Lady Dervorguilla Seminar
'The Convergence of Conflict and Organised Crime' by Dr Annette Idler
23 February 2018, 8.00pm
Middle Common Room, Holywell Manor (no disabled access)
Dr Annette Idler (Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations) will give a talk on ’The Convergence of Conflict and Organised Crime’.
In this talk, Dr Idler unpacks the intricate relationships between armed conflict and transnational organised crime. She demonstrates how tracing illicit supply chains reveal security challenges that are analytical blind spots to conventional frameworks on the ‘crime-conflict nexus’. These challenges include first, the mismatch of local and global perceptions that undermines the perceived legitimacy of governments; second, the persistence of illicit power structures throughout war and peace time; and third, the interconnectedness of multiple forms of organised crime that perpetuate conflict and fuel wider insecurity.
Annette Idler is the Director of Studies at the Changing Character of War Centre, Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, and at the Department of Politics and International Relations, and Affiliate at the Latin American Centre, all University of Oxford. She is the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council’s Fellow on International Security and Research Associate at the Graduate Institute Geneva’s Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding. Dr Idler’s work focuses on the interface of conflict, security, transnational organized crime and peacebuilding. Drawing on ethnographic methods in her research, over the past decade, she has conducted extensive fieldwork in and on the war-torn and crisis-affected borderlands of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, including more than 600 interviews with local stakeholders. Her work appeared in journals such as Stability: International Journal of Security and Development and Perspectives on Terrorism and her book Borderland Battles: Violence, Crime, and Governance at the Edges of Colombia’s War is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Dr Idler advises governments and international organizations, is a regular expert for media outlets such as Al Jazeera, BBC and the Washington Post, and has published numerous policy briefs. Dr Idler previously worked with UNDP’s Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, and the German development cooperation. She holds a doctorate from the Department of International Development, University of Oxford, and an MA in International Relations from King’s College London’s Department of War Studies.
