The Double Crisis: Insecurity and Humanitarian Plight at the Colombia-Venezuela Border

Date: 

Wednesday, December 4, 2019, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Wexner G-02, HKS

Speaker: Annette Idler, Visiting Scholar, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University

About the Talk:  Drawing on her book Borderland Battles: Violence, Crime, and Governance at the Edges of Colombia’s War (Oxford University Press, 2019) and her latest research findings, Annette Idler reveals why the Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands are enabling crucial but largely unacknowledged interactions between Venezuela’s devastating crisis and ongoing political violence in Colombia. She discusses how the so-called border effect has facilitated violence, undermined trust relationships, attracted numerous violent non-state groups including conflict actors, drug cartels, and gangs, and obscured the nuanced realities of multiple insecurities. Failure to tackle these issues could have serious long-term implications for stability in the region. This makes long-term plans for sustainable peace and security across and along the border an urgent necessity.

About the Speaker: Annette Idler is Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She is also the Director of Studies at the Changing Character of War Centre, Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, and at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. She is Principal Investigator of The Changing Character of Conflict Platform and of the CONPEACE Programme at Oxford. Annette Idler has conducted extensive fieldwork in war-torn and crisis-affected borderlands, including in and on Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Myanmar, and Kenya (on Somalia) analysing people-centred security dynamics.

See also: Event, Growth Lab