Embrace Dialogue Academia Seminar 3: Coca and capitalism in Cauca

Dialogues bridging academic research with policy implications for contemporary peacebuilding challenges in Colombia

In this talk, based on an article published in World Development, ‘The coca enclosure: Autonomy against accumulation in Colombia’ (2020), Dr Anthony Dest analysed a relatively new phenomenon in northern Cauca: the massive expansion of coca cultivations.

After decades of intense forced eradication campaigns promoted by the US government, the so-called 'War on Drugs' failed at achieving its stated aim. Instead, these militaristic policies pushed coca growers to find more remote places to cultivate coca in different parts of the country. In northern Cauca, coca cultivations are strongly associated with a wave of 'colonization' (colonización) by coca growers displaced by Plan Colombia. In addition to the crops, these settlers also brought what some local inhabitants call the 'anti-culture of coca', which is associated with new forms of consumerism, violence, and an extractive relationship to the land.

Anthony explored coca’s power to transform social and economic relations, and revealed how the structural inequalities in Colombian society are reproduced in regions where it is cultivated.

Presenter: Dr Anthony Dest, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Lehman College, CUNY.

Discussant: Dr María Clemencia Ramírez, Research Associate and former Director of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History.

Convener: Dr Gwen Burnyeat, Junior Research Fellow in Anthropology, Merton College (University of Oxford) & member of Embrace Dialogue.