Tillyian Process Without A Tillyian Effect Criminalised Economies and State Building in The Colombian Conflict

Journal of Political Power
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpow21
Tillyian process without a Tillyian effect:

criminalised economies and state-building in the
Colombian conflict
José A. Gutiérrez & Estefanía Ciro
To cite this article: José A. Gutiérrez & Estefanía Ciro (2022) Tillyian process without a Tillyian
effect: criminalised economies and state-building in the Colombian conflict, Journal of Political
Power, 15:1, 29-55, DOI: 10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031109
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031109
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JOURNAL OF POLITICAL POWER
2022, VOL. 15, NO. 1, 29–55
https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031109
Tillyian process without a Tillyian effect: criminalised

economies and state-building in the Colombian conflict
José A. Gutiérreza and Estefanía Cirob
a
School of Law, Universidad Santo Tomás Medellín, Colombia and Institute for International Conflict
Resolution and Reconstruction, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland; bSchool of Social Sciences and
Government, Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Querétaro, México and Colombian
Amazon Think-Tank AlaOrillaDelRío, Colombia
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Illegal economies have received substantial attention in conflict Illegal economies; cocaine;
studies over the past decades. Often, this attention is linked to illegal mining;
economicist paradigms, rendering invisible the political processes criminalisation; state-
building; conflict
linking conflict and illegal economies. By discussing the Colombian
case, we argue that criminalisation is linked to patterns of capital
accumulation and State-building. First, it reflects a long-term con
flict of Proudhonian overtones between small-scale producers and
big capital; secondly, it reflects a Tillyian process but without
a Tillyian effect. Thus, the interaction between capital accumulation,
political power and warfare takes place, without the expected result
of a centralised and efficient, democratic State.
1. Introduction
Colombia, for nearly half a century, has been both the scenario of the longest armed
conflict in the Western Hemisphere and the focus of international efforts to eradi
cate thriving illegal economies, chiefly (but not exclusively) production of cocaine.
Colombia has been for the last 40 years, undisputedly, the main producer of cocaine
(Tokatlian 2000, Rentería 2001, Bagley 2005, Thoumi 2015, UNODC 2021). More
recently, other illegal economies are getting as much attention, in particular illegal
mining, chiefly (but not exclusively) of gold. Illegal economic activities have been
given a privileged explanatory power in relation to the various ills afflicting
Colombian society as if they possessed, per se, the ability to account for corruption
or the longevity of the persistent internal armed conflict (Guáqueta 2003,
McDougall 2009, Idrobo et al. 2014, Maldonado and Rozo 2014, Escobedo and
Guío 2015, Davis et al. 2016, Rettberg and Ortiz 2016, Montero 2017, OECD
2017, Idler 2019). Drugs and now illegal mining are considered to be the ‘fuel’ of
the conflict: take them out of the equation, and Colombia would be nothing short of
an oasis of peace in a chaotic continent (El Tiempo 2000, El Tiempo 2020).
CONTACT José A. Gutiérrez jose.danton@ustamed.edu.co Universidad Santo Tomás Medellín, Colombia and
Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction, Dublin City University, 2 Ardán Na Curkish,
Bailieborough, Co. Cavan, Dublin, Republic of Ireland (Éire)
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med
ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
30 J. A. GUTIÉRREZ AND E. CIRO
The basic premise behind the ‘fuel-of-the-conflict’ narrative, that conflict is primar
ily about rent-seeking, has been discussed elsewhere (Cramer 2002, Gutiérrez-Sanín
2003, Gutiérrez and Thomson 2021). In this paper, therefore, we will question other
important premises behind this narrative that have not been subject to the same critical
analysis.
First, we will question the obsessive emphasis with ‘non-State armed actors’ -an extre
mely vague and equivocal term, which obfuscates and confuses rather than clarifies the
terms of the debate.1 This emphasis is particularly puzzling in a country where national
elites have extensive and proven involvement in activities they themselves have defined as
‘criminal’: multiple scandals have exposed the links of dominant parties, senior govern
ment figures and their relatives, businesspeople and media personalities into a range of
illegal activities, including, but not limited, to drug trafficking and production (Bowden
2010, López and Ávila 2010, Ronderos 2014, Davis 2015, Sáenz 2021). The wealth of
evidence of implication of the elites in the illegal economy, accumulated mostly in
journalistic work, has rarely been the subject of academic research -and when it is, is
mostly through the phenomenon of right-wing paramilitarism (Medina 1990, Hristov
2009, Zelik 2015, Grajales 2017, Gutiérrez-Sanín 2019). Although the influence of illegal
economies permeates the whole of Colombian society, the debate on illegal economic
activities has centred, on the one hand, around non-State, particularly rebel, armed
actors; on the other hand, it has centred on the bottom of the value-chain (i.e., cultivators
and small-scale miners), the so-called ‘peripheries’ or ‘borderlands’, deflecting attention
from the top of the value-chain, where most of the profit is actually created -and where
often legal actors profit handsomely. We argue that discourses of centre (legal/State) and
periphery (illegal/non-State) prevent us from understanding the ways in which illegal
economies articulate with the broader political economy (cf. Domínguez 2005) and with
State-building processes.
Secondly, we will question dominant approaches focused on the absence/presence and
weakness/strength of the State in peripheral territories. Generally, these neo-functionalist
approaches assume the State as a neutral expression, instead of an institution shaped by
power relations and subject to contestation. On the contrary, we will emphasise how
large swathes of territory supposedly outside the control of the State are, indeed, the
product (and victims) of a particular version of State-building, which constantly reasserts
itself through the creation of ‘hinterlands’ and ‘peripheries’ (Serje 2005). At the same
time, the ‘centre’ is idealised, although
(. . .) nowhere in Colombia can one find the idealized state that elites claim is absent in the
frontier. Indeed, the neutrality and disinterestedness that ruling groups insist must be
established in the peripheries of the nation is lacking even in the supposedly most state-
saturated regions of the country (the national capital). Even in the center, state and nonstate
actors alike employ violence on an extensive scale and in the most arbitrary of manners to
achieve their particularistic ends (Ramírez 2015, p. 36).
Thus, the centre-periphery divide and the criminalisation of the latter become State-
building mechanisms, which are vigorously contested by the population in these regions.
Our approach requires a shift from the emphasis on regional studies, so prevalent in
Colombia, towards the corridors of the apparatuses of State where the political process of
criminalisation is designed and decided.
JOURNAL OF POLITICAL POWER 31
Thirdly, we will question the reification of illegal economic activities, which assumes
that their ‘illegal’ character is an intrinsic quality, instead of the product of a political
process. In our understanding, definitions of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ are not a merely technical
affair, but are subject to asymmetrical power relations. Criminalisation is a power
exercise by which an economic activity is regulated through specific forms of violence
rather than through the mythical ‘invisible hand’ of the market (Ciro 2020). In this sense,
we will move beyond the narrow binary opposition of legal/illegal: both categories are
articulated in the broader political economy as means to regulate capital and political
power accumulation.
In order to proceed with our arguments, we will focus on the political process behind
the criminalisation of (mostly) small-scale producer economic activities. That political and
criminal involvement are not a zero-sum type of inverse proportional relationship, and
that indeed, involvement in criminal activities can in itself be political has been argued
convincingly elsewhere (e.g., Gutiérrez and Thomson 2021); here we will focus on the
political process behind criminalisation as such. This process reflects the tensions inher
ent to the accumulation patterns of both capital and political power in the Colombian
context, which are indissociable from systematic large-scale dispossession of land from
the myriad of independent producers who populate the Colombian hinterlands described
as ‘red zones’ (i.e. areas of military operations). We will examine the criminalisation of
the economies of coca and gold after 1996, a year signalling a significant escalation of
direct and indirect State-led violence against criminalised producers. This violence has
been justified in the name of the ‘war of drugs’, counter-insurgency and the ‘war on
terror’, with the US providing arguments, support and funding (Palacios, 2012; Tate
2015, Vega 2015, Lindsay-Poland 2018).
We will argue, as proposition A, that both criminalised activities -cocaine and
gold- share in common the fact that, although both are complex and stratified
industries controlled at the top of the value-chain by powerful and well-connected
individuals, their bottom is composed by a mass of small-scale producers who bear
the brunt of the State repressive measures. We argue that this criminalisation is part of
a historical hostility of the Colombian elites against small-scale independent producers,
more oriented towards the reproduction of their family units rather than bigger
capitalist venture (LeGrand 1986, Vega 2002). In this sense, the Colombian conflict
responds more to the Proudhonian model of conflict -one revolving over the auton
omy of small-scale producers- than the proletariat vs. bourgeoisie Marxist model of
conflict.
Proposition B, builds up on proposition A. We argue that the criminalisation of
economic activities has impacted significantly the State-building patterns in Colombia,
war being an integral part of it. This war-system (Richani 2013) naturalises the large-scale
dispossession of small-scale producers, which in any case does not go without resistance
(Fajardo 2015). Here, the links observed by many sociologists between State-building and
warfare (Tilly 1985, p. 1992, Giddens 1985, Mann 1988, 2012, Tarrow 2015) offer
important clues to understand the process of State-building through massive violence
against the population; but here the process (the intersection between war, political
power and capital) does not produce the expected outcomes of the theory (the emergence
of a relatively centralised and democratic nation-State). In this sense, we talk of a Tillyian
process without a Tillyian effect.
We proceed by explaining the methods, before discussing in more detail some of the
assumptions prevalent in the literature on illegal activities and conflict. We then discuss
two criminalised economic activities in Colombia to provide background. We discuss
criminalisation in the context of power relations, bringing to the fore the political process
behind it. We then locate the place of these illegal economies in relation to specific patterns
of capital accumulation -which we link to a Proudhonian model of class conflict- and forms
of State-building, where we draw critically from the Tillyian model. We will finalise with
some concluding remarks and outlining some elements for a research agenda on the topic.
2. Methods
This paper is of an exploratory nature, which means that it is more concerned with
generating propositions in order to advance future research agendas, develop theory and
concepts (Stebbins 2001, Davies 2006). This is mostly a discussion reflecting our dis
content with much of the prevalent literature, whose concepts and categories of analysis
seem ill-equipped (theoretically, empirically and also conceptually) to understand the
complexities of the relationship between the legal and illegal spheres in conflict situa
tions. This is the first contribution of a much broader research agenda in which we will
further explore some of the discussions here advanced.
We approach the problem by analysing critically the regulatory legal frameworks of
the mining and drug policies in the period 1996–2016 (See Tables 1 and 2). This paper
also builds on extensive ethnographic experience in regions of illegal economic activities,
including some regions which are predominantly cocaine producing (Putumayo, Cauca,
Caquetá, Córdoba, Nariño y Guaviare) and some areas which have gold mining as
a primary economic activity (Southern Bolívar) or as a complementary economy to
peasant smallholders (Cauca Valley and Ituango).
3. Illegal economies and conflict: some preliminary observations

