Miriam Seemann, Water Security, Justice and the Politics of Water Rights in Peru and Bolivia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. xviii + 226, £13.60, hb
tionship to the existing work on this complicity that could have been specified further. To be sure, in a novel way, the fifth chapter starts with an intriguing analogy that promises to shed light on the entanglement of the paramilitaries and the state: between the Sicilian Mafia and the paramilitaries. However, the chapter falls short of specifying the particular elements of this analogy, and of recognising the limitations of it. On the one hand, Civico argues that both the paramilitaries and the Sicilian Mafia would have emerged from the need to establish order and provide protection in a context in which the state was not capable of assuming these governance functions. On the other hand, he argues that the paramilitaries and the Mafia operate both within and outside the state. The argument somewhat conflates origins and modus operandi and leaves one wondering how the paramilitaries’ ideological motivation comes in. The goal of counter-insurgency is essential to the circumstances under which the Colombian government encouraged the establishment of self-defence groups and to the relationship between the state and the paramilitaries in subsequent decades. Against this, the Mafia’s modus operandi focuses on protection, yet does not explicitly engage in such ideologically motivated activities. Furthermore, in Colombia, paramilitaries have not been the only non-state actors to provide protection: guerrillas and drug cartels have replaced the state in certain regions to provide such governance functions. Later in the chapter, Civico himself introduces the history of Pablo Escobar and refers to the drug cartels’ ‘Mafia-like power centers’ (p. ). He also defines the Mafia as the ‘social phenomenon in which a criminal organization has a strategic alliance with legal institutions, as is the case in Colombia’ (p. ). It thus is unclear how the paramilitary–Mafia analogy is singled out. In this regard, lenses such as Federico Varese’s conceptualisation of the Mafia and states on a continuum, with hybrid actors such as paramilitaries and insurgents in between, can be useful for enhancing analytical clarity (Varese, ‘What is Organized Crime?’, in Varese (ed.), Organized Crime, Routledge, , pp. –). Overall, the book and the additional questions it raises are welcome contributions to a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of the Colombian conflict. In the current context of the implementation of the peace deal between the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC) and the Colombian government, yet continued insecurity in the country, the book is an urgent reminder that ending violence through more violence can easily backfire. It also emphasises that public discourses do not always reflect activities and experiences on the ground. Finally, it highlights that solutions to conflict are not necessarily found in the central state by default, but also require including voices at the margins of the state.