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Excited to share the publication of this article "What is the state made of: Coca, roads and the materiality of state formation in the frontier" in @WorldDevJournal which we wrote with @silvia_otero85 and Simón Uribe. You download it free here: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1cYxi,6yxDH0M9
We began this research a few years ago inspired by an inventory of goods that the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) drafted in the framework of the peace agreements, for the reparation of victims, and which included 3700 km of roads.
We traveled to the Amazon states of #Caquetá and #Putumayo to learn more about these roads, to understand when and how they were made, to chart their routes and spatial logics, and what the role of the state, communities and the guerrilla was in their construction.
In this article, we question the notion implicit in peacebuilding lit that there are certain material conditions - such as roads - which advance state-building, while there are others- such as coca - which inherently undermine it, as well as the state model upheld by that notion
The Colombian Peace Agreements rest upon this notion and reiterates again the old narrative that for there to be peace, the State simply needs to expand - through roads, say - to these peripheral regions.
Instead of taking this mechanical causality as a given....
Instead of taking this mechanical causality as a given....
...between those materials and state-formation, we maintain that materialities 1)enable the creation of local orders 2)are the means through which those orders are created 3)substantiate and are the products of those social relations that maintain and reproduce those orders
We concentrate on the state of Cartagena de Chairá and use roads and coca as an entry-point to understand two distinct configurations of local orders. The first begins in the late 70s to 2002, and is premised on a symbiotic relationship between communities, guerrilla and state
The relationship between coca, coca growers and guerrilla generate conditions for financing constructing and maintaining these roads, which in turn strengthens the local state, generating a symbiotic and grassroots state-formation
The second moments starts in 2002, the peak of the armed conflict here, and traces an antagonistic and militarized relationship between state and communities. Aerial fumigations erradicated coca, and military occupation criminalized the colono population.
The war was also registered on the roads: these were bombed, their construction was criminalized, and with the mass displacement and decline of coca, the roads began to go into disrepair. They became the material surfaces of this top-down militarized state-formation.
Its not so easy to say more roads/ less coca = more state. The question is also a matter of what kind of state is being constructed and how it is instantiated. State interventions around road construction and anti-narcotic interventions can have contradictory effects.
We wrote about this in spanish with regards to Putumayo in the article "Making the state: roads, conflict and local orders in FARC territories", published in @facisouniandes : https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/doi/full/10.7440/res75.2021.08
In the "post-accord" these roads have been abandoned, have deteriorated and the community action boards lack the resources - especially without coca - to maintain them. The state must recognize and support the work of local communities in the construction of these public goods.
These communities and their tangible incorporation in the peace process must be the basis of genuine peace-building. Exercises in "participation" will be meaningless if the state-model is designed to continue criminalizing or abandoning them.
I am particularly grateful to the communities in the Caguán who took me in for months in 2018, who shared their lives, and especially to @Coordosac and the FARC ex-combatants who showed me these roads and shared their stories with me and the project.
This article is part of a special issue titled "The Role of Illicit Economies in Transforming Latin America's Rural Spaces", which can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/world-development/special-issue/10B9CD78QC1, and is co-edited by @AnthonyDest and @laurla11 .