The 1990s witnessed two simultaneous phenomena, which reinforced one another -the
end of the Cold War and the global hegemony of the US-sponsored neoliberal system
(Harvey 2005, Hobsbawm 2007). The end of history announced by Fukuyama (1992),
became also the end of human evolution, our species having arrived to the ultimate stage:
the homo economicus.
During this period, the persistence of conflict after the (supposed) end of ideologies
was explained by two dominant narratives. On the one hand, the New Wars paradigm
claimed that conflicts were now diffuse and about identity, emphasising the ‘criminalisa
tion’ of conflict (Kaldor, 2001). On the other, Paul Collier and his associates developed
the narrow ‘economic theory of conflict’ according to which rent-seeking activities
explain the root causes of any rebellion (Collier and Hoffler, 1998, Collier 2000).
Simple as that. Both narratives have evolved and developed into other paradigms, such
as the ‘crime-terror nexus’ or ‘continuum’ (e.g. Makarenko 2004).
These reductionist narratives have been subject to a relentless critique (e.g. Kalyvas 2001,
Cramer 2002, Gutiérrez-Sanín 2003). Notwithstanding the crisis of this approach, its allure
remains strong in Colombia. As the biggest producer of cocaine in the world, Colombia is
a showcase to a pervasive narrative in which drugs are the ‘fuel’ and master explanation of
Table 1. Main changes in the regulations on illegal drugs in Colombia (1998–2017).

Year Decree/Law/Resolution Description
1998 Plan Nacional de Lucha contra las Creation of the Illicit Crop Eradication Programme through aerial spraying
Drogas: 1998–2002 with the herbicide Glyphosate – PECIG
2000 Ley 599 de 2000 It subsumed all the crimes found in the National Narcotics Statute and
increased the penalties for all of them.
2003 Resolución 013 de 2003 The Environmental Management Plan (WFP) is issued and the UN is
entrusted with the creation of the Integrated Monitoring System for Illicit
Crops (SIMCI).
2003 Resolución 1054 de 2003 The management of the PECIG is no longer with the Ministry for
Environment and is passed to other government bodies, including the
Ministry for Justice and the National Police.
2004 Ley 890 de 2004 It increases penalties for all crimes. Reform of the Penal Code
2006 Resolución No. 015 del 2005 It allowed fumigations in National Parks
2015 Resolución 006 de 2015 Aerial fumigations (PECIG) are suspended.
2016 Ley 1787 de 2016 It creates the regulatory framework to cannabis derivatives for medicinal
and therapeutic purposes.
2016 Resolución 009 de 2016 The execution of terrestrial fumigation was authorized -the Illicit Crop
Eradication Programme through terrestrial spraying with Glyphosate
(PECAT).
2016 Ley 1801 de 2016 Harsher measures related to the transport and consumption of drugs in
public space.
2017 Resolución No. 01 de 2017 PECAT is authorized throughout the national territory.
conflict. President Iván Duque summarises this position eloquently, when he says ‘the
biggest enemy of peace-building in Colombia is drug trafficking; the more coca, the less
peace, this is the painful equation we have lived with for the past decades’ (Leal, 2021).
As Colombia slips towards a new cycle of conflict (Gutiérrez 2020, Gutiérrez-
Sanín 2020) most explanations still revolve around the control of illegal rents by
non-Strate actors (e.g., Massé and LeBillon 2018, Idler 2019; Garzón et al., 2021,
Nova 2020, FIP 2021). This so-called ‘rebels-turned-narcos premise’ has been cri
tiqued as a reductionist narrative, insufficiently grounded in evidence, according to
which former ideologically committed rebels, by entering into the illegal drugs
production chain become irredeemably corrupted (Gutiérrez and Thomson 2021).
The more involved, the less political they become.
By criticising economicist reductionism, we do not hold the economy to be irrelevant
to understanding conflict. On the contrary, we believe there is a need to adopt broader
political economy perspectives instead of a narrow caricature which reduces the beha
viour of people in conflict to that of maximising carnivores. This caricature reifies illegal
economies by giving them intrinsic qualities which render invisible the social, political
and historical context only in which they can be made sense of.
The economicist approach found its policy match in the counter-insurgent
strategy to attack the so-called ‘funding sources of terrorism’ contained in the US
Patriot Act,2 which had already been advanced through ‘Plan Colombia’ (1999), later
mutating into the Colombian ‘Patriot Plan’ (Rojas, 2015, Tate 2015, Vega 2015,
Lindsay-Poland 2018). Today, this approach has been adopted by the policy of
‘Peace with Legality’ of Duque’s government (Presidencia de la República 2018).
Collapsing the wars against illegal economies and against insurgency turned the
criminalisation of illegal activities into a moral crusade, far more serious than
a merely legal question, conflating narratives of fatherland, values, sovereignty and
patriotism (Ministerio de Defensa 2003, Centeno et al. 2013).
Table 2. Main changes in the mining regulations in Colombia (2001–2017).

