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Thriving Economies amid Armed Violence
About
While stability, predictability, and legal certainty are commonly viewed as indispensable to economic development, agro-industrial, extractive, manufacturing, and service sectors nevertheless thrive in contexts of armed violence, attracting tens of billions of dollars in international investment every year. From the petrochemical corridor of Altamira in Mexico to Karachi’s textile and pharmaceutical plants in Pakistan; from the extraction of raw materials essential to AI in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to banana and palm-oil plantations in Colombia’s northern Magdalena region, many leading sectors of contemporary capitalism – often presented as flagships of the formal economy – are expanding in environments marked by the daily experience of uncertainty and the presence of armed groups.
This project bridges two bodies of scholarship that have largely developed in parallel – on the one hand, organized crime and violence; on the other, economic growth – by examining the relationship between violence and economic relations through the interweaving of legal and illegal sectors. We situate these sectors within global supply chains and their local subcontracting networks in order to analyze protection and brokerage arrangements, and to examine how the costs and profits of economic expansion in contexts of violence – economic, social, legal, and environmental – are unevenly distributed among different protagonists and the residents of these regions.
Social scientists have indeed largely overlooked the paradox of economic prosperity coexisting with armed violence. An overly narrow focus on drug trafficking, the smuggling of weapons and migrants, or minerals that are easily extracted, transported, and resold (gold, diamonds, oil, etc.) tends to obscure the essential role violent actors play in the broader structuring of the global economy. When scholars have examined economic activities closely tied to violence, they have most often concentrated on looting and extortion, as well as the emergence of lucrative sectors surrounding armed conflict – such as security provision and humanitarian aid. By contrast, broader accumulation dynamics have primarily been analyzed through macroeconomic and quantitative studies, which have often neglected the lived experience of violence in these contexts.
Rather than simply categorizing activities as legal or illegal, we investigate how they are embedded in contexts of violence – an evolving reality that has profoundly affected many societies for decades. The project builds on a growing body of field-based and ethnographic scholarship that takes as a central assumption that formal and informal economies cannot be neatly separated conceptually, nor can they be separated from the surrounding structures of violence. On the contrary, in many settings, whether profit margins are legal or illicit, they are notable for emerging within an environment shaped by clashes between armed groups and the visible presence of the military.
While the project grows out of research conducted in Mexico, it also incorporates comparative case studies from Afghanistan, Syria, and the Sahel. Grounded in ethnographic research and informed by recent revivals of political economy, Thriving Economies in Contexts of Armed Violence emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration (Political Science, Anthropology, History, Political Economy). It aims to build a durable transatlantic partnership for the study of violent political economies. During its first year (2025–2026), it will convene a working group and host conferences in New York and Paris. Through these activities, the project supports comparative, field-based research on how violence and economic order are co-produced in the contemporary world.
Scientific Coordination
- Adam Baczko (CERI-Sciences Po)
- Adèle Blazquez (CEMCA et LAP-EHESS)
- Claudio Lomnitz (Columbia University, Colegio Nacional de Mexico)
Partners
Funding
- CNRS Sciences humaines et sociales
- Alliance Program (Sciences Po & Columbia University)
- President’s Global Innovation Fund (Columbia University)
- The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (Columbia University)
- Institute of Latin American Studies (Columbia University).
Program
13 November 2025
Violence and Thriving Economies in Mexico, Columbia University