← New Books Network
New Books Network
Alex Diamond, "Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
01:04:14
Loading summary
Transcript42 lines
- [00:02]
Lowe's Announcer
Pros Just because something on the job runs out doesn't mean you have to order it on the Lowes app. Myloes Pro Rewards members get free same day delivery on eligible orders over $25. Get the fasteners, hardware or tools you need to keep the job Moving. Order by 2pm and get eligible in stock items delivered right to your job site by 8pm members get more at Lowe's loyalty program subject to terms and conditions Subject to availability restrictions and terms@lowe's.com shippingterms subject to change
- [00:32]
New Books Network Survey Announcer
hey NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network Audience Survey and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most, and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries and institutions we partner with, when we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users. It opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing, if you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [01:45]
Lowe's Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:50]
Sneha Navarrapu
Hello everyone and welcome to New Books Network. I am Sneha Navarrapu, the host of this channel. Today I'm in conversation with Dr. Alex Diamond. Alex is sociologist and his book Governing the Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory was published by University of Chicago Press in 2026. So it's hot off the press. Alex is also a dear friend. Together we founded the Ethnographic marginalia blog in 2020 and we edit submissions together. Till date. We have also hosted several podcast episodes for the New Books Network ethnomarginalia podcast and so it was truly delightful for me to chat with Alex about his brilliant new book. I hope you enjoyed the episode. So hello Alex. This is such it's such a great pleasure being in conversation with you about your book Governing the Excluded. I think this is a really, really special episode for the both of us, considering we started co hosting episodes for Ethnographic Marginalia podcast and we've had so many conversations over this pandemic haze of 2020 about ethnography and of course, even before that. And to have witnessed your journey from a curious sociologist to a committed ethnographer to now the author of your first book. It's been such a delight to be a part of your journey and to actually see this happen. So big congratulations. I really enjoyed the book. I think it's beautifully written, it's conceptually so powerful and yeah, there's just so much to think about with the book and I mean, as your friend, I'm obviously like super biased and I love it. But also as an objective reader and a teacher, I'm very excited to have a book like this that I think think is, has so much generative value in sociology. So thank you for writing it and welcome to the podcast.
- [03:54]
Dr. Alex Diamond
Thank you. Thank you so much, neha. That means a lot to me. And our conversations recorded and offline about ethnography over the last, what, like seven years that as I was doing field work, as I was writing it up, I've been really formative and generative in putting this book together. So thank you for that as well and inspiring.
- [04:19]
Sneha Navarrapu
Well, thank you and yeah, thanks for taking time out to chat with me about the book. So let's start. You know, this, you know the drill. So we start with getting to know you a little better. So how did you become a sociologist? What led you to choose to do a PhD in sociology?
- [04:37]
Dr. Alex Diamond
So I think in terms of my, my interest in sociology, I, I went, started my undergrad at Wesley University in Connecticut, didn't really know what sociology was. Was in an intro to sociology class as a, you know, wide eyed 18 year old and right away it just spoke to me as kind of the way that I wanted to, to understand the world and sort of had it. I was interested in politics, I was interested in the world and, and sociology just had answers that I hadn't found of how things work, why things happen. But I think your question of starting a PhD is apt because I don't know that I was really a sociologist until many years later when I decided to go back to graduate school, start a PhD study Columbia through the project that this book comes out of. And that was, you know, I had kind of maybe a, a longer journey to my PhD where I had traveled, but taught, really lived all over the world. Teaching Memphis, Tennessee, high school teacher and then English teacher in Korea, in Peru and in Colombia, and the opportunity to just live all over the world. And you know, I wasn't researching, but I think kind of my interest in, in studying other cultures and politics in other places was really piqued by that. And then the last thing I'll say is that I always just loved reading ethnographies. So even more than becoming a sociologist, I thought just the idea of a person sort of going into this, you know, a community, whether that's close to where they're from or far, and really describing what's going on within this social world, taking the reader inside of it, drawing some conclusions. I just thought that was the coolest thing in the world. I was like, that's what I want to do. So around the age of 30, I decided I had sort of a reflective moment, or I had been teaching English, was kind of getting bored with that, and said, no, I want to do this. I want to try to be an ethnographer. And here we are.
- [06:55]
Sneha Navarrapu
That's fantastic. And I think I know some of this from our previous conversations, but it's really nice to see and connect the dots as you speak about your journey. And yeah, I think I feel like I relate more to ethnography than to sociology. So I think that's kind of why we started talking in the first place. So how did this particular book emerge? What led you to study the peace process and its attendant complications in Colombia?