Decree/Law/
Year Resolution Description
2001 Decreto 70 de 2001 Re-structures the Ministry of Mines and Energy
2001 Ley 685 de 2001 This code established the same regulations for small and big-scale operations, while
(Mining Code) the State incentivised private investments in export-enclave mining and de-
incentivised public mining.
2003 Decreto 520 de 2003 Dissolution, liquidation and de-investment in the public coal and oil sectors.
2004 Decreto 254 de 2004 Dissolution of Minercol Ltda- Public mining company.
2010 Ley 1382 de 2010 Modifies the Mining Code, making licenses and environmental impact studies, more
flexible for big-scale operations.
2010 Decreto 2820 de 2010 The contributions of local communities with respect to environmental impact studies,
will be used ‘when they are considered pertinent’ for mining projects, and prior
consultation, will be carried out ‘in the cases in which it is required’.
2011 Decreto 4134 de 2011 Creates the National Mining Agency (ANM), an autonomous public body within the
Ministry of Mining and Energy
2011 Ley 1450 de 2011 Harsher measures against illegal mining and stricter regulation of the gold market
according to legal requirements.
2012 Decreto 2261 de 2012 Tightened control over the import of machinery and inputs to be used in gold mining.
2012 Decreto 2637 de 2012 All gold in the market required to be from sources with mining titles listed in a unique
registered of mining merchants (RUCOM).
2013 Resolución 0341 de Big-scale mining operations producing for external markets are declared of ‘national
2013 interest’, and given priority above social or environmental regulations.
2013 Ley 1658 de Further restrictions on the use of mining inputs mainly used in small and medium scale
2013 mining.
2015 Decreto 276 de Further modifications to the RUCOM system.
2015
2015 Ley 1753 de 2015 Stricter definition of small and medium-scale mining, making difficult to comply with
legal requirements.
2016 Decreto 2133 de 2016 Further restrictions to the import and sale of inputs needed in small and medium-scale
mining (mercury)
2017 Resolución 40,103 de Establishes the top production for subsistence mining.
2017
2017 Decreto 1102 de 2017 Further legal requirements to engage in mining and commercialisation of minerals,
targeting small and medium-scale producers.
Ahead of Plan Colombia, there had been a significant escalation of military

counter-narcotics operations since 1996, led paradoxically by president Ernesto
Samper, whose campaign was handsomely funded by drug dealers (Rettberg 2011),
after a 200,000 people-strong march of cocalero peasants (Ramírez 2011). Since
then, entire regions and their populations have been criminalised as ‘red zones’,
and subject to the treatment as enemies of the State -as ‘terrorists’ (Ramírez 1996,
2011, Gutiérrez 2021, Gutiérrez-Sanín 2021). Thus, people engaged in the drug
economy became ‘narco-terrorists’ (a term which is often used in a very different
way as how it originated in the 1980s).3 Later, those engaged in illegal mining,
became ‘criminal miners’ and funders of ‘terrorism’, after president Santos formally
declared ‘war’ against ‘criminal mining’ in 2015, labelling it -following US military
jargon- a ‘high-value target’ (El Espectador 2015, Massé and LeBillon 2018). In 2019,
president Duque was announcing to mining corporations (after they had required
energic military measures) new military units to deal with ‘illegal’ miners (Arias
2019, Betancur 2019).
4. Some background on the cocaine and gold economies

Both coca and gold have long histories in Colombia spanning many centuries. Both
economies are also extremely diverse, including people who work full-time on them,
others who supplement farming income, people that have worked traditionally in these
economies and people from far away who have settled into these regions with the illusion
of leaving poverty behind. Although this is not the place to do a history of coca or gold,
which have been done elsewhere (e.g., West 1972, Gootenberg 2008, Dávalos et al. 2016,
Ciro 2020), we discuss key aspects of both economies in order to proceed with our
argument on the criminalisation of both activities.
4.1. Cocaine
Coca has been for millennia a sacred plant for Andean American natives, before the
German pharmaceutical industry created cocaine in the 19th century (Marichal et al.
2006). In the 1920s cocaine had been made illegal, first in the US, then in the rest of the
world (Hawdon 1996, Spillane 1999, Gootenberg 2008, López 2016). In Colombia, the
production and trade of illegal drugs started with marihuana in the mid-20th century,
mostly to the US; these same networks were used when cocaine became the predominant
drug in the 1970s (Sáenz 2021).
A number of factors coalesced to turn Colombia into the world’s number one cocaine
producer, producing an estimated 64% of the world cocaine in 2019 (UNODC 2021).
First, the elites’ unwillingness to reform the deeply unequal agrarian structures, coupled
with high levels of political violence in the countryside throughout most of the 20th
century, created a mass of uprooted peasants willing to expand the agrarian frontier
through successive waves of colonisation (LeGrand 1986, Fajardo 2015). Coca provided
this peasantry in dire need of some form of stability a promising and stable market. In
fact, the combination of insurgency and coca created, in some regions, a wall of conten
tion against land concentration (Molano 1994; Vásquez, 2009, Gutiérrez 2021).
Second, although the links between drugs and Colombian elites go back to the 1950s,
before Colombia was a cocaine producer (Sáenz 2021), the combination of ferocious
electoral politics, the 1970s fragmentation of national parties into regional coalitions, and
the increasingly dirty counter-insurgency war, facilitated the convergence of the domi
nant bloc (politicians and army officers) with the mafias. One of the few scholarly
accounts looking into this phenomenon from a systemic perspective -rather than as the
personal proclivities of corrupt politician-, remarks that
When the drug economy hit the country by the mid ‘70s, these [political] bosses were in the
midst of a ferocious competition among them for scarce votes. They needed the fresh
resources offered by the narcos, and were not above getting them. The result was that the
biggest party of the political system [ed. The Liberal party], and the most efficacious vote
gatherer, underwent a deep transformation towards its criminalisation (Gutiérrez-Sanín
et al. 2007, p. 23).
‘Political scandals’ such as ‘process 8000’ or the ‘Ñeñepolítica’ have stained presiden
tial campaigns for the last 40 years with drug money, proving this is a structural
problem at all levels of the State (López and Ávila, 2010; Rettberg 2011, Sáenz 2021).
So strong is this association, that a political movement called decent ones was created
-as if decency was a political programme in its own right! (El País 2018). In parallel,
counter-insurgency brought other sectors of the State (armed forces and police) into
this equation by the close association of right-wing paramilitarism (MAS, PEPEs,
AUC, etc.) with the main Colombian cartels (Bowden 2010, López and Ávila 2010,
CNMH 2013, Ronderos 2014, Sáenz 2021). Even international agencies in Colombia
have been implicated in relations to the cartels: the campaign to kill Pablo Escobar
relied heavily on support provided by the rival Cali cartel, and more recently, Michele
Leonhart, head of the DEA, had to resign after evidence emerged that DEA agents in
Colombia regularly attended sex parties with the Medellín Cartel (Davis 2015,
Hosenball 2015).
The regional cocaine economies, despite their illegal nature, reproduce market
dynamics in a highly stratified value-chain starting with coca cultivation and the produc
tion of base paste by the cocalero peasant. Then, the base paste is processed into cocaine,
a process taking place in crystallizing facilities (cristalizaderos), where the product
acquires most of its added value in the production stage. There are thousands of facilities
producing base paste, but the production bottleneck is in the crystallizing facilities, which
requires an investment outside the reach of the peasantry. Most of the value is not added
at the stage of production, but on the trafficking stage: while the kilo of coca leaves is U
$0.71, the kilo of base paste is U$500 and the kilo of cocaine is U$1.508 at the production
facility. In the streets of Europe and the US, this same kilo can fluctuate between U
$30,000 and U$100,000 depending on quality (UNODC 2020). However, the bulk of the
discussion on illegal drugs focuses on the bottom of the value-chain -particularly, on
cultivation (e.g., Dion and Russler 2008, Mejía et al. 2019), thus deflecting us from
understanding the complexity of the value-chain and from locating the powerful actors
within this chain.
4.2. Gold and illegal mining

