Military Politics and Democracy in the Andes

2013, The Johns Hopkins University Press
 
Military Politics and Democracy in the Andes engages how militaries may perform or neglect the counterinsurgency mission given to them by their governments. The book explains the Peruvian and Ecuadorian armies’ performance of their mission to combat insurgency—in Peru, internal insurgents, and in Ecuador, Colombian guerrillas that cross the international border—and extends the analysis to the other Andean armed forces. Employing theories of organization, the book’s central finding is that the armies were constrained in their ability to carry out this mission by their overwhelming concern with predictability for officers and soldiers on patrol. This revelation counters expectations that armed forces try to maximize their budgets, and that in the interest of maintaining professionalism and legitimacy, militaries actively fight insurgents and external enemies.
          If a desire to maintain predictability explains level of army participation in missions, resources beyond the army budget affected who benefited from that work. Private companies in extractive industries—the armies’ “clients”—procured army security services by negotiating with and subsidizing local army units. That is, private actors captured directly portions of the state security apparatus.
      For the book, Jaskoski interviewed 152 army officers on eight battalion and brigade bases and in the capital cities of Ecuador and Peru; and 176 journalists; academics; NGO representatives; private-sector actors; navy, air-force, and police officers; local, regional, and national political officials; and officials from the U.S. defense and state departments.

The Politics of Extraction: Territorial Rights, Participatory Institutions, and Conflict in Latin America

2022, Studies in Comparative Energy and Environmental Politics series, Oxford University Press

The Politics of Extraction analyzes thirty major mining and hydrocarbon conflicts in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, drawing on Jaskoski’s field research in the three countries. The book is the first systematic study of how participatory institutions channel and exacerbate extractive conflict. It explores the roles of public hearings built into environmental impact assessment, state-led prior consultation with Indigenous communities, and local “popular consultations,” or referendums. While in some cases impacted communities act within provided participatory spaces, in others, they organize “around” or “in reaction to” the institutions, using participatory procedures as focal points in the escalation of conflict. Communities select their strategies in response to the specific participatory challenges they confront: initiating a participatory event, gaining inclusion in a participatory process or, for communities with access, expressing views at the participatory stage.

Listen to Dr. Jaskoski's five-minute introduction to the book.

American Crossings: Border Politics in the Western Hemisphere

2015, The Johns Hopkins University Press

American Crossings explores the complex interplay among four dimensions of borders that traditionally scholars have treated separately: external limits demarcating sovereignty, boundaries of internal security and the rule of law, lines defining imagined communities, and spaces of economic transactions. Jaskoski coedited and coauthored the book. In a sole-authored chapter, she analyzes how the Colombian insurgency that relied on free passage to Ecuador’s neighboring borderlands for rest and training also enforced the Colombia-Ecuador borderline. The analysis challenges the ideas in the literature that guerrilla movements desire ill-defined borders and that only states draw international boundaries.