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

Apr 6, 2026

Alex Diamond, sociologist and ethnographer who studied rural Colombia, discusses life in Briceño and the aftermath of peace. He traces how coffee’s decline pushed farmers into coca, how coca substitution made villagers dependent on the state, and how dams, mining, and local politics reshape livelihoods. He also explores how shifting economies affect recruitment to rearmed groups and previews research on cannabis legalization.

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ADVICE

Prioritize Long Term Presence For Rich Ethnography

Build deep relationships early when doing ethnography to access meaningful life stories.
Alex lived multiple seasons in Briseño, shared coffees, farm visits, and accompanied people to meetings to ground four detailed life vignettes.

ANECDOTE

Camera Work Opened Doors And Produced A Documentary

Alex used photography and a participatory documentary to deepen ties and document community priorities.
He trained in photography, carried a camera through COVID fieldwork, and co-produced a film with local families shaping the narrative.

INSIGHT

Livelihood Loss Fueled Postpeace Recruitment

Peacebuilding that eliminates coca removed a vital pathway to livelihoods and upward mobility for young men.
Coca offered frequent harvest work and savings that enabled youth to acquire land; substitution left them idle and prone to joining rearmed guerrillas.

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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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