In transit

4.5 hours meeting, 0.5 hours bureaucrarate, 0.5 hours emailing, 0.5 hours processing feedback, page count = 143

Greetings from the Phoenix airport. I'm in the midst of a layover on my way back home to New York. I managed to schedule five meetings back-to-back today, so I guess you could say extending my trip by a day yielded some results. I met with two of my advisors and got very helpful feedback, and then with three fellow graduate students who work on Colombia or one of my comparison countries (Nicaragua). Given that the "Colombia in comparative perspective" chapter is the one that needs the most work, that last conversation was particularly timely and illuminating.

A common theme in the conversations was the complexity of politicization of the police, and its continuing relevance today. It's important that I distinguish "politicization," which I define specifically as control of hiring, firing, and payment by politicians, from "capture," which can be control by politicians or soldiers. Indeed, what I'm saying is that those two types of capture, while similar in being cases of capture, are in fact very different in their implications for regime stability down the line.

Another element that came up in the comments over the past two days was timing. At the time that it made sense for policy-makers to design security forces, police professionalism wasn't as far advanced as military professionalism, so that designing autonomous police institutions wasn't as feasible. I'm not crazy about that part of the argument hinging on timing, but I've learned over the years that timing can be a powerful explanations for historical patterns of development in different parts of the world. It matters tremendously for Latin America that it was Portugal and Spain and not England that were first to colonize; the English took the leftovers, but they took them to settle rather than extract gold from, so the institutions they built were generally less exploitative than mining and plantation economies in Latin America.

One especially provocative comment I got had to do with horizontal vs. verical escalation of conflict. I've been assuming that local actors see potential for alliances with defecting security forces in terms of local, then state, then national, i.e., different levels of a vertical hierarchy. But what about about neighboring localities? That's horizontal alliance-building, and I'll definitely need to give it more thought as I examine the Antioquia case materials.

I'm aiming to round out the empirical and comparative chapters and have a complete draft to my committee by November 30. Whew! Here's to a productive next few weeks. It's almost time for my flight to board, so I'll sign off now. Hasta mañana!