- [07:23]
Dr. Alex Diamond
So at the time that I decided to go to grad school, I was living in Colombia, and Colombia is in the midst of negotiating. The Colombian government was in the midst of negotiating a peace process with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. This armed group that had existed for 50 years. And this was major news. And there were all these folks of, of ending a conflict that has really led to huge amounts of human suffering. And I just got very interested in the politics around that. And there's always, I think we often read these sort of ex post facto justifications of. I had this burning question. It took me to the Perfect Field site and then I did all this work to answer this question. These very neat explanations, right, that aren't often the case. The truth is I was sort of generally interested in the peace process and I tried to, as a first year PhD student, I tried to access a bunch of other spaces. For example, the FARC guerrillas were turning from armed group into political party. I thought it'd be really Interesting to try to embed with them as an ethnographer and see what this meant for them as a political party. And I just wasn't. Wasn't really able to get access to that, which, in retrospect, I think is good. So what I came to was wanting to understand what this peace process meant, what peace building meant, what this transformation of an area that had been under the control of armed groups, not just the guerrillas, but also sort of right wing paramilitary groups that. That fought them for territorial control. When the peace agreement is signed, what happens in one of these villages that has been under the control of armed groups as the state tries to impose its authority? I was able to get access to the village of Briseno, and I visited in my first year in graduate school on the recommendation of an anthropologist called Isabel Penaranda, who was kind enough to introduce me to some people in the village and just found people to be very welcoming. So I ended up living there for three years.
- [09:52]
Sneha Navarrapu
Yeah. And so how did you go about the research for this particular project in the sense that, as you were saying, I think it almost seems like we always have this perfect roadmap or how you're going to do things. Right. And more often than not, most ethnographers talk about, say something like serendipity or talk about some sort of unintended connections that ended up actually mattering a lot more than they had imagined. Right. So was there a story of unintentionality in your research? And how did you go about, you know, ultimately tracing the fieldwork connections that you do that make up the bulk of this book? Right.
- [10:37]
Dr. Alex Diamond
I think the most important thing that I did was build relationships. You know, I was living in the village, and I lived in the village for basically, for my first two years of the PhD. I lived there for three months during the summer each of those years. And then I had a more extended two and a half year field work period where I lived in the village during COVID So it was a little field work was interesting. It was a challenge at that time. But yeah, I think the most important thing that I did from the start was build relationships. People were very welcoming and very happy to talk with me and happy to introduce me to other people. And I just sort of started, you know, the People. The book focuses on four families or individuals in depth and tells their stories. And they're all people that I met in that first summer of field work there. I think one of them I met in the second one, and I just went and visited their farms. I Had countless coffees with them on the village square, and I accompanied them in political projects, in community meetings and demonstrations. They organized against police violence, in political campaigns. There are a lot of other people as well that I didn't write about so deeply who I kind of had the same relationship with. But, yeah, I think I knew from the start that I wanted to write about people's lives on a deep level. So it was just. Yeah, finding excuses to hang out with them, asking them about their experiences, their hopes for the future, et cetera, through
- [12:17]
Sneha Navarrapu
so beautifully in the vignettes that you also begin each chapter with. You actually see the, like, what you were saying, the way people narrativize their own lives in the context of massive transformation at a national level, but also at a global scale. These economic transformations that you trace. And we'll get to that in a bit. But, yeah, I do think that the fact that there are all these people whose portrayals are so vivid in your book actually speaks to the depth of your relationships with them, if that makes sense. And my heart also did break a little bit when you do incorporate at the end of the book how one of your key interlocutors passed away. And I think, again, there was a depth in the way you write about him that was very moving. But I know you also love incorporating photographs into your ethnographic mode, and I know you made a documentary during your research there. So could you tell us a little bit about these visual modes of storytelling that matter to your research, and what do you think they bring to the table?
- [13:23]
Dr. Alex Diamond
Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. So photography, and I guess documentary filmmaking emerged from the beauty of Briseno, the village that I. That I write about. In sort of my first couple of summers there, I just had, like, a camera phone, and I was. You know, it's this. It's this village in the mountains where there's agricultural fields interspersed with. With jungle, with. With tropical birds, waterfalls. It's just a wonderfully beautiful place. So I started taking these photos, and I was, you know, wanting to. To use these photos as a way of. In my writing, as a way of getting the context right and sharing what I was experiencing there. Um, and then I realized that the. The camera, this would not be true anymore. But I realized that the phone camera I had was not good enough quality to print in many publications. So I said, oh, I. I need a. Like, I need a real camera. Um, and a friend. I'll. I'll shout him out. Ricardo Venegas, who's working with me on this Documentary helped me in terms of thinking how to. Through how to take photos and could go to what camera I. I wanted to get. And for my sort of two and a half year extended period, I carried a camera, that camera with me everywhere that I went. And when the pandemic happened, I decided that, you know, I actually wanted to. To put some time into photography. And I. So I did some online courses and spent a lot of time taking photos and. And trying to improve as a photographer. And I will say that as an ethnographer, I think a challenge is we want to hang around. We want to be where the action is happening. We want to be with the people that we want to write about. But it could sometimes be awkward, like, why are you hanging around? What are you doing? A camera gives you an excuse to interact with people, to be in a space. You're taking photos, follow up with people. Let me send you. I took this photo of you. Let me send it to you. It gives you an excuse to follow up with people, get their number, continue talking with them. People like having photos of themselves taking those photos with permission, of course. So that sort of became. I don't think I realized this until it happened, but it became central to how I was inhabiting these spaces, be they sort of political meetings or just going to visit someone's park and hear their story as an ethnographer. And then you asked about the documentary film as well. That was also. You used the word serendipity. That came out of having friends in Colombia who were audiovisual students doing a master's in audiovisual production and Colombian. And interested in Colombian politics. And I started talking with them about research. One of them had been a coworker of mine in Colombia, and they were very interested in what was going on in Briseno, which had become this village of great interest to the peace process. It'd become a peace laboratory. And we just started talking about the idea, and they ended up visiting with me. We brought in a couple other people into the project, and what we ended up with was a project that was participatory with two families. Right. The documentary focuses on two families who are very much involved in the process of what kind of story we want to tell, what we're going to film, what even the politics behind it are. And these end up being. I mentioned there were sort of four individuals or families who are central to Whose stories make up much of the book's analysis. Those are two of the families, right? So again, it kind of gave me, with my collaborators, an Excuse to hang around with them. Their families I lived with during the pandemic for a few months each. But it also sort of gave an excuse to sort of talk with them about how they wanted this story to be documented of the village's experience with the peace process and of a hydroelectric dam that was being built there as well. So we haven't finished the documentary yet. We're in the process of doing final edits, and I think it's an exciting sort of way to present findings to an audience that a book can't reach. But also just in terms of an ethnography, it was more than an excuse for being there, a reason and a basis for talking through what people thought was important about their experiences.
