Maiah Jaskoski is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University. She specializes in environmental politics, security privatization, borders, and military roles in Latin America. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Political Science from Swarthmore College.
Jaskoski’s current book project examines social conflict over proposed mining and hydrocarbon extraction. Through systematic analysis of 30 conflicts in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, she identifies and explains country-level trends in the form of popular mobilizing, and patterns common across the three countries. The study emphasizes how institutions that govern community participation during and prior to environmental licensing can trigger and organize conflict. A portion of the research is published in World Development.
Jaskoski’s first book, Military Politics and Democracy in the Andes (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), focuses on how militaries perform and neglect the counterinsurgency mission given to them by their governments. Employing theories of organizations, she finds that the Peruvian and Ecuadorian armies are constrained in their ability to carry out this mission—in Peru against internal insurgents, and in Ecuador against Colombian guerrillas that cross the international borderline—by their overwhelming concern with predictability for officers and soldiers on patrol. This finding runs counter to expectations that armed forces try to maximize their budgets, and that in the interest of maintaining professionalism, militaries actively fight insurgents and external enemies. For this research, Jaskoski interviewed more than 150 officers on eight army bases and in the capital cities; and more than 170 navy, air-force, and police officers; national and subnational political officials; private-sector actors; NGO representatives; journalists; academics; and officials from the U.S. defense and state departments.
In other published work, Jaskoski analyzes how actors using funds from beyond the defense budget, especially multinational corporations in extractive industries, have procured the services of armed forces through resource transfers to local military units. This study is thus about the direct capture of the state security apparatus by the private sector. She has also contributed to the conceptualization and measurement of civilian control of the military in post-transition settings and analyzed the factors that drive individuals to engage in violence, in settings of internal conflict.
Jaskoski’s collaborative research includes American Crossings: Border Politics in the Western Hemisphere (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), which explores the complex interplay among four facets of borders that traditionally have been treated separately: external limits demarcating sovereignty, boundaries of internal security and the rule of law, spaces of economic transactions, and lines defining imagined communities. In one of the volume's chapters, she demonstrates that the Colombian insurgency that has relied on free passage to Ecuador’s neighboring borderlands for rest and training has also most directly delineated and enforced the borderline, contrary to prominent ideas in the literature that guerrilla movements desire ill-defined borders and that only states draw international boundaries.
Jaskoski’s current book project examines social conflict over proposed mining and hydrocarbon extraction. Through systematic analysis of 30 conflicts in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, she identifies and explains country-level trends in the form of popular mobilizing, and patterns common across the three countries. The study emphasizes how institutions that govern community participation during and prior to environmental licensing can trigger and organize conflict. A portion of the research is published in World Development.
Jaskoski’s first book, Military Politics and Democracy in the Andes (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), focuses on how militaries perform and neglect the counterinsurgency mission given to them by their governments. Employing theories of organizations, she finds that the Peruvian and Ecuadorian armies are constrained in their ability to carry out this mission—in Peru against internal insurgents, and in Ecuador against Colombian guerrillas that cross the international borderline—by their overwhelming concern with predictability for officers and soldiers on patrol. This finding runs counter to expectations that armed forces try to maximize their budgets, and that in the interest of maintaining professionalism, militaries actively fight insurgents and external enemies. For this research, Jaskoski interviewed more than 150 officers on eight army bases and in the capital cities; and more than 170 navy, air-force, and police officers; national and subnational political officials; private-sector actors; NGO representatives; journalists; academics; and officials from the U.S. defense and state departments.
In other published work, Jaskoski analyzes how actors using funds from beyond the defense budget, especially multinational corporations in extractive industries, have procured the services of armed forces through resource transfers to local military units. This study is thus about the direct capture of the state security apparatus by the private sector. She has also contributed to the conceptualization and measurement of civilian control of the military in post-transition settings and analyzed the factors that drive individuals to engage in violence, in settings of internal conflict.
Jaskoski’s collaborative research includes American Crossings: Border Politics in the Western Hemisphere (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), which explores the complex interplay among four facets of borders that traditionally have been treated separately: external limits demarcating sovereignty, boundaries of internal security and the rule of law, spaces of economic transactions, and lines defining imagined communities. In one of the volume's chapters, she demonstrates that the Colombian insurgency that has relied on free passage to Ecuador’s neighboring borderlands for rest and training has also most directly delineated and enforced the borderline, contrary to prominent ideas in the literature that guerrilla movements desire ill-defined borders and that only states draw international boundaries.
