Based on research in Colombia, this article argues that violent economic situations in specific spaces can be productively studied through a hybrid style of research that combines techniques of investigative journalism with the conceptual and methodological commitments of ethnographic inquiry.
Through a combination of García Márquez's stories and Marx's general formula for capital as a means of analysis (Magical Marxism!), this article proposes a spatial framework for understanding how agrarian spaces are transformed by the drug trade.
Five days after Stuart Hall died, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed accusing academics of self-inflicted public irrelevance. That same day, Larry Grossberg, a student of Hall’s, published an essay reflecting on his former teacher’s intellectual influence around the world. Grossberg ended his tribute with the line: “It is a time to remember that ideas matter as we try to change the world, and that bad stories, make bad politics.”
This article shows the grassroots development apparatus—its discourses of political participation, environmental conservation, and ethnic empowerment—became a conduit for paramilitary-backed state formation and land-grabbing in northwest Colombia.
How has state formation developed in a region where relations of land, labor, and capital have been violently contested and in which the government has never been the sole nor the most powerful source of political authority?
A brief summary of some political and conceptual flashpoints that provide a compelling meta-analytical window onto already emergent aspects of the political conjuncture currently unfolding in geography and beyond.