- [18:25]
Sneha Navarrapu
Yeah, and I can't wait to watch the documentary film. But I've seen a little bit of it as part of some talks that I have had the pleasure of listening in on. But the book as such, beyond, of course, what you've discussed thus far, it sort of takes at its core this landmark peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas, and it traces it historically, ethnographically and theoretically. Right. And you focus on the stories of rural farmers in Brisenio, and you show so beautifully how abstract concepts such as peace, violence, state power, and economic transformation really work in complex and counterintuitive ways on the ground. What emerges through your ethnographic eye is a story of vulnerability, dependence, disillusionment, but also hope. So could you share with our listeners a little bit about the central questions guiding the book, the puzzle that we sociologists so love to speak about, and what were you curious about, both empirically but also theoretically?
- [19:31]
Dr. Alex Diamond
I think the real empirical puzzle, the ethnographic puzzle that if I had to choose one to introduce the arguments, is that this village of Briseno was under armed group control, both by the FARC guerrillas, but also by right wing paramilitaries who fought the guerrillas for control of the village for decades. And in this time, you know, some. Some young people joined these groups, but mostly people in the village lived and. And farmed coca, which is what's used to make cocaine, and was what was funding the ARC groups. Right. Largely, the peace process happens. The peace agreement is signed, and even before it's signed, this village becomes a symbol of the peace process. It's called a peace laboratory. The president shows up on helicopter, they launch this coca substitution program that's supposed to establish legal crops, and all these millions of dollars of state aid pour into the village. They have a really concrete effect, literally Concrete. Right. Because they're building roads, they're building community meeting houses, soccer fields, et cetera. So the village is transformed with all this investment in peacebuilding. And that period of time, which is the time that I was in the village. Right. Is during this time as laboratory of peace, this period of time. The puzzle is that this period of time is actually the period of time when the greatest number of people joined the gorillas. Right, in the context of a peace process. Then there's a rearmed guerrilla group where some, just a couple dozen of the longtime guerrillas abandon the peace process. They're upset with the state for a variety of reasons, and they say, we're taking up arms again. And then hundreds of young people in the area join them. And it's not only disturbing to those of us who have a stake in building peace in this village and in the country, but it's also, it seems very counterintuitive that this peace building process would lead to that. And the answer to this puzzle took me to a focus on livelihoods. And you mentioned concepts like peace and violence and economic transformation and state authority. Right. The key to understanding the puzzle was that in eliminating the coca economy through this substitution program that gave farmers aid to develop legal crops, they destroyed this economy that had been providing guaranteed work for a particular subset of people, which were primarily young men, say from 14 to 25 and a little older years old, who could sort of always make a decent living picking coca with harvests every couple months and could also save their money if they were so inclined, get land of their own and establish their own crops. So it was a means for not only livelihood, but it was also a means for upward mobility and for people to be able to really provide for their families, build a family, get land, et cetera. When the coca economy goes away through this substitution program, this particular subset of young men from uneducated, without land of their own are left with nothing to do. Right. And this is entirely the group of people who end up joining the guerrillas in record numbers in the context of a peace process. So that answering that puzzle sort of pushed me to my focus on livelihood, which is kind of the central argument of the book is that it's the way that people seek to pursue a living in the face of these constrained sets of opportunities that are absolutely critical for peace building, for building state authority, for questions of who is able to govern, which of competing authority figures are able to set sort of the terms of the rules of daily life in the territory.
- [23:46]
Sneha Navarrapu
Yeah, thank you. That's very succinctly. Put, and I think you do actually answer those questions in the book. And coca cultivation and its substitution, as you've already mentioned, has such a central role to play in this story, right, about farmers, the state and local authority. And in chapter one, you articulately walk us through the political economy of coca and you also show us how coca cultivation produces a moral economy in the region. Right. And that the illegality of coca cultivation, which I thought was really interesting, produces specific gains, but also specific risks. Right. So could you speak a little bit about why coca cultivation persists in the region and what are the kinds of dilemmas its cultivation produced amongst the farmers?
