State Formation and Class Politics in Colombia

• In Event: States and Their Others: Rule as Process in the Andes

Abstract

This paper explores processes of state formation in Colombia’s Middle Magdalena valley. It considers three distinct periods in which shifting regimes of capital accumulation, the coercive capacities of different actors (a transnational oil company, guerrilla insurgencies, and right-wing paramilitaries) and the organization and claims-making of working people gave rise to changing geographies of power. It asks how power-laden social geographies emerge from conflicting political and economic agendas, how rights are defined and distributed to different groups, and how distinctions such as state/non-state, foreign/domestic, and public/private arise. How, too, do working people conceptualize the state and formulate claims at particular moments? It argues that shifting geographies of power turned on the control of resources, changing forms of capital accumulation, and the making, unmaking, and remaking of a working class in which the demands, visions, and struggles of working people played a central part.

Author

• Lesley Gill, Vanderbilt University