The Andean region is very rich in gold and other minerals. The indigenous populations
have been familiar with the art of goldsmithing for millennia, which reflected status,
power, and devotion, but was not used for capital accumulation (Lechtman 1984, 1991,
Reichel-Dolmatoff 1988). The myth of El Dorado, attracted the Conquistadores who
exploited both the natives and imported African slaves to the mines of Iscuandé and
Barbacoas, changing forever the demography of the Colombian Pacific region, develop
ing a distinctive Afro-Colombian culture (De Friedemann 1974, Navarrete 2003). Soon,
mints in Bogotá and Popayán started turning this gold into circulating capital (West
1972).
Precious metals were later central to the consolidation of regional economies -which
functioned like ‘regional archipelagos’- that articulated slowly to national and interna
tional markets, providing the republican elites with the building blocks in the State-
building process amidst a fierce fight over the control of labour and resources (Barona
1997).
Although mining no longer plays the central role it played in the national economy
until the mid-19th century, it is still prominent in many regions: 141,000 people depend
on mining, of which 74,000 depend on illegal mining. 72% of the mines in 2013, were
considered small-scale, being predominantly oriented towards ‘subsistence and
traditional mining’; of these, 66% were illegal (Guiza 2013, p. 112). According to a 2011
census, 87% of gold mines are illegal (i.e., lacking a mining title), the majority located in
conflictive ‘red zones’ of Chocó, Bolívar, Cauca and Antioquia (Ibid.; OECD 2017). Most
of the gold in the country, indeed, is produced by independent miners (small to mid-size
miners without links to the State or to formal companies): according to the US Mineral
Yearbook report between 2005 and 2015, they produced 80% of the Colombian gold
production (in Castillo and Rubiano 2019).
After the global economic crisis of 2008, the sharp increase in the price of global
commodities led to a drastic increase in gold exploitation in Latin America and
Colombia, in particular (Idrobo et al. 2014, Massé and LeBillon 2018, Castillo and
Rubiano 2019). The National Development Plan 2010–2014 needs to be made sense of
in this context; by 2010, 4.8 million hectares of land had been given in concession to
mining corporations, overlapping with ethnic and peasant territories, and with informal
mining regions (Vélez-Torres 2014, Massé and LeBillon 2018). 2.1 million hectares had
been granted in concession specifically to gold and precious metals mining companies in
2019, with two of them, Anglo Gold Ashanti and Continental Gold concentrating about
half of this surface (Betancur 2019). Corporations often don’t pay taxes and only seldom
pay royalties, so it has been argued that, at a dreadful social and environmental cost for
communities, the State has actually ended up subsidising multinational mining, while the
profits are channelled directly to national and international elites (Garay 2014, Vélez-
Torres 2014).
If the regional economies of coca are diverse, this is much more the case in gold
mining, which is largely concentrated in Chocó, Antioquia and Bolívar (OECD 2017).
In Chocó, in the Pacific coast, gold panning was traditionally practised as a supplement
to agriculture by former slaves, who remained autonomous in their territories thanks to
this extra-income, despite the efforts of the multi-national Chocó Pacífico to control
both the resources and labour in the region during the first part of the 20th century
(Leal 2009, Castillo and Rubiano 2019). In North-East and Bajo Cauca of Antioquia,
regions that have labelled ‘red zones’ since the 1980s (Ordóñez 2012), gold attracted
during the 19th century peasants who settled and combined agricultural and mining
activities, although in the last decades ‘pure miners’ have emerged (Lenis 2009, Pérez
et al. 2009). In the South of Bolívar, towards the mid-20th century people arrived from
all over to work in the gold economy, while others settled as farmers -many of them
participating in the coca economy (Medina 2013). Other regions have witnessed
a mixture of traditional and mechanised forms of mining, co-existing with farming
activities as witnessed in fieldtrips in Ituango (May 2019), where fishermen supple
mented their economy with gold, and Sevilla, Cauca Valley (July 2017) where dairy
farmers panned gold for extra-income. Community processes, reflecting on these
synergies, often refer to their economy as agro-minería (agri-mining) (cf., Vélez-
Torres 2014, LeBillon et al. 2020).
While in some of these territories, the gold rush has attracted ‘outsider’ medium-scale
illegal entrepreneurs to the territories, which invariably brought negative impacts, agree
ments with locals existed (Castillo and Rubiano 2019), something which seems impos
sible with the corporations. The recent scramble over the gold concessions attracted Gran
Colombia Gold, a Canadian corporation, and the South African Anglo Gold Ashanti, to
Antioquia and Bolívar, respectively, exacerbating violence. In the conflict between small-
scale producers (who complain of the extreme difficulties to legalise their activities) and
the corporations, the State sides squarely with the latter, putting its coercive apparatus at
their service and favouring them with centuries-long concessions (Bernal-Guzmán
2018).
5. Demystifying illegal economies: the political process behind their