- [24:32]
Dr. Alex Diamond
Well, so this great question and this sort of speaks to another puzzle, which is you have a pretty conservative village. Rural Colombia tends to be overwhelmingly Catholic, where even things like smoking cannabis are very stigmatized. Any kind of drug used is very looked down on. Yet these same very traditional religious farmers for a period of decades made a living farming cocoa, cocaine. Right. It doesn't seem like a natural thing to do. And it's really only understandable in the wake of the collapse of a different drug economy. I would say, somewhat facetiously, which is coffee, which used to provide for village. Used to be the economy used to be based on farming coffee as well as other food crops. And basically what happened is that the global market for coffee was flooded with this huge rise in coffee production and particularly massive sort of industrialized farms. Brazil, Vietnam, places like that in the 1990s. And at the same time, Colombia has this economic opening where policies that had protected local food production tariffs are being taken away. And Colombia begins importing huge amounts of food, including stuff like corn and beans that people in Briseno would have used, were actually selling in domestic markets for a profit. They could no longer do that because all these cheap products are coming in and the price is for agricultural, but it's just drops, coffee, corn, beans, things like that. So in this context, the only crop that is sort of protected from this rise of corporate agriculture, which is not a Colombian phenomenon, Right. This is across the world. And you see these dynamics in rural areas across the global South. But the difference is that in Colombia, there is an option of a crop that is completely excluded from corporate agriculture because it's illegal, right, which is coca, cocaine. So that what I found was that despite sort of the moral ambiguity or, or even repugnance this idea, we don't want to. We don't want to grow a drug crop for farmers and their families. This became sort of the only way that they could maintain things they did value very highly morally, the ability to live on and from the land, the ability to provide a better future for their family while farming. So that the real dilemma in that. Right. Is that it does bring. It makes the area very attractive to armed groups. It ties local livelihoods into those armed groups because it's the guerrillas, it's the paramilitaries who are organizing the coca buying. So this sort of gives them a power within the community, and they end up fighting over the territory as well. So I don't want to really. I don't want to romanticize this too much because a lot of violence results, but that was why coca cultivation spread.
- [27:56]
Sneha Navarrapu
Yeah. And, you know, following this, you walk us through the coca substitution process and how farmers were encouraged, slash, and forced to plant legal crops instead of coca. And I think the early part of the chapter, I chuckled a lot at the. The image of President Santos planting a plantain seedling instead of cacao. And again, the kinds of little ethnographic details that make your book so eminently readable. The sort of confusion and the embarrassment of that moment that he didn't know what he was actually planting. But anyway, so the coca substitution program you show in the book, through your ethnography, significantly produced state society relations in the region. So I would love for you to say more about this and how the substitution process shaped the symbolic power of the state.
- [28:45]
Dr. Alex Diamond
Yeah. So thank you for pointing to that vignette. Yeah. The president showed up in the area on helicopter in 2017 to launch on a national level the coca substitution program. And the discourse around it is we're replacing violence with peace, we're replacing guerrilla authority with state authority, and we're replacing coca with cacao, which is what's used to make chaja. Of course, the story, the joke, and people in the area are still making fun of him for this, was that the president, Juan Manuel Santos, was sort of this from an elite family in Bogota who was educated at Harvard and lse. And it wasn't cacao at all. It was a plantain that he was planting, and he just had no idea. Which symbolizes the disconnect between elite urban power and these rural areas that have, you know, felt, and probably correctly, in many cases, that they've been ignored and abandoned by the states. But with this program launching, what you see is that these relations that have previously established the authority of the guerrillas. Right. Because people are depending on the girls and the paramilitaries to organize the local economy, they flip and they start depending on the State, they start needing roads because coca, they make it into coca paste, and it's just a couple kilos that they need to get to market. They can do it on mule paths. Now they're taking out thousands and thousands of kilos of coffee, so they need roads to get to market. Now they're milking cows, so the milk truck needs to be able to get close to their farms. Now their hopes of funding these new crops are wrapped up in State eight. That's supposed to come through the substitution program. Right. So they begin depending on the state in a way that they didn't before. And that's really critical to the authority relations that are developing within the territories. They're turning to the state for their livelihoods and in such, recognizing its authority and also creating these concrete ties that didn't exist before between rural farmers and a variety of state officials, both local government and related to the peace process.
