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Paper short abstract:

The paper challenges simplistic views on illicit drug crops, advocating for a nuanced understanding of ethnic communities' socio-economic choices in the coca economy. Drawing on Colombian case studies, it highlights complex agency and governance within Indigenous and Afrocolombian groups.

Paper long abstract:

Scholarship on Illicit Drug Crops mostly understands illicit economies as disruptive for ethnic identities and ethnic institutions of territorial governance. In particular, illicit economies are said to generate violence in ethnic territories by strengthening the control of armed groups over coca-producing territories and unsettling socio/cultural changes that weaken collective processes of identity-making and territorial control. In this paper, we argue that this scholarship is underpinned by a simplistic representation of ethnic communities solely as powerless “victims” of illicit economies. We claim that formulating effective drug policies requires understanding in more nuanced ways the specific socio-economic trade-offs experienced by ethnic groups when entering the coca economy, recognizing ethnic subjects as holders of political and economic agency even in the violent context of coca enclaves. We draw on the analysis of two case studies in Colombia: the Catatumbo and Bajo Cauca regions, to investigate the complex forms of agency and governance that Indigenous and Afrocolombian communities hold in coca-producing territories. The ethnographic comparison between these two hotspots of coca production allows us to claim that the relationship between ethnic communities and drug economies is dynamic and framed by the different trajectories of ethnic social movements and territorial governance in specific socio-economic contexts and cannot only be understood as one of “resistance” or “dispossession”. Finally, we argue that simplistic understandings of this relationship can lead to counterproductive outcomes as they reproduce an “ahistorical” image of ethnic subjectivities as deprived of political agency, further excluding ethnic actors from decision-making spaces.