In 2018, Alex Diamond, a sociology PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, moved to rural Colombia to study the peace process, a protracted effort to end a decades-long armed conflict between the government and guerrilla groups. He had lived in the country before, but this time he was there to observe the aftermath of the historic 2016 peace agreement between the central government in Bogotá and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). How would the Colombian state establish its authority in rural areas where it had almost no power? What factors enabled and inhibited the success of the peace process in rural Colombia?

Diamond, now an assistant professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University, has a new paper that examines the peace process in rural Colombia, discussing the remaking of state authority and economic life in Briceño, a rural mountainous village of 8,000 people that was shaped in large part by the cultivation of coca, the plant from which cocaine is produced. As part of Colombia’s negotiated peace, the government designated Briceño a peace laboratory, introducing a landmine removal program and a pilot coca substitution program, supplying farmers with new goods to help them transition away from coca and toward the legal economy.

Diamond draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to tell a story about changes in state authority from the perspective of the local population. During the civil war, the central government was largely absent, while guerrillas built a track record of solving problems for residents and even settling disputes.

As residents sought to transition from coca farming to coffee and cattle, moving goods to market necessitated reliable roads that had to be constructed and maintained. The local population had depended on mules to transport coca, a lightweight crop, and maintained mule paths themselves, turning to guerrillas when help was needed. But cattle farming required large trucks to move milk, and if rocks and mud washed out roads, spoiled milk would spell significant losses. Roads represented the fulfillment of material needs, and since state officials controlled the machinery needed to build and fix them, Briceño residents forged new ties with the state as the community undertook the construction of a new road. While working through his data, Diamond uncovered the significance of relationships between community representatives and government officials in consolidating state authority in the village.

Read the full article about the peace process in Colombia by Daniela Blei at Stanford Social Innovation Review.