- [31:16]
Sneha Navarrapu
Yeah, thank you. That's really well put. And I think we begin to see the sort of analytical moves that you continue to make through the book with your emphasis on this sort of the frictions that also emerge. Right. With the symbolic power, the state being established in this region. And in chapter four, you make a really profound point when you say that while the rural poor find their labor and agricultural production excluded from the global capitalist economy, their land, minerals and water have become central to the processes of capitalist accumulation. And you show how this works in the case of water and gold, two resources that are sought to be extracted and I guess, harnessed in different ways. You also show how there are these two extractive mega projects, one of which doesn't actually take off, and I'm sure you'll say a little more about that. And they're part of the peace process, but they don't actually bring peace, and instead they become the basis of establishing or re. Establishing alternative forms of authority. So there is this crisis of legitimacy that you're talking about in the context of these extractive projects. You also point to how local politics then emerges on the ground and how it emphasizes accommodation over resistance, but that these concepts themselves might need more careful inquiry, since accommodation is often viewed by our sociologists as surrender. So, I know I've said a lot of things, but could you say a little more about all of this? And again, I just wanted to say that the level of complexity also, I think, extended in the case of this chapter, to ecological stuff. Right. And for instance, we talk about how there was a great resistance to this dam being built, and then there was also a lot of worry that the geology of the region doesn't actually make. It's not good for the rocks in the region, right. For this dam to be built and then the dam actually bursts and then this, this reservoir that's formed. And what I really appreciate was the ethnography, again, like the depth of the research was how. Then you point to how the reservoir gave rise to things like fungi on coca crops, right. And this sort of prevalence of communicable mosquito bone diseases that weren't actually quite heard of in this region. So I just want to say that again, this chapter was eye opening on so many levels, so many scales, and I think you do that so well in moving very effortlessly from one scale to another. But. Yeah, so what's really going on here with water and gold?
- [34:00]
Dr. Alex Diamond
Snehat? First of all, thank you. It's an honor to have such an insightful and engaged reader because you just brought up a lot of really important points, I think. So that in, in that specific chapter, I guess I'll go back to that analysis that, that I'm, that I'm doing throughout of livelihoods. The idea that looking at why, you know, how people are pursuing their livelihoods and why they're doing it in that way is, is critical to understanding, you know, how these broader forces, like something that would, you know, like extractivism, right. How they unfold on the ground. And what I found in living with a couple of families right above this hydroelectric dam that you pointed to that has really transformed the region is that what began as resistance against the hydroelectric dam, people wanted to stop it from being built. There's this whole movement, but. But it fails, right? They're. They're unable to stop the dam. The, Some of the people I write about spent years of their life, you know, they, they walked to Medellin, which. It took me five hours on motorcycle to get to Medellin. So you can imagine the, the weeks that it took them to walk there and live for months in the coliseum of the. The local university protesting against the dam, drawing visibility to, to their cause. But by the time that I was there, the dam was being built. Um, it was being finished. In fact, though, there was, as you pointed to right as I began fieldwork, there's a major disaster where the, the dam itself was completely blocked so that water couldn't get through. And then they had to, they had to sort of burst and it destroyed the machine room, flooded areas downstream. This is major, majorly costly disaster in terms of, in terms of money. And I think it displaced 25,000 people. But basically by the time I got there, these anti dam activists were confronting a new reality. A new reality where the dam was there, where instead of this narrow swift river that used to give them that they used to be able to fish and they used to mine for, they used to pan for gold alongside the river as an alternative income. Right. They could no longer do that. But also the humidity in the region, as you pointed to driving mosquitoes, driving illness, and driving new kinds of fungus that like really limited their fruit production, their coffee production, et cetera, this was kind of the new normal in the territory. And what I saw was that people didn't, didn't just give up, right? They shifted to this new politics. We can't stop. The dam is here. We can't stop it. But what they started to do is push the dam company, which is this public private partnership, so it's kind of part of the state, but they kind of see it as something separate. They're pushing the dam company to sort of provide the conditions that will allow them to continue living in and making a living in different ways in a transformed territory. Right. This may mean pushing that company to help them with their roads. It may mean pushing that company to provide them with a market at the foot of the dam to sell their goods. It's very much contentious politics, right? There's throughout my research, there may be a half dozen what are called taros, where they actually go down and block the road that leads to the dam until their demands are met. So it's not. You talked about how we sometimes think political sociologists think about accommodation or co optation or surrender, right? It wasn't that, but. But it's this shift in politics to say, okay, like you're here. This gives us an in. This gives us a pressure point to, to pushing you to support local livelihoods. And that became really central to local politics and kind of another way that people are turning to the, to the state or to this quasi state entity to meet their daily needs. That's already a long answer. But I guess one other thing I want to say is that that dam was the reason that Briseno was named a peace laboratory. It's the largest hydroelectric dam in Colombia. There's this sort of added imperative to pacify the region, to get rid of violent actors and to bring it under state control because of the dam. And then as it became pretty clear, it became clear very quickly, in fact, in my research that there was another imperative, which was the fact that Briseno's mountains are filled with gold. And in fact, a Canadian company, which has since been bought by a Chinese company, has long owned concessions to mine those mountains and extract the gold. And they were not able to. And this is kind of something that you see across rural Colombia in areas that were controlled by armed groups or that still are in many cases, is that they were unable, because of the dynamics of insecurity, to enter and establish this mine, which would presumably be very profitable. So the imperative to pacify the reason was not just for the hydroelectric power that could be channeled through the water flowing through it, but also the gold in the mountains. And this affected local authority in all kinds of disturbing ways, one being that, you know, a gold mine would threaten, it would contaminate water sources, it would threaten people's variability to stay in the territory. But this rearmed guerrilla group that I talked about before, pretty early on in my research, put an end to the mining project, or at least put a pause on it, that is maintained to this day by tragically murdering three young Colombian geologists who were working for the Canadian company after making it known, Right. That they were not wanted in the area. So here you see, sort of there's this interesting process of meaning making within the community of like, we don't want violence, we don't want armed actors. And yet these armed actors did something that is, for us, very practically useful, which was get rid of this gold mine that the local people pretty much overwhelmingly don't want. Yeah, you pointed the complexity of these dynamics of extraction and authority that was kind of another way that they were linked through local livelihoods.
