Alex Diamond, "Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Apr 6, 2026

Alex Diamond, a sociologist and long-term ethnographer of rural Colombia, explores life in Briceño. He traces how collapsing legal markets pushed farmers into coca, the tradeoffs of coca substitution, and how dams and mining reshape livelihoods. He also examines tangled authority—state programs, guerrilla power, and local politics—and why roads, jobs, and public projects become central to peace and survival.

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ANECDOTE

Long Immersion Built Intimate Ethnography

Alex Diamond lived in Briceño across multiple summers and a 2.5 year extended field period during COVID to build deep relationships with villagers.
He focused on four families he met early on, accompanying them to farms, meetings, demonstrations, and daily life to produce rich ethnographic vignettes.

ANECDOTE

Documentary Strengthened Collaborative Ethnography

Diamond produced a participatory documentary with audiovisual students that focused on two families and helped legitimize his presence and research in Briceño.
The film process opened conversations about what villagers wanted documented and strengthened collaborative storytelling.

INSIGHT

Livelihood Loss Drove Postpeace Recruitment

The peace laboratory in Briceño saw peak guerrilla recruitment after coca substitution because young men lost a reliable livelihood when coca disappeared.
Coca picking had provided regular pay, savings for land, and upward mobility for 14–25-year-old men who then joined rearmed groups when legal options vanished.

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The Colombian village of Briceño 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 Briceño 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 Briceño 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 Briceño 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.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College.

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