New Frontiers of Land Control (Critical Agrarian Studies) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135714475
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-09-12T22:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

This contribution intends to participate in the debate in this volume, showing the importance land control and property rights have for the Colombian case. For a great variety of actors – paramilitary groups and their allies, but also policymakers and peasant movements – the articulation between armed violence and property rights enforcement institutions is pivotal. The importance of a legal recognition over property claims partly shapes the logics of violence. The political agenda, where issues of agribusiness and its ‘contribution’ to economic development are central, gives form to a certain political opportunity structure favorable to land spoiling and to the conversion of these spurious capitals into legal ones. The interaction of all these mechanisms contributes to the consolidation of a highly inequitable agrarian economy.

Yet, concluding that the deepening of inequality and the strengthening of predatory forms of capital accumulation automatically lead to a weakening of the state is a theoretical nonsense. Such analysis ignore the central place taken by violence and spoiling in the formation of the state. It ignores a historical fact pointed out by Charles Tilly (1985, 170) when he developed the idea of ‘the interdependence of war making and state making and the analogy between both of those processes and what, when less successfully and in smaller scale, we call organized crime’.

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