criminalisation
Both the criminalisation of the cocalero and the small-scale miner have a history.
Colombia’s legal regulations on narcotics started back in the 1920s, at the same time
that the US developed its anti-drug legislation, becoming increasingly punitive as the
century progressed (Bagley 2005, Uprimny et al. 2013, López 2016) -the number of
people in prison for drug-related offences in Colombia grew by 289% between 2000 and
2015 (Chaparro and Pérez 2017). The National Statute on Narcotics was decreed in 1974,
curiously, at the time that the first president with alleged links to drug trafficking, López
Michelsen, came to power (Britto 2020, Sáenz 2021) and the most recent legal framework
regulating drugs, Law 30 of 1986, was influenced by US president Reagan (Tokatlian
2000).
The mid-1990s cocalero marches mark the escalation of the criminalisation against
these smallholders, which has been constant since (see Table 1), except for
a contradictory break in the context of the 2012–2016 peace negotiations (Acero and
Machuca 2021). Cocalero protests were severely repressed, serving as the preamble to
Plan Colombia, which aligned counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency operations
(Rojas, 2015; Tate 2015, Lindsay-Poland 2018).
It is difficult to disaggregate displacement caused by fumigations from other causes, as
counter-narcotics operations typically go hand in hand with other forms of public
violence and paramilitary operations, but research show a strong correlation between
fumigations, and displacement and/or other aggressions (Marín 2021). In Putumayo and
Nariño, 35,000 families were displaced between 1999 and 2003 because of fumigations
(Ceballos 2003). Some available figures, estimate that between 2001 and 2002, 75,597
people were directly displaced by fumigations (CODHES 2003). In 2008 fumigations in
Antioquia and Vichada displaced 13,134 people (CODHES, 2008). During the Uribe
government (2002–2010), the scale of fumigations reached a record high while ‘narco-
peasants’ were displaced and criminalised: 2002, Uribe’s first year in government,
reached a record 423,231 people forcefully displaced (Ibañez and Moya 2007).
Meanwhile, the government repeated like a mantra that coca was the ‘plant that kills’
(la mata que mata) (Ciro 2018). Alongside US-sponsored Plan Colombia, the UN has
promoted for the last 20 years monitoring mechanisms of coca cultivations while they are
building similar tools to monitor ‘illegal’ mining (UNODC 2016), as part of these politics
of criminalisation.
This State-led violence reflects the deep asymmetry in the distribution of rents and
violence across the drug economy’s value-chain. While the rents are minimal among base
paste producers, and they are massive among the final stages of production and distribu
tion; violence, on the contrary, is massive in the lower links of the value-chain while it
barely touches the higher links: trafficking and the financial tentacles of this industry.
The illegal condition of much small-mining derives from a series of changes in the
legislation, which did not target small-scale mining per se, but made it in practice
impossible (see Table 2). The mining code (Law 685 of 2001) established for small-
scale mining the same regulations as for the big-scale operations of multinational
corporations, while the State incentivised private investments in mining and de-
incentivised public mining production. According to Vélez-Torres, ‘the Colombian
state has assumed the position of a broker whose main responsibility is to address the
management of natural resources to attract and fulfil investors’ demands’ (2014, p. 73).
Later, the Decree 1102 of 2017 required mining titles for small producers, prompting two
months of protests in North-Eastern Antioquia, demanding guarantees and titles for
exploitation; these were met with disproportionate lethal violence by the authorities
(Pareja 2017, Bernal-Guzmán 2018).
Most (90%) of the lands in which small-scale mining takes place are already under
a mining concession, with the State systematically favouring big-scale mining interests
(Guiza 2013, Betancur 2019, López 2021). The inability of small-scale producers to
comply with legal requirements and the bureaucratic difficulties to legalise their opera
tions mean that they end up being pushed into illegality (Massé and LeBillon 2018,
Betancur 2019, Castillo and Rubiano 2019, Jonkman 2019).
Illegal mining -that ‘which lacks mining deeds or environmental licenses’ (Valencia
2017)-, operates often in areas of armed conflict. In this context, small-scale illegal
mining ended up being accused of funding ‘terrorism’. Juan Carlos Pinzón, then
Minister of Defence, during the parliamentary debate on legal and administrative
measures against illegal mining, argued that:
(. . .) extortion, narcotics trafficking, and illegal mining are the source of an ever-increasing
amount of funding available to armed groups resorting to terrorism to subdue the civilian
population and to threaten the legitimate authority (Gaceta del Congreso, 16/09/2013, Year
XXII, No 721, p.8. Our emphasis).
According to Pinzón, Plan Colombia’s alleged success against drug-trafficking forced

guerrillas to look for new funding sources. Illegal mining gave these actors distinctive
advantages: normative ‘anarchy’ (sic), blurry lines between legal and illegal activities, and
little State control. Thus, the link between counter-narcotics operations and the new push
to criminalise small-scale mining was made explicit. In recent years, the links between
illegal mining and money laundering have been exploited to pressure for military
responses to ‘criminal mining’ (Asobancaria, 2016; Montero 2017), although small-
scale miners are not the beneficiaries from these transfers. In the aforementioned
parliamentary debate, while the minister pressed for harsh measures against illegal
mining, big-scale mining was praised as a pivot of ‘national development’.
The article 106 of the National Development Plan (2011–2014) of president Santos
and Law 1450 of 2011 established a new regulatory framework for mining activities,
which included harsher sentences for illegal mining. The discussion around mining,
and the mining industry itself, became increasingly militarised since: 70,000 soldiers
are part of 20 mining-energy-infrastructure battalions, two of which are exclusively
devoted to the gold mining regions of Antioquia.4 Militarisation is particularly proble
matic considering the extensive links of the army and police with right-wing para
militarism (Medina 1990, HRW 2001, Hristov 2009, Gutiérrez-Sanín 2019), and of
paramilitarism with big-scale mining-extractive corporations (see Moor and Van de

Sandt 2014, CNMH 2015, Betancur 2019) and highly destructive medium-scale mining
operations in traditional small-scale mining territories (eg., Paulsen and Mosquera-
Vallejo, 2020).
As we have discussed, there is nothing intrinsically illegal about coca or gold, no
quality in them that makes them dangerous per se, or conflict-prone. As highlighted in
other contexts, the definition of what is criminal can be shaped by class interests and
power (Chambliss 1975, Thompson 1975). Therefore, we call the attention to the political
process -which includes processes of State-building and the struggle over the control of
labour and capital- by which both activities have become largely illegalised.
As a caveat, in the same way that we question the generalisation that deems all
criminal activity as at the antipodes of politics, it would be equally wrong to assume
that all criminal activity is political in its intent or results. What we say is that behind all
criminal activity there is a political process that defines its boundaries and modalities.
This process in the Colombian case is indissociable from armed conflict.
6. Conflict, the ‘refractory’ peasant and criminalisation

