, which continues to gain steam as more revelations are made.

What this speaks to in terms of my dissertation is the degree to which the structure of regular armed forces (the guns authorized by the state) shape, reflect, and interact with the structure of irregular armed forces, such as the paramilitaries.

This is my 100th post in this blog; appropriate that it should come at the end of the month. Happy Halloween!