The Double Crisis: Insecurity and Humanitarian Plight at the Colombia-Venezuela Border

In 2019, Dr. Annette Idler wrote Borderland Battles: Violence, Crime, and Governance at the Edges of Colombia’s War (Oxford University Press, 2019). Based on her extensive research on this issue, her book reveals why the Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands are enabling crucial, but largely unacknowledged interactions between Venezuela’s devastating crisis and ongoing political violence in Colombia. Failure to tackle the issues at the border could have serious long-term implications for stability in the region, which makes long-term plans for sustainable peace and security across and along the border an urgent necessity. In this Growth Lab podcast, Research Assistant Ana Grisanti interviews Annette, who discusses how the so-called border effect has facilitated violence, undermined trust relationships, attracted numerous violent non-state groups, and obscured the nuanced realities of multiple insecurities.