- [40:45]
Carrington College Announcer
Your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors and learn about the our associate degree in nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at Carrington Edu events. For information on program outcomes, visit Carrington. Edu Sci Chronic Migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox Onobotulinum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo.
- [41:33]
Botox Chronic Migraine Announcer
Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking breathing eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
- [42:09]
Carrington College Announcer
Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more.
- [42:15]
Lowe's Announcer
Want to make the most of your
- [42:16]
Dr. Alex Diamond
tax refund file with TurboTax on intuit credit Karma? They help you get your biggest refund and then we help you do more with it with a personalized plan designed to help you hit your money goals. Start filing today in the Credit Karma app.
- [42:33]
Sneha Navarrapu
Yeah, no thank you. And the sort of complicated dynamic between the state authority and the guerrilla authority I think comes through so beautifully in chapter five, which is easily my favorite. And you show so powerfully how and why guerrilla authority is entangled with state authority in Brisenio and the everyday life consequences. Right? So obviously I would love for you to share with us how the sources of the two sources of authority are actually relied on by communities. And obviously I would love for you to do that with the example of helmet use and the whole issue with helmets and what that really tells us. I found it very, very interesting because I mean I am of course interested in helmets and mobility and all of that stuff. But I think it really such an everyday life, such a mundane sort of object, right. Gets entangled in these sorts of again like these ways in which these two source of authority are almost accommodating each other in interesting ways. So could you say a little bit about that?
- [43:39]
Dr. Alex Diamond
Well, as you pointed to Sneha, I certainly don't need to tell you that roads and how people use roads are central to authority because I'm excited to at some point in the near future interview you on your book which will explore those dynamics through Indian cities. Right. A very different context. But I know similar to what I saw in Colombia, your work has pointed to helmets and to potholes as these critical areas for ways authorities constructed for ways that people understand and experience the state. For me, the sort of the story that points to kind of points to my naivete in entering the region, but I also think points to the Value of ethnography and of a project where I actually lived there and had to learn how to navigate local authority structures. I don't want to be too navel gazy about this. And a book for focuses much more on the stories of local people. But the challenge of figuring out how to transport myself through the territory, it produced so many insights that helped me understand what local people are dealing with as an ethnographer. And one of the seminal moments of this was within my first week or two in Briseno, I had bought a motorcycle because I realized that was kind of the only way that I could visit these isolated rural farms on these precarious dirt roads, steep dirt roads throughout the territory. And I still bear the scars of those first few months as a novice motorcyclist, when I crashed a number of times, right. Fortunately, was able to avoid major injury. But as one does, or as at least I've started to do, as I have become a little bit more reasonable and wanting to protect my brain, I was wearing a helmet in going around the territory. It's also Colombian law, right? You have to wear a helmet as a motorcyclist in Colombia. So on one of these first excursions to visit a local leader, I came back to the village square, parked the motorcycle, took off the helmet. And a local city council person, an elected government official, someone I had interviewed before, nice guy, came up to me and said, where are you coming from? I said, oh, I was coming from this rural community. And he said, you can't wear a helmet. And what he let me know was that the guerrillas had let it be known. They had made sort of the declaration that helmets could not be worn throughout the territory. So if I had been leaving the village, there's an access road to the village. You can wear a helmet if you're leaving the village. And then once you actually leave the village, right then you're back in the state territory and you have to wear a helmet, but within the village and going to rural areas, you cannot. And it was actually years later that I figured out how this happened, which was what you were pointing to as understanding how these. How authority between two different claimants being the formal state, which says helmets are required, and the gorillas, which says you cannot wear helmets. How this was contested and how these, you know, how local people make choices about how to live their daily lives and decide whether to wear a helmet or not, which was actually that the. The gorillas. There had been a. There had been a case where people with helmets and, you know, people who wear Helmets, you don't know who's moving through the territory. The guerrillas needed to know who was moving through the territory because there had been this shooting where people with helmets had gone through and tragically killed someone. So they let it be known, no helmets. And there was this sort of newly installed transit official who, following Colombian law and following his duties, had been saying, you need to wear helmets. And people had been sort of caught between these two authority figures, and they had been refusing. They had a protest. They'd been refusing to wear helmets because, you know, guerrilla commands are backed with the force of violence. And guerrillas had sort of a longer history of being the authority in these communities. So people sort of knew they needed to follow them. And eventually the guerrillas invited this transit official to a meeting. They took him on motorcycle without helmets into this sort of isolated area. And they said, look, this is why we can't have helmets. We're happy to collaborate with you and help you out on other transit issues, like if kids who are too young to ride motorcycles or riding motorcycles, or if people are riding motorcycles drop things like this, we're happy to even back you in these areas. But the helmet thing is non negotiable. And he basically said, okay, that's fair. So is this a case when there was. I think it's. You use the word entanglement. Right. Which is the word that I use. This sort of surprising. We think the image we might have of these two different claimants to authority is they're shooting it out. They're fighting each other for control. In many cases, they're actually negotiating and even collaborating together.
