Jasmin Hristov

Dr. Jasmin Hristov is a global sociologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Guelph Institute of Development Studies (GIDS), University of Guelph, Canada.

Her current research explores the intersection of economic globalization and violence – more specifically how violence carried out by state and non-state armed actors has been instrumentalized for the purpose of facilitating land acquisition by large-scale industries and repressing social movements that challenge neoliberal development policies in the Global South.

Jasmin’s broader expertise encompasses the areas of state violence, irregular armed groups, neoliberalism, land conflicts, and social movements, with a geographic concentration on Latin America. Interdisciplinary in its approach and outputs, her research contributes to the fields of political violence, social movements, and development studies.

She is the Principal Investigator on a five-year project entitled “Land Violence, Security and Development in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico,” funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Please visit these pages for more project details and outputs Land Violence Project, Project Objectives and Violence Database.

Sites of Collaboration Over the Past Six Years

Geographic Locations of Fieldwork Sites

A Theory of Pro-Capitalist Violence

There is an abundance of empirical evidence showing a global rise in a type of violence carried out by states or private armed groups with the complicity of states, against civilian populations, for the purpose of securing access to resources and silencing dissent. To capture this type of violence that constitutes a coercive strategy integral to economic development projects in the Global South, Jasmin has developed the theory of pro-capitalist violence which builds upon 15 years of extensive empirical work across various Latin American countries. The theory underscores the synergistic relationship between violence and legal mechanisms. The concept also speaks more broadly to the nature of the political counterpart of global capital by demonstrating that that violence is not incidental but rather foundational to how nation-states manage threats to the security of large-scale capital in the era of globalization.

Scholarship

Jasmin is the single author of Paramilitarism and Neoliberalism: Violent Systems of Capital Accumulation in Colombia and Beyond (Pluto, 2014) and Blood and Capital: the Paramilitarization of Colombia (Ohio University Press, 2009). She is the lead editor of Paramilitary Groups and the State Under Globalization: Political Violence, Elites, and Security (Routledge 2022).

Her journal articles are featured in: Sociology of Development; Studies in Political Economy; Journal of Peacebuilding and Development; Journal of Peasant Studies; Latin American Perspectives; Labor, Capital and Society; Social Justice; Canadian Review of Sociology; and Journal of Islamic Studies and Humanities. She has published various book chapters in: Paramilitary Groups and the State under Globalization; Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies; Gendering Globalization, Globalizing Gender: Post-Colonial Perspectives; and Gender and Development: Economic Basis of Women's Power.

Distinctions and Awards

Jasmin served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) 2020-2026 and has been the Chair/Co-Chair of the Sociology of Development Research Cluster of the Canadian Sociological Association (CSA) since 2016. She is also a member of the International Solidarity Committee, led by Comite Cerezo Mexico, whose mandate is to monitor the work of the Special Search Commission instituted by the Supreme Court of Mexico to investigate the abduction and subsequent disappearance of two Mexican activists by the army in 2007.

Teaching and Learning Excellence Award for Tenured Faculty, University of Guelph (2025)

Early Investigator Award, Canadian Sociological Association, 2019

Global Contexts in the Classroom Award for Globalizing the Curriculum, University of British Columbia Okanagan, 2018

Finalist for the WOLA-Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, 2010

Scholarship and Pedagogy: Rooted in Transformative, Global, and Humanist Principles

Jasmin’s scholarship and pedagogy are intended to serve as an infrastructure of empowerment by amplifying marginalized and excluded voices and supporting emancipatory social justice-oriented agendas. The starting point for her research questions is not any theoretical framework; rather, it is people’s everyday experiences of deprivation, injustice, and violence in its many forms.

The humanist dimension of her work is about a commitment to contribute to advancing well-being, human rights, and human dignity for all of humanity. This commitment comes from a combination of love in the most revolutionary sense of the word – love for fellow human beings – and a sense of indignation at injustice. The belief in the power that comes with people using their agency collectively, combined with a recognition that the structure we live in is not inevitable, but rather the product of the agency of some who have been able to impose a structure that adversely affects the majority of others, gives rise to a transformative force on the level of knowledge and praxis – i.e. seeing the social totality as an object of transformation. The global principle is about transcendence – transcending our individual problems, our local struggles, our cultural particularities, and our specific conditions of deprivation or comfort, by understanding the common denominators underlying our disparate experiences of oppression, and, eventually, in the words of Cox and Nilsen (2014), developing common strategies and collective identities across social and spatial boundaries, until we arrive at a conception of a universal alternative to the existing social system.

Aligned with the Following Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Land Acknowledgement

Image credit: the artist (M a j e z) and La Vía Campesina

I would like to express my gratitude for being able to live and work on the traditional and treaty lands of many indigenous peoples, including the Huron Wendat, Seneca, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River as well as to honour the Dish with One Spoon Covenant.

I view land acknowledgements as opportunities to reflect not only on the historical processes of land theft, genocide and cultural oppression but also on the ways in which present day issues of poverty, marginalization, exclusion, and violence experienced by indigenous communities can be traced to land dispossession and other forms of domination that continue to be reproduced through institutional practices which in their core are still racist and premised upon processes of Othering.

As an immigrant to this land, I cannot help but wonder about these somewhat uncomfortable questions such as - why do the first and original inhabitants of this land often find themselves much more isolated with much less support networks and resources than people who have only recently arrived here? Or questions such as, what is the role of immigrants or racialized groups who are not descendants of the two dominant colonizing nations, in processes of reconciliation? Do indigenous peoples view them as part of the problem or as groups that are sometimes subjected to multiple systems of oppression with whom bonds of solidarity can be build around overarching struggles for social justice?

As someone with family ties to collective struggles for land in Northern Brazil, whose grandparents and relatives’ lives were shaped by land dispossession and subsequent proletarianization, the word land has a huge value and evokes strong emotions inside me. By focusing my research on the topic of land and violence, I continue to keep myself close to the kind of struggles I had seen as a child, to the images that stayed engraved in my memory, and the indignation I continue to feel. Land appropriation by capitalists has always been and continues to be a violent process. It leaves people homeless and without a livelihood, it destroys culture and community fabric, and it turns human beings into disposable items. The result is the commodification of all aspects of human life including our bodies. Having access to land is about having the right to exist in this world. And right now, the world is telling millions of people that it has no place for them.

Just like the colonizers proclaimed that there was no place for the indigenous ways of life and culture in a modernizing nation, today, peasants are told that they are obsolete and have no place in a world dominated by profit-oriented global production chains. And so, the pain of being separated from one’s land, is being felt today by many peoples, including those who do not necessarily identify as indigenous – from Latin America, to Gaza, to India, to the Philippines – the struggle continues.

And so, when I acknowledge the land, I think of collective human suffering by indigenous peoples in Canada and people elsewhere, but I also think of the path that lies ahead, the opportunities to reimagine the way we relate to land and to each other. When my son was six-year-old, he once said something that I will never forget: “The world is not the property of some. It is for all of us” And so, let’s reclaim our world by reviving the common bond of humanity that we all share.

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