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Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia, by Nazih Richani. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 228 pp. $65.50 cloth. ISBN: 0-7914-5345-6. $21.95 paper. ISBN: 0-7914-5346-4.
PHILLIP HOUGH
The Johns Hopkins University
It seems that many social scientists who are interested in general theoretical questions of revolutions and social movements tend to fall into a trap when researching Colombia's protracted revolutionary insurgency. Entering Colombian terrain, they quickly become bleary-eyed from the difficulty in categorizing the actors and locating their interests, unable to make sense of the complexity and totality of the task, and content to focus instead on a more manageable slice of the conflict. Thus, one can see a movement from theoretical to empirical concerns, from theorization of general social processes to arguments for historical exceptionalism, and from socioeconomic and political to culturalist explanations.
Nazih Richani's Systems of Violence deserves attention because it helps resituate the Colombian case of protracted violence back into a comparative, historical, and theoretical perspective. Richani's central question is, under what socioeconomic and political-institutional conditions do armed conflicts become protracted? As such, he engages with the relative void in the revolutions literature to deal with cases of insurgency that neither succeed nor fail, but instead become institutionalized into the dynamics of politics as usual. Charting this fairly new territory, Richani gains theoretical strength by standing on...