Annette Idler's work focuses on global security, especially at the interface of conflict and transnational organized crime. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in and on crisis-affected regions of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Myanmar, and Somalia. For example, in her 2020 World Politics article, co-winner of APSA’s International Security Best Article 2021 Award and winner of LASA’s Defense, Public Security & Democracy Section Best Article Award 2021, she integrates ethnographic methods with spatial analysis to theorize the logics of illicit flows in armed conflict.

She is the author of Borderland Battles: Violence, Crime, and Governance at the Edges of Colombia’s War (Oxford University Press, 2019), published in Spanish as “Fronteras Rojas” by Penguin Randomhouse (2021). Her new book, Transforming the War on Drugs: Warriors, Victims, and Vulnerable Regions (Oxford University Press/Hurst Publishers, 2021), co-edited with Juan Carlos Garzón-Vergara, challenges the often-implicit North-South divide in the social sciences by examining the “glocal” impact of the International Drug Control Regime on vulnerable regions across the globe. Dr Idler is the recipient of the 2020 University of Oxford’s Vice Chancellor Innovation Award for her work on “Re-thinking Conflict, Building Peace”.