Books: February 2025
The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia — Teo Ballve
⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Frontier Effect is a book about Urabá, a region in Colombia near the border with Panama. Urabá is a microcosm of the country’s violent conflicts – you can see every element at play. Early on, an “underdeveloped” backwater that grows quickly due to the booming banana industry. Later, a hotspot for guerrilla organizing, especially the FARC and the much less written about EPL. And much later, the place where the paramilitaries exert seemingly unparalleled control over economic and political life.
Ballvé is interested in the role of the state in Colombia’s wars and especially Urabá. It is a common refrain that in places like Urabá, the state is weak or absent, and so Hobbesian violence emerges. Ballvé argues that, instead, other kinds of order emerge: imposed first by the guerrillas (who bring significant political infrastructure) and later the paramilitaries.
Ballvé’s narrative of the paramilitaries is where the book really shines. In many readings of the conflict, the paramilitaries are shadowy figures with little ideological worldview, notoriously violent and predatory. Ballvé’s depiction is surprisingly nuanced. He establishes quickly and convincingly that the paramilitaries, like the guerrillas, relied on social bases of support. And like the guerrillas, they had a vision for the region – confused and incoherent in parts, but not so dissimilar from the guerrillas’.
The level of institution-building the paras took on surprised me. The extent to which they resettled lands with new peasants who expressed some degree of loyalty also surprised me. There are eye-popping anecdotes: the paras’ foray into ecotourism, their development of community action boards, the fact that when land restitution ultimately comes to Urabá it is with tacit para approval.
Before reading this, I thought the absence of an effective, legitimate state in large swaths of Colombia’s territory was a major factor in the war. After reading, I still mostly feel the same way. The orders Ballvé describes don’t seem to last all that long, and they seem normatively worse than an effective, legitimate state.
Impressive book.
Stories of Your Life and Others — Ted Chiang
⭐⭐ Chiang’s move in these short stories is to take often obtuse academic concepts and humanize them, give them stakes, and build characters who interact in worlds where these concepts have weight. He draws on hermeneutics in Tower of Babylon, linguistics in Story of Your Life, math in Division by Zero.
The standout is Tower of Babylon. Chiang focuses on the routine, daily mechanics of building the tower: what material to use, how workers make the climb, how people live on the tower. The focus on engineering gives the story a realism that produces clever dramatic irony: as you read, you imagine the builders will discover what you already know – that there is no “vault of heaven,” just outer space. This makes the moment when they reach the vault very effective. That the builders never give a positive account of why they are building the tower is interesting, especially once piercing the vault could trigger world-ending flooding. The question is never “should we do this” but the mechanics of minimizing potential damage. Obvious parallels to real-world science: the atom bomb, the hadron collider.
The second best story is the titular one. Story of Your Life is impressive in sketching what it would feel like to interact with a non-human language that still conforms to structure. There’s a “pleasure of mastery” as the narrator slowly develops the ability to communicate with the Heptapods. Unfortunately, the time-traveling reveal at the end made me squirm – a hard-science premise that veers into something more sentimental.
The other stories are not very good.