- [49:15]
Sneha Navarrapu
Yeah, super interesting. And I think this sort of, again, this looming sort of desire for the state in everyday life and the kind of, again, entanglement with guerrilla authority really came through in those examples that you give in this chapter. I also really enjoyed the analytical point that you made about how, you know, there is this guerrilla authority that actually works through invisibility and silence. And there's just this sort of aura of silence and quiet around its power. But like state power, you know, as research has shown in anthropological, sociology and political science, actually works through spectacle. Right. And so I really enjoyed the way you juxtapose those two. Those two auras of authority as well. But. Yeah, but so sort of coming back to this question of the state. Right. We see very clearly in your chapter on electoral politics in the region that there is this desire for the state that seems to be very strong in particular ways. Right. So can I ask you to say a little bit about why mayoral election campaigns have gained so much importance in the region, and how clientelism shapes political equations.
- [50:28]
Dr. Alex Diamond
Yeah, so as you know, I'm not a quantitative sociologist, but maybe I'll point to one number, two numbers, a comparison of two numbers, which is that before Briseno lived this transformation, beginning with the peace process, people really didn't vote for mayor. Mayor. The village has a. It's a small, small village. The population's about 8,000. But the winning mayoral candidate would come in with just a couple hundred votes. This kind of. I couldn't actually find the exact numbers because it speaks to local record keeping. But, you know, there probably weren't even a thousand people voting, many fewer than a thousand people voting in elections. As the coca economy disappeared and as people begin turning to the state for help they need with, with their livelihoods, begin pursuing their livelihoods through the state. And I'll talk about how that works in a second. You see elections become this huge deal. In Brisenio, the winning candidate isn't getting 400 votes, he's getting 3,000 something votes, which I was able to accompany two election periods. And that's how it worked. People really started, and I appreciate how you refer to this as a desire for the state, but they really started participating in local electoral politics. And the reason they did this was very simple. And it points to livelihoods. Again, it's that the mayor's office controlled the only formal jobs available in the territory. The only jobs that paid at least minimum wage. So for people with some level of education, whether it's a high school degree or a little more, they needed. They depended on the mayor hiring them if they're going to get like a decent job. The mayor's office also controlled the resources needed, the excavators needed to fix local roads so that when, you know, farmers who are depending on the milk truck coming into their community to get, to get their, their milk to market when those roads are damaged, they needed to be able to call on the mayor for help. And the mayor controlled all these home improvement programs, which were the ways that people improved their quality of life through adding like indoor plumbing, a bathroom to their homes, through paving the floor to the dirt floors to their homes, things like that. Now, previously they could meet a lot of those needs through the coca economy, which was offering money. But when that disappears, and gold panic to some extent, which disappeared with the hydroelectric dam, when that disappears, people begin really depending on the state. And all of these state resources are distributed, not all of them, but a majority of them are distributed through the mayoral office based around these clienteless logics of did you support me in the campaign? Did you put up on your door a sign saying fulano, which is the word in Colombia that's used for, like John Doe, fulano for mayor. Did you come to my rallies? Did you make a Facebook post supporting me? So people in the time that I was there start really strenuously participating in these electoral campaigns. They dominate the village. Everyone starts voting and they start basically negotiating their votes and voting blocks of their community. So community leaders would do this or their family for access to all these resources that they hope to be able to take advantage of when and if their candidate eventually wins. So this was kind of another way that state authority is established. Right. And it's not the way we think of like an impartial state that guarantees security and the public good of everyone. It's very personal. It's negotiated through the personal figure of the mayor or his. And I say his because the mayors have always been met his sort of trusted political allies. It's very disappointing because in most cases, the mayoral candidate over promises and under delivers. But there's still this. All these resources are flowing through these clienteleist relationships where people have traded their political support for resources they hope to receive down the road. And so they went from not caring about elections in the least to these elections really dominate the social lives, the social life of the village. There's all these events. You have these huge election teams traveling to different rural areas. All people are hoping to get jobs in the municipal administration. And every four years, it's just this sort of major competition for the resources that people are going to. They know they're going to need down the road. And this ends up being this imperfect but really consequential way that state resources and state authority have become necessary to local livelihoods.
- [55:47]
Sneha Navarrapu
Yeah, thank you so much. That was really well articulated. And that was a chapter that you had an article, right? Was it in qualitative sociology?
- [55:59]
Dr. Alex Diamond
It was, yeah.
- [56:00]
Sneha Navarrapu
Yeah, I remembered was one of the first articles from this research, right?
- [56:05]
Dr. Alex Diamond
The first one I published.
