(Illustration by iStock/DrAfter123)
In 2018, Alex Diamond, a sociology PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, moved to rural Colombia to study the peace process, a protracted effort to end a decades-long armed conflict between the government and guerrilla groups. He had lived in the country before, but this time he was there to observe the aftermath of the historic 2016 peace agreement between the central government in Bogotá and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). How would the Colombian state establish its authority in rural areas where it had almost no power?
Diamond, now an assistant professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University, has a new paper that examines the remaking of state authority and economic life in Briceño, a rural mountainous village of 8,000 people that was shaped in large part by the cultivation of coca, the plant from which cocaine is produced. As part of Colombia’s negotiated peace, the government designated Briceño a peace laboratory, introducing a landmine removal program and a pilot coca substitution program, supplying farmers with new goods to help them transition away from coca and toward the legal economy.
Diamond draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to tell a story about changes in state authority from the perspective of the local population. During the civil war, the central government was largely absent, while guerrillas built a track record of solving problems for residents and even settling disputes.
As residents sought to transition from coca farming to coffee and cattle, moving goods to market necessitated reliable roads that had to be constructed and maintained. The local population had depended on mules to transport coca, a lightweight crop, and maintained mule paths themselves, turning to guerrillas when help was needed. But cattle farming required large trucks to move milk, and if rocks and mud washed out roads, spoiled milk would spell significant losses. Roads represented the fulfillment of material needs, and since state officials controlled the machinery needed to build and fix them, Briceño residents forged new ties with the state as the community undertook the construction of a new road. While working through his data, Diamond uncovered the significance of relationships between community representatives and government officials in consolidating state authority in the village.
“Moments when authority relations are contested and transformed are rare,” Diamond says. “I was fortunate to witness how this happened, and it wasn’t a linear process. Both the state and at least one armed group continued to perform authority functions in different ways. A central finding was that change depends on personal relationships, whether it’s state officials, guerrillas, or representatives of communities.”
In particular, community presidents—representatives elected by the community—played a critical role in shifting state power in the community through frequent contacts with government officials to pursue practical needs that then developed into durable relationships. Local guerrilla governance did not disappear, Diamond found, but the ideas and practices of the formal state “gained a foothold in the collective life of the village.” As Briceño residents began to view the state as contributing to community livelihoods, voting rates in municipal elections soared. By partnering with community presidents, state officials were also able to carry out new projects, such as distributing groceries to needy families during the COVID-19 pandemic, bolstering its symbolic authority in the process.
But Briceño, Diamond warns, is not an “unqualified story of successful state formation.” Roads brought the community to the state, while guerrillas—an alternative source of authority—continue to enforce law and order and fulfill other statelike functions. Tensions between the guerrillas and the state will evolve according to the strength of relationships, Diamond’s findings suggest, and the extent to which those relationships can solve collective problems.
“Over time, Alex witnessed how processes such as ‘state building’ and ‘corruption’ played out in people’s lives,” says Marco Garrido, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. “He shows people working out their relationship to the state, opting to subordinate themselves to it, and becoming citizens.”
Find the full study: “On the Road to State Power? State Formation Through Relationship Building in Rural Colombia” by Alex Diamond, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 131, no. 2, 2025.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.