ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore the drastic transformations of rural spaces in Colombia during the last two decades, in a context of paramilitary state-sanctioned violence, multiscaled landgrabbing, the war on drugs and sustainable development projects. In particular, drawing from ethnographic research, we examine how peasants in the Colombian Caribbean articulate a resource politics while navigating a very limited political terrain. We define peasants’ political and material space as elusive, seeking to tease out the processes through which they appear as unproductive and environmentally destructive, and thus left incapable of accessing the political language of land rights or of biodiversity conservation. Finally, we explore peasants’ territorialities, looking for more politically enabling ways of understanding peasant space and of accounting for their different strategies to open up this space, vis-à-vis the dynamics of everyday dispossession and enclosure set in motion in the region.