- [56:06]
Sneha Navarrapu
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that. And the more recent article of yours, it is out in American Journal of Sociology. I know that parts of it feature in your. In your final sort of chapter, right. In the book, which is on road construction as state formation, which is also a favorite of mine, of course, and I've read a version of it in the past. So why do collective struggles around road construction and maintenance become ways for you to state, for you to trace state formation and how does the materiality of road maintenance and improvement enable a relook at state making as an ongoing process?
- [56:46]
Dr. Alex Diamond
Yeah, thank you for your very insightful comments on that article because that. I think you may have even commented on it as a chapter as well, because that. That argument took me a long time and a lot of help from. From people like you to get to. But basically what I found in. And again pointing to the value of ethnography and living in the region, having to transport myself around the region is that sort of the central, the main collective concern that communities shared. And they shared it as bounded units, right? Because roads lead to particular communities was the state of their roads, right? And this was, as I pointed to, this was a product of economic changes. They didn't necessarily need those roads when they were selling relatively like coca paste or panning for gold. But with this move to legal agricultural economies, they need the roads. And this process of trying these roads did not exist, I should say they only had mule paths. This transformation in Briseno also coincides with the development of a road network. And we often think about roads, and I think in most places roads come come to being as the manifestation of state power, state resources and state initiative, right? And that's not what happened in Brisenio. It's actually local communities coming together to. To take the lead in building their own roads, but in building their roads. And this is as they realized they were going to need to develop eagle legal economies that would require those roads. But saying that they took the initiative is not to say that they owned excavators or had the resources they needed to build those roads or later maintain them. So what I describe ethnographically is this process where the economic need to build these roads brought these communities together. I call them publics, following following other scholars who've written about sort of similar concerns, similar need for shared needs for public goods. But these communities come together, they. They need to build their roads and then they have representatives who turn to the representatives of the state who control the resources, primarily excavators, right? Those big machines that are used to build roads. And not only does this create. Not only is this another way that this creates sort of a dependence on the state and on state resources, but it also creates these concrete ties between representatives, people who credibly represent communities, right? Community presidents and people who represent the state, the mayor or people who work for the mayor's office, but primarily the mayor. And it's these ties that are used in electoral campaigns. But it's also these ties that the local government uses to understand the territory. They turn to these community presidents. And I guess what I was able to see ethnographically is this, which I shared, this concern, this need to move throughout the territory. There were times when roads were blocked by landslides, which happened over and over again. So building the roads creates these ties. Then we need to maintain the roads. You know, my. My ability to get back to my apartment in the village center depended on is the mayor going to send the excavator to this particular landslide. And when there are heavy rains in Briseno, There might be 10 different landslides. Right. So that also, you know, that that sort of brought people together and then created these ties and this dependence on the mayor's office, that it was really central to state society relations and really central to establishing the state as what we think of, maybe in imperfect ways, but as a state providing for people's collective needs.
- [60:53]
Sneha Navarrapu
Yeah, thank you and thanks for going through the book with me again. It was such a pleasure to read. And again, I just feel like I learned so much from it, not just in terms of the conceptual interventions you're making, but also in terms of how to write ethnography in a way that is extremely theoretically rich, layered, but also deeply engaging. So thanks a lot for writing this book and I would love to know what you're working on now and what can we expect to read from you in the future.
- [61:29]
Dr. Alex Diamond
Well, thank you for those kind words about the book, Sneha. And as you know, we've been talking about this project for a long time, and you've been really inspiring to me in thinking through how to write and how to present findings and how to make something. That's fun to write and fun to read, I hope. The project that I'm working on now. So there's this concept of a gateway drug, right, Which. Which has been mostly debunked, but the idea is that, you know, soft, quote unquote, softer drugs early on can lead people to harder, more damaging drugs. And having written, I'm. I'm doing this process in reverse because having. Having written about cocaine economies, I am now cocaine has been my gateway drug to. To cannabis. I've been researching for a couple of years now, and now writing a book on political and economic struggles around cannabis legalization in the US So trying to understand how we've gotten to the laws that we have as a way of understanding the political process in the US but also how these changing laws, which are changing every year, have influenced the development of. Of cannabis economies, both legal, illicit, and kind of everything in between. So it's a project that. It's really informed by this project, right? The questions of who can participate in agricultural economies, what is the role of illegality, and also what is the nitty gritty of politics?
- [63:15]
Sneha Navarrapu
Yeah, I mean, sounds great. And if this book is anything to go by, then I really, really can't wait for you to finish the second one. And I know it's going to be really, really fascinating. I, of course, have heard you speak about the project in informal ways, but I look forward to reading more about it. All the best with the field work and with everything else. And thanks so much for taking time out to do this. I really appreciate it.
- [63:40]
Dr. Alex Diamond
No, thank you, Sneha. This was a real pleasure and I appreciate such penetrating and insightful questions.
- [63:48]
Sneha Navarrapu
All right, I'll talk to you soon. Everything feels more expensive right now. That's why this matters.
- [64:06]
Dr. Alex Diamond
TikTok Shop has a huge selection of products with surprising deals. You don't expect affordable finds for everyday life. Download TikTok now.