Dissident Peace: Autonomous Struggles and the State in Colombia

(Stanford University Press, 2025), By Anthony Dest

Reviewed by Alejandro Jaramillo (PhD Candidate, NYU)

Researchers, both nationally and internationally, view Colombia as a crucial case for theorizing peacebuilding and transitional justice—particularly following the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement. However, aligning with the legacy of hotly disputed “Violentology” from 1990s Colombia, the dominant narrative continues to emphasize that sustainable peace hinges on strengthening the state and its institutions. Despite widespread debates about supporting granular peace initiatives—whether territorial (Rettberg 2019; 90) or community-based (McGinty 2014)—these approaches often reflect a longstanding, perhaps even Hobbesian, skepticism about the self-organizing capacity of marginalized peoples, especially if racialized. This prompts a fundamental question: can peace be sustainable, let alone understood, without the aegis of the state and, by extension, global capital?

Anthony Dest’s Dissident Peace: Autonomous Struggles in Colombia challenges this dominant framing in generative and novel ways. Drawing on over a decade of dedicated engagement with Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities in Northern Cauca, Dest introduces what he calls an “ethnography of struggle.” This framework is specifically attuned to the ethno-racial and sociopolitical complexities of the Colombian context but offers broader applicability. The depicted struggles center on the pursuit of autonomy—an aspiration consistently undermined by historical processes of dispossession and the expansion of the settler-colonial state. Dest synthesizes insights from diverse theoretical traditions—Latin American Decolonial Theory, Marxism, and Critical Race Theory—while maintaining a firm grounding in the Anthropology of the State, engaging throughout the book with scholars like Pierre Clastres, Wendy Brown, Arturo Escobar, John Holloway, and James Scott. This multidimensional approach enriches the analysis of sociopolitical autonomy that defies standalone theoretical frameworks.

Each of the four chapters serves as a case study examining sites of state intervention in Colombia’s post-peace accord era, specifically addressing the legacies of armed insurgency, coca cultivation, agrarian reform, and popular revolt—all enacted under the guise of peacekeeping, reestablishing order, and shoring up development. In each case, Dest emphasizes grassroots resistance to state-sanctioned frameworks, illuminating the inventive ways communities and groups pursue self-determination through practices of mutual aid, non-cooperation, and refusal of neoliberal multiculturalism. These acts of resistance compound what Dest calls a “dissident peace,” a set of practices that challenge colonial legacies of pacification and racialized social stratification.

Dest’s methodological approach is rooted in participant observation and in-depth interviews, emphasizing active engagement in the present tense. This strategy sidesteps the coloniality often found in traditional archives, fostering direct, in-person political participation. The first chapter, ‘Alfonso Cano’s Grave: Vanguardism and the FARC-EP in Northern Cauca,’ explores the process by which the FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army) held a monopoly on resistance against the state for decades. It details how the guerrilla established a hierarchical structure led by its intelligentsia, who, Dest argues, sought to take over the state but ended up resembling the oppressive oligarchy they aimed to overthrow. Their vanguardist ideology—whereby military strategists lead the masses—elevated armed insurgency as the only legitimate struggle, framing violence as justified by revolutionary ends—a stance with devastating consequences. For one, indigenous disarmed movements, such as the Nasa We’sx’s “Movement for the Liberation of Mother Earth” in Cauca, opposed the FARC’s leadership, rejecting it as a form of watered-down, “authorized autonomy” (Dest 2025, 158).

The second chapter, ‘The Coca Enclosure: Drug-Trafficking and the Settler Colonization of Struggle,’ reveals how the illegal cash crop’s cultivation paradoxically expands both capitalist and settler-colonial relations in Northern Cauca. This process unfolds not only through the monetization of land and labor but also via statist politics of multicultural recognition. Dest challenges conventional political economy analyses by examining how mestizo (mixed-race) coca farmers, or colonos, undermine Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities’ efforts to attain autonomy. Thanks to Coca’s high profitability—obliquely fueled by Washington’s hemispheric War on Drugs—flush newcomer colonos exploit the weaknesses of community-based bargaining and struggle, using racial tensions to their favor, wherein lands once held collectively are enclosed as private property, reinforcing a process of internal colonization that ultimately benefits the state’s tributary system and ownership regimes. This is a bold and innovative argument within Colombian agrarian studies.

Dest’s novel contribution here is further solidified in the third chapter, ‘Making Peasants Count: Creole Whiteness and the Politics of Recognition.’ In it, the author exposes how mestizo peasants, or campesinos (of the same breed as colonos), leverage the state’s multicultural governance of difference to further their influence in agrarian reform—often at the expense of ethno-racial minorities. As the primary beneficiaries of the 2016 Peace Accords—and, as Dest argues, driven by what Wendy Brown describes as the “ressentiment” at the heart of neoliberal identity politics (2025, 99)—the figure of the campesino allows individuals claiming this identity to exploit the dominant mestizo racial ideology embedded in the Colombian state, to demand greater material equality. Therefore, by siding with the Accords’ emphasis on land productivity and economic development over political self-determination, campesino identity politics undercut Afro-Colombian and Indigenous efforts in the broader Cauca region toward sovereignty. It’s worth recalling that, as the architect of the 2016 Peace Accords, former President Santos explicitly stated that neither the country’s economic model nor its political organization was subject to negotiation, revealing how deeply entrenched the triangulated complicity between state, liberal peace, and global capital remains.

It is noteworthy that this study situates itself in the minutiae of struggles for autonomy most clearly in the fourth chapter. In ‘¡Tod@s Somos Primera Línea?: Preliminary Notes on the 2021 Uprising in Cali,’ Dest shifts focus to the significant popular revolts against former President Iván Duque’s proposed tributary reform. This chapter offers perhaps the most vivid account in the book of how the struggle for autonomy materializes as a daily, lived practice. Descriptions of communal kitchens, impromptu medical aid, celebratory joy, shared responsibilities, and Indigenous collective labor known as Mingas illustrate how these acts expose fundamental cracks in the state’s governance through force. Most compellingly, Dest shows that, contrary to expectations, marginalized classes such as the lumpenproletariat or so-called ñeros do not require direction from traditional leadership—they find agency in these collective expressions of resistance, revealing the inherently disruptive potential of grassroots protest.

A Dissident Peace is at its strongest when addressing how the 2016 Peace Accords codify the “coloniality of power” and racial capitalism within the framework of liberal peace, which seemingly progressive policies perpetuate in a dubbed ‘post-conflict’ moment. However, the author’s evidence falters—as seen in the conclusion, ‘The Doing of Dissidence’—when addressing how disobedience and refusal can contribute to long-term, effective resistance to the state’s continuing encroachment and expansion of capitalist relations. Perhaps, to this point, even the more lasting effects of self-determination practices escape academic scrutiny, or their cumulative impact remains indiscernible. Yet, this implicit stance ends up reinforcing the author’s self-effacing tendencies, frustrating his capacity to be prescriptive in a field he is helping