In Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Jasmin Hristov examines the complexities, dynamics, and contradictions of present-day armed conflict in Colombia. She conducts an in-depth inquiry into the restructuring of the state’s coercive apparatus and the phenomenon of paramilitarism by looking at its military, political, and legal dimensions. Hristov demonstrates how various interrelated forms of violence by state forces, paramilitary groups, and organized crime are instrumental to the process of capital accumulation by the local elite as well as the exercise of political power by foreign enterprises. She addresses, as well, issues of forced displacement, proletarianization of peasants, concentration of landownership, growth in urban and rural poverty, and human rights violations in relation to the use of legal means and extralegal armed force by local dominant groups and foreign companies.

Hristov documents the penetration of major state institutions by right-wing armed groups and the persistence of human rights violations against social movements and sectors of the low-income population. Blood and Capital raises crucial questions about the promised dismantling of paramilitarism in Colombia and the validity of the so-called demobilization of paramilitary groups, both of which have been widely considered by North American and some European governments as proof of Colombian president Álvaro Uribe’s advances in the wars on terror and drugs.

Jasmin Hristov (PhD, Sociology) is a sessional lecturer in Sociology at the University of Toronto, York University, and Trent University. She is a research associate at the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) and holds a Graduate Diploma in Latin American Studies.

Jasmin is the author of Paramilitarism and Neoliberalism: Violent Systems of Capital Accumulation (coming Fall 2014) and Blood and Capital: the Paramilitarization of Colombia (Ohio University Press and Between the Lines 2009). Her other publications appear in the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, Journal of Peasant Studies, Social Justice, Latin American Perspectives, NACLA Report on the Americas and Labour, Capital and Society.

Her research interests revolve around: conflict, development, human rights, and democracy; state, and para-institutional violence; militarization; and social inequalities and social movements. Broad fields of expertise include: global political economy; neoliberalism; international development; social movements; economic and political sociology.

Her research, writing, and teaching are informed by an interdisciplinary, global, critical political economy framework with attention to how class, race, and gender intersect. She has carried out extensive qualitative field work research during her trips across Colombia and has interviewed people from a wide range of social sectors. She has been an active participant in the political and cultural life at York University as well as the community at large by regularly speaking at workshops and colloquia in Sociology, Political Science, the York Centre for International and Security Studies (YCISS), the Centre for Refugee Studies, as well as at public educational events across Canada organized by Latin American solidarity groups, labour unions, student organizations, and social movements.

Jasmin has also been part of international delegations, various regional and world forums of social movements, NGOs, and other members of civil society, such as the World Social Forum (WSF).

Jasmin holds a BA – major in Geography and Sociology, an MA in Sociology, and a Bachelor of Education. She has been invited numerous times by faculty and students to give guest-lectures at the University of Toronto, York University, Simon Fraser University, and MacMaster University. She has taught at York and Trent University. Her educational philosophy and teaching practice are grounded in Paulo Freire’s methodology of liberatory education.