Colombia has experienced the longest armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere,
lasting, with ebbs and flows, the best part of seven decades. Although the reasons at the
root of the conflict and behind its extraordinary persistence are subject to much debate
(e.g. CHCV 2015), its agrarian roots are beyond doubt. This conflict is linked to the
colonisation of vast rural territories which until well into the 20th century were not
settled. This colonisation was influenced by the opportunities opened up by the gradual
integration of Colombia into foreign markets through the demand for tropical commod
ities such as tobacco, indigo, banana, cotton, rubber, quinine and coffee from the late 19th
century onwards (LeGrand 1986, Rausch 1999, Domínguez 2005, Fajardo 2015, Tovar
2015, Britto 2020). These conditions created a highly mobile peasantry. Political upheaval
and perennial conflict between the two dominant parties in Colombia (Liberal and
Conservative) translated into significant bloodletting and mass displacement that exa
cerbated the movement of people and the expansion of the agrarian frontier, as the
peasantry looked for both economic opportunities and political sanctuary whether
deeper into the jungle or higher into the mountains (Molano 1987, 2017, Garzón 2015,
Britto 2020). This process was further reinforced by the political decision of Colombian
elites to stifle calls for agrarian reform by privileging colonisation processes into this
ever-expanding agrarian frontier (Fajardo 2015).
Behind this mobile peasantry came landlords and entrepreneurs, who, through debt,
judicial mechanisms or naked violence, often claimed property over the lands cleared by
the peasantry, therefore pushing them deeper into the jungle and thus reproducing
a cycle of expansion of the agrarian frontier followed by land accumulation (Molano
1987, 1994, Fajardo 2009) (See Figure 1).
This cycle did not go uncontested: the insurgents have acted as a barrier against the
penetration of land-grabbers and corporations into areas of colonisation (Molano 1994,
Gutiérrez, 2019), while coca and mining provided viable alternatives allowing the repro
duction of the family-scale economy of the smallholding peasantry. The coca economy
has given these smallholders the chance to access education, health and infrastructure in
Figure 1. The model of expansion of the agrarian frontier and land accumulation in Colombia.
the absence of State investment in rural regions. It has also given them the chance to
remain in the land as a viable unit thanks to providing them with a stable market, and
even aspire to some degree of social mobility; the possibilities for households headed by
single mothers are also worth noting (Parada and Marín, 2019; Ciro 2020, Gutiérrez
2021). Illegal gold-mining has provided the peasantry with a precious opportunity to
supplement their income to similar effect (Molano 2001, LeBillon et al. 2020, Paulsen-
Espinoza and Mosquera-Vallejo 2020). Both illegal economies and insurgency underpin
processes of resistance to the aforementioned pattern of land concentration, preventing
the proletarianisation of rural smallholders who become a refractory peasantry, whose
very existence represent a challenge to the status quo (Gutiérrez-Sanín 2019).
6.1. More of Proudhon than Marx: refractory smallholders and the political
economy of criminalisation
This relative buffer against land accumulation goes against the grain of the historical
struggle of the Colombian dominant bloc to control both land and labour (LeGrand
1986). The Colombian conflict cannot be understood from the angle of proletariat versus
bourgeoisie: although the Marxism-Leninism of the Colombian rebels cannot be treated
as a deceptive and irrelevant ideological artifact (see Ferro and Uribe 2002, Gutiérrez-
Sanín 2003, 2019), guerrillas, with the exception of the region of Urabá (García 1996,
Ortiz 2007, Carroll 2011), had scarce, if any, support among the proletariat to which
Marxism-Leninism primarily aimed at. It had, instead, significant support among the
smallholding peasantry in areas of colonisation (Gutiérrez-Sanín 2019), a situation which
was not unique to Colombia (Shanin 1966, Popkin 1979, Skocpol 1982, Kalyvas 2015).
In Cauca Valley, for example, unlike the smallholders of the Andean slopes, the mass
of landless wage earners working for the sugar industry were largely uninfluenced by the
insurgency (Vega and Gutiérrez 2019). Likewise, there is significant evidence that the
bulk of the political support to the guerrillas in coca producing regions came from
smallholders who had some land (often very little, indeed), much more than from the
raspachines, the floating population that comes and goes harvesting the coca leaf (Ferro
2004, Gutiérrez 2021). In the case of gold, judging from our experience in mining regions
(Bolívar and Cauca Valley), the bulk of the support for insurgency came from small-scale
miners and from smallholders that engaged in mining activities as a supplement to their
income (cf. Molano 2001).
The political imagination of the settler peasantry at the bottom of this value-chain,
a view of independent smallholdings articulated by links of collective solidarity, and by
a sense of industry and social justice, resembles quite closely the view of Proudhon,
according to which property (possession) and liberty are indissociable: ‘When property is
widely distributed, society thrives, progresses, grows, and rises quickly to the zenith of its
power (. . .) When property is concentrated, society, abusing itself, polluted, so to speak,
grows corrupt, wears itself out (. . .) plunges into long-continued and fatal luxury’
(Proudhon 2011, p. 141). This Proudhonian take on property, and particularly on the
land question, was articulated in his classic work Qu’est-ce que la propriété? [1840], in
which he argued:
the man who takes possession of a field, and says, “This field is mine,” will not be unjust so
long as everyone else has an equal right of possession; nor will he be unjust, if, wishing to
change his location, he exchanges this field for an equivalent. But if, putting another in his
place, he says to him, “Work for me while I rest,” he then becomes unjust, unassociated,
unequal. He is a proprietor.
Reciprocally, the sluggard, or the rake, who, without performing any social task, enjoys like
others -and often more than others- the products of society, should be proceeded against as
a thief and a parasite (. . .) (Ibid:129-130)
This view was disparaged by Marx as petty-bourgeois, yet, it rings a much stronger bell
with the project devised in the agrarian programme of Marquetalia, the foundational
document of the FARC-EP, than the Communist Manifesto. And it is this view that, to
a degree, has been possible to articulate at the local-level thanks to the smallholders
resorting to illegal economies.
If the illegal economies offer smallholders opportunities for their reproduction,
they offer bigger opportunities for the elites: after all, the part of the value-chain
controlled by the peasantry is the weakest link. Illegal economies are scenarios of
class struggle too -although not, as we’ve said, in the sense of proletariat vs.
bourgeoisie. This struggle between oligarchs and small property owners who, more
often than not, have informal deeds and extra-legal claims to their land, hovers
around the distribution of rents, mechanisms of social mobility and access to
resources and labour.
Criminalisation concentrates the risks associated to the illegal economies’ value-chain
at the bottom and the profits at the top. In this pattern of accumulation, the smallholder -
constantly under threat of displacement- can have a low margin for their reproduction,
while the elites can profit from the more lucrative processing of goods produced by
precarious and criminalised labour. Likewise, given their status and political power, elites
can transfer rents from the illegal to the legal spheres (Ciro 2020).
6.2. A moral crusade: counter-insurgency meets the struggle against illegal

economies
The refractory peasantry has resisted this pattern of accumulation/criminalisation resort
ing throughout history to various mechanisms, ranging from the so-called ‘weapons of
the weak’ and the ‘hidden transcripts’ (cf. Scott 1985, 1990) to open rebellion (Sánchez
1977, Fajardo 1978, 2015, LeGrand 1986, Molano 1994). But their engagement in
criminalised economies could also be regarded as a form of resistance, not explicitly as
in other contexts (Crummey, 1986), but in the sense that, by escaping State regulation
and countering the land-grabbing cycle, it allows them to remain independent producers.
If open rebellion is almost universally treated by Statesmen -even by some scholars
(Collier 2000)- as nothing more than criminality, criminalising economic activities is
not so straightforward, producing significant institutional tensions.
Cocaine production was already criminalised by the time that a proportion of the
peasantry embraced it as a mechanism for their survival as individuals and as class. This,
however, was not the case with traditional and informal mining. Its criminalisation was
a response of the elites to an economic activity that escaped their control and challenged
their vision of development as enshrined in the National Development Plan 2010–2014,
which described big-scale mining as a pivot (locomotora) of national development and
which foresaw giving away significant portions of the territory on mining concession to
big multinational players (Departamento Nacional de Planeación 2010), at the expense of
other actors (i.e. ethnic communities and peasantry) living in those territories (Vélez-
Torres 2014).
In order to justify this push towards the criminalisation of activities that, per se, are not
necessarily criminal, these activities need to be demonised. It is not enough to present
them as outside the regulatory framework of the State, or not paying taxes or royalties -
something most of the legal big mining operations in Colombia seldom, if ever, do
(Garay 2014, Vela-Almeida et al. 2021). They need to be presented as enemies of the
nation by their association to the guerrillas, who had been systematically presented for
over a decade as an existential threat (Centeno et al. 2013).
Presenting smallholders in criminalised economies as natural allies of the insurgency
is credible because their activities take place typically in rural regions where guerrillas
have an actual influence, and often regulate these industries.5 Thus, the fight against
criminalised activities becomes more than an ordinary fight against crime: it becomes
a moral crusade. The argument of combatting the ‘funding sources of terrorism’ through
the criminalisation of small-scale miners, made available the repressive tools developed
over decades of counter-insurgency for this purpose.6
There’s a wealth of conflict research literature that severs the link between illegal
commodities and the historical and social context in which they are produced. Gold or
cocaine are reified as representing in themselves the cause for conflict, which is reduced,
a-la-Collier, to merely a rent-seeking enterprise (e.g., Idrobo et al. 2014, Maldonado and
Rozo 2014, Escobedo and Guío 2015, Ortiz-Riomalo and Rettberg 2018). According to
this perspective, the firm arm of the law should suffice to solve these conflicts. Based on
our evidence, we claim that it is the very nature of the mining and drug legal frameworks
what is at the heart of these territorial dynamics of social, environmental, and armed
conflict. We can affirm, in this case, with Walter Benjamin (1996) that it is not the
absence of the law, but its very existence that creates conflict.
7. The Tillyian lens: criminalisation, resistance and state-building

