Jeffrey Pugh's compact, seminal work is the product of 8 years of fieldwork in the area and living with the people. It shows how numbers of illegal migrants made their way above, below, and around the state through an invisibility bargain, but also alternative strategies or negotiation with civil society on the other side. A thorough, detailed, insightful study of a subject that has so far fallen between the cracks of comparative politics and interstate relations and
faces the challenges of researching and analyzing human security with enormous implications for understanding the growing topic of immigration.
Jeffrey D. Pugh is Assistant Professor in the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and the founding executive director of the Center for Mediation, Peace, and Resolution of Conflict (CEMPROC) in Quito, Ecuador. Pugh's research focuses on peacebuilding and non-state actors in the Global South, and he is a past president of the Middle Atlantic Council on Latin American Studies
(MACLAS).