Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory

Diamond, Alex

ISBN 10: 0226846202 / ISBN 13: 9780226846200

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2026

About this Item

Very Good - Crisp, clean, unread book with some shelfwear/edgewear, may have a remainder mark - NICE PAPERBACK Standard-sized.

Seller Inventory # M0226846202Z2

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226846202
• ISBN 13: 9780226846200
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

An on-the-ground description of Colombia’s peace process as lived by the rural populations most affected by it.

The Colombian village of Briceņo might, at first glimpse, look like many communities in the rural Global South. Many of the people living there rely on small-scale farming, even as a newly constructed hydroelectric dam threatens traditional livelihoods. Yet after decades where Briceņo suffered from a bloody conflict, the village has more recently become central to the nation’s hopes for peace. In Governing the Excluded, sociologist Alex Diamond shares a closer look at Briceņo and offers unique insight not only into the contemporary Colombian state but to how people across the Global South are struggling to maintain rural livelihoods amid economic dispossession.

Governing the Excluded describes a landmark peace process between the Colombian government and the radical FARC guerrillas from the perspective of Colombian farmers, drawing links between economic transformation, drug economies, and armed conflict. Exclusion from global markets for traditional crops like coffee first pushed farmers to grow coca, the raw material for cocaine. This ushered in an era of violent conflict for control of the illicit economy, while farmers continued to be priced out of legal markets. In exchange for peace and state protection, farmers ultimately agreed to sacrifice profitable coca. But with its disappearance, they now find themselves dependent on the state: for machinery to maintain the roads they need to get legal harvests to market, municipal jobs that are the only decent work available, and for public resources to subsidize food crops with razor-thin profit margins. Ongoing economic struggles in the legal sector make the state’s newfound authority tenuous, as some villagers replant coca, abandon the village for uncertain urban futures, or join a rearmed guerrilla group.

Informed by deep ethnographic research and firsthand stories from Briceņo residents, Governing the Excluded shows that when it comes to the forces driving dispossession—be they international corporate megaprojects, global food prices, or national initiatives to replace coca cultivation—state authority goes only so far as its ability to sustain local livelihoods.

About the Author

Alex Diamond is assistant professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University.