The characterisation of these regions as ‘red zones’ (i.e., wild, lawless) legitimates the
State’s strategy of ‘total war’, encompassing surveillance, terror, displacement, murder,
bombings, fumigations and even infanticide (Lindsay-Poland 2018, Daniels 2021).
Constitutional guarantees are suspended, and the criminalised peasant becomes subject
of a mixture of conditional, paternalistic, and violent policies (Ciro 2018). Against this
backdrop, there is a copious scholarly literature in Colombia to understand the relation
ship between the State and these ‘red zones.’ Most of the literature describe the State as
being absent from these territories, or being weak (e.g., Pécaut 1989, Pizarro 2004,
McDougall 2009, Duncan 2013, Giraldo 2013, Revelo and García 2018); often, the two
demons, ‘State absence’ and ‘illegal economies’, are regarded as mutually reinforcing: ‘In
stateless areas of Colombia, rebel consolidation tends to take place in areas where the
drug trade is also present’ (McDougall 2009, p. 322). Over the last two decades this claim
has been subject to scrutiny and critical analysis (González et al. 2003, González 2014,
Ciro 2016, Ballvé 2020).
Our proposition to this debate, drawing critically from Tilly (1985, p. 1992), is rather
simple: these regions are not a blank slate where the State is (half or totally) present or
not. These regions are the product of a particular form of State-building which re-creates
a centre/periphery divide through the conflicts, interactions and negotiations of frag
mented elites, as well as by the resistance of a refractory peasantry and regional subaltern
groups to a specific pattern of accumulation.
7.1. Rendering the state visible

Although the activities at the bottom of the value-chain in these illegal economies take
place in regions considered as hinterlands, contrary to the ‘absence of State’ literature,
they are tightly imbricated with international and national markets (where, indeed, most
of the value is produced) and with the legal, executive and legislative apparatuses of the
State (cf. Domínguez 2005). Notwithstanding high levels of informal employment and
unemployment, the State administration and mining-extractive industries, are the most
important economic activities.7 The invisibilisation of the State is, in our opinion, partly
the product of an over-normative notion of the State in Colombia, with functionalist
overtones (cf. Ramírez 2015). Also, the focus on ‘non-State armed actors’ in relation to
these economies has deflected the attention from the role of legal actors, and indeed the
State. Thus, these narratives are limited to advocating a strengthening of the State
presence -without problematising the State as such or the many ways in which the
State actually operates in these territories and contributes to shaping them.
In order to grasp the ways in which State-building takes place in these ‘red zones’, we
need to state the obvious: what is legal and illegal is defined in scenarios where political
and economic powers are accumulated. Criminalisation is, indeed, devised by the State
apparatuses (Hibou 2013). One of these, the national parliament, is a paradigm of the link
between mafias and political power (López and Ávila 2010, Romero 2011). Here, the
sphere of ‘criminality’ is demarcated through policies, laws, assistance programmes,
decrees, etc., impacting on the workings of illegal economies and contributing to their
regulation -how the rents of illegal markets are distributed, how the social costs of these
are shared (including who and how gets punished). In this sense, what is sometimes
depicted as ‘borderland battles’ (Idler 2019) is merely the local expression of battles,
which, indeed, take place in the very ‘belly of the beast’, so to speak.
These designs at the centre of the national stage do not go uncontested. When cocaleros
call coca the ‘resistance crop’, this has two meanings: a commodity that allows the
smallholding peasantry to be reproduced as a class, as aforementioned, but also, an activity
that allows them some autonomy from central government (Ciro 2020, Gutiérrez 2021).
The same can be said about gold mining, as in many regions, small-scale miners have
resisted through a broad repertoire that includes engagement with and contestation of this
legal framework, to open mobilisation (Medina 2013, Jonkman 2019). Guerrillas in mining
regions of Vichada and Guainía were described by Jorge Orlando Melo as ‘puritans’: ‘they
have banned prostitution and dream of housing developments where miners can live with
their wives and children, so they can “save money and get ahead”’ (in Molano 2001, p. 11).
The very existence of these criminalised economies, moreover, gives these smallholding
peasants, traditionally excluded from the political channels of representation and often
ignored as a political subject (Gutiérrez-Sanín, 2015), a leverage to be rendered visible to the
State. For communities engaged in illegal activities, the attention this fact draws from central
authorities gives them the chance to enter into negotiations with them on State-building in
their ‘peripheries’, on social and economic development, on political representation. For
decades, representatives of illegal economies have negotiated -rather unsuccessfully- with
State these questions on behalf of the ‘peripheries’, giving them precarious representation
mechanisms denied in practice by the formal political system (cf., Ramírez 2011).
7.2. The Tillyian process in Colombian perspective

