Ana Arjona on the findings of her award-winning 2016 study
Adam talks with Ana Arjona, director of the Center for the Study of Security and Drugs (CESED) at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University.
Professor Arjona is the author of the 2016 book Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War. Based on extensive field work and data analysis in Colombia, Rebelocracy offers an intricate theory of how armed conflicts and civil wars function, viewed at the local level. Arjona finds that most of the time, the situation is not anarchy and chaos: there can be some sort of order in the midst of civil war. Further, she finds that this order usually takes one of two forms, and what form it takes is often up to the civilian population themselves.