This combination of top-down violence and bottom-up resistance as a State-building
process resonates strongly with the ideas of Charles Tilly, who provocatively referred
to State-building as organised crime and to the State as an organised racket (1985).
He argued that from the late Middle Ages in Western Europe, power holders made
war against one another; to fund the belligerent effort, they had to extract resources
from the populations under their control, and borrow from bourgeois lenders. This
strengthened centralisation and the bureaucratic machinery of modern States, leading
inadvertently to State-making, that is, the elimination of the rivals of the elites in
those territories over which they claim authority (1985; 1992). For Tilly, violence and
coercion lie at the heart of the State-making process. Coercion can be effective, but it
can also lead to contestation and resistance, which in turn triggers its own specific
dynamics into the State-building process. In Tilly’s view, popular resistance to war-
making and State-making translated into concessions from rulers, limiting both
activities and defining a system of entitlements that lays at the base of the modern
democratic State. Other authors too have argued that the emergence of modern
States and modern armies, while mutually reinforcing one another, gave rise to the
notion of citizenship rights (Mann 1987, Giddens 1985, Tarrow 2015).
Though Tilly himself warned us that his model should be applied with great
caution outside of Western Europe (1992), his model has been applied to a wide
range of countries and contexts over the decades with varying degrees of success -or
lack of (Barkey 1994, Reno 1998, Herbst 2000, Heydemann 2000, Centeno 2002,
Leander 2004, Hui 2005, Taylor and Botea 2008, Cheeseman et al. 2018). This
research has highlighted that context and a number of accessory mechanisms were
dependant for the process to lead to the outcome described by Tilly. And although his
model has been subject to persuasive criticism on a number of grounds including in
the Western European cases he analyses (e.g., Kaspersen and Strandsbjerg 2017), it
nonetheless provides valuable insights to understand the relationships between see
mingly antinomic terms: crime and State-building, organised violence and
citizenship.
We argue that the full value of Tilly’s insights got lost by a tendency to treat them as
a model to be rejected or accepted in toto. Instead, we separate what we call the Tillyian
process (the process of war-making, capital accumulation and State-building) from the
Tillyian effect (the emergence of centralised nation-States with a strong bureaucracy and
the emergence of democracy), to understand the link between conflict, criminality and
political power in Colombia.
Here, we identify a Tillyian process without a Tillyian effect; that is, the process of war-
making, State-building and capital accumulation go hand in hand, as already described,
with the ‘organised crime’ metaphor being quite literal given the extensive links of the
elites to mafias. However, the result of this process is not a strong democracy or even
a centralised State as Tilly describes. What we have is a State dominated by fragmented
but powerful regional-national coalitions, which systematically excludes significant sec
tors of the population by a number of mechanisms, including criminalisation -effectively
turning whole categories of inhabitants into non-citizens. The demands of these non-
citizens hover around their aspirations for social recognition, inclusion, infrastructure,
and a vision for an alternative, rights-based, form of State-building (Jaramillo et al. 1986;
Zamosc, 1986, García 1993, Ramírez 2011). In this sense, their ‘State-nostalgia’ (Ballvé
2020) represents an aspiration more than an endorsement of the actually-existing-State
(cf. Ramírez 2015).
Tilly himself gave us a clue to understand this disjunction, in his definition of one of
the State-building activities: protection. Rulers engage in protection by ‘(e)liminating or
neutralizing the enemies of their clients’ (1985:181). Here, we need to go back to the
political process behind criminalisation of illegal economies -who are the clients of the
ruling bloc? who are the enemies of these clients? This requires to delve deeper into the
nature of these regional and national elites, and into their complex and conflictive
relationship with the criminalised subaltern dependant on illegal economies.
Elucidating how criminalisation (in some cases) and strategic tolerance (in others) are
used as protection mechanisms to the interests of the ruling bloc’s clients, is crucial to
understand how the Tillyian process has unfolded in Colombia with effects very different
to those devised by Tilly.
8. Concluding remarks
We have argued that there is an intimate link between the criminalisation of economic
activities, patterns of capital accumulation and the dynamics of political power in
Colombia. This link has been distorted in the literature, by an almost exclusive emphasis
in focusing on ‘non-State armed actors’ in relation to illegal economies; by ignoring the
length of the illegal value-chains by focusing on the lowest links in the ‘peripheries’; and
by a reification of the illegal economies, which obscures the political process behind
criminalisation. The criminalisation of the cocaleros and small-scale miners -indeed, their
conflation with ‘terrorism’- is a process taking place at the heart of power structures,
impacting how the violence and rents of illegal economies are distributed unevenly
throughout the value-chain.
More than ‘new data’ (enough data is already out there), what we need is a new prism
to look at the problem, for the conceptual tools we have at present are sorely ineffectual in
order to give account of complex realities on the ground in conflict contexts such as
Colombia. In this paper, we have set ourselves the task of delineating some basic elements
for that prism. We propose to question the artificial dichotomy of legal/illegal as two
distinct forms of economies or spheres of interaction, a distinction even more arbitrary in
a country where the lines between both are blurry, to say the least, if not mutually
constitutive. We also propose to critically examine centre/periphery distinctions -
recently rekindled in the ‘borderlands’ literature (e.g., Idler 2019, Bhatia et al. 2021)-
by understanding how both integrate through State-building mechanisms.
Illegal economies in Colombia exist as part of broader State-building processes and
capital accumulation patterns, linking the regional to the national, through criminalisa
tion, resistance, claims-making, militarisation, and the many opportunities available to
the elites to legalise illegal rents. The specific modalities through which this happens,
understanding the clientelistic networks of the various fragments and sections of the
ruling bloc, exploring the contents of the various claims articulating to State-building
demands, are among the many issues to advance in future research in this direction
utilising this prism.
Notes
1. In Colombia there are many irregular armed groups, with various organisational structures,
constituencies, differential links to State institutions and wildly diverging political commit
ments. As such, to collapse them all into the category of ‘non-State armed groups’ clusters
together group that have little in common, obscuring both the dynamics of conflict and the
State’s role in it.
2. US Congress, ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools
Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot Act) Act of 2001. Public Law
107–56. 107th Congress. 26 October 2001.
3. Narco-terrorism was used in the 1980s to describe Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel in
their gruesome war against president Barco’s agreement of extradition with the US.
However, the US ambassador Lewis Tamb has already referred to Colombian guerrillas as
narco-guerrillas back in 1984 (Tokatlian 2000).
4. See the presentation of the Department of Defence (circa 2018) http://proyectos.andi.com.
co/Documents/CEE/Colombia%20Genera%202015/Viernes/JoseJavierPerez.pdf
5. Right-wing paramilitaries regulate these activities in certain regions, but does not seem to
bother too much the Colombian establishment, who shows a strategic tolerance in these
cases.
6. For these debates in the Colombian parliament, see Gaceta del Congreso (03/08/2009. Year
XVIII, No 673), Gaceta del Congreso (02/08/2010. Year XIX. No 476), Gaceta del Congreso
(07/07/ 2013. Year XXII. No 471) and Gaceta del Congreso (16/09/ 2013. Year XXII, No
721).
7. See for instance, the central bank economic reports for some of these regions -Informe de
Coyuntura Económica (Banco de la República de Colombia). We checked the reports of
Chocó, Caquetá, Guainía, Guaviare, Putumayo, Vaupés y Vichada for 2013 and 2014.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge Patricia Correa and Maira Triana for their assistance.
Thanks to Michael Mann, Siniša Malešević, Jenny Pearce, Christian Olsson, Ana María López and
Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín for their most invaluable feedback during the ‘Political Power,
Criminality and Conflict’ workshop (10/06/2021) and on subsequent drafts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
José A. Gutiérrez Sociologist, researcher and lecturer. He has worked extensively on the
Colombian conflict on issues related to governance and state-building. He has experience in
Ireland, the EU, Kenya and Indonesia on development research. Currently he works in Teagasc,
the Agriculture and Food Development Authority (Ireland) as post-doctoral research fellow.
Estefanía Ciro Research coordinator on drug trafficking, cocaine economies and war on drugs in
the Truth Commission (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad), Colombia. Researcher at
the Colombian Amazonian Think-Tank AlaOrillaDelRío. UNESCO Juan Bosch Prize Winner
(2018). Political and social sciences PhD at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2016).
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Tillyian Process Without A Tillyian Effect Criminalised Economies and State Building in The Colombian Conflict

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Journal of Political Power

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpow21

Tillyian process without a Tillyian effect:

José A. Gutiérrez & Estefanía Ciro

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031109

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa

Published online: 02 Feb 2022.

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Tillyian process without a Tillyian effect: criminalised

3. Illegal economies and conflict: some preliminary observations

Table 1. Main changes in the regulations on illegal drugs in Colombia (1998–2017).

Table 2. Main changes in the mining regulations in Colombia (2001–2017).

Ahead of Plan Colombia, there had been a significant escalation of military

4. Some background on the cocaine and gold economies

4.2. Gold and illegal mining

5. Demystifying illegal economies: the political process behind their

According to Pinzón, Plan Colombia’s alleged success against drug-trafficking forced

paramilitarism with big-scale mining-extractive corporations (see Moor and Van de

6. Conflict, the ‘refractory’ peasant and criminalisation

6.2. A moral crusade: counter-insurgency meets the struggle against illegal

7. The Tillyian lens: criminalisation, resistance and state-building

7.1. Rendering the state visible

7.2. The Tillyian process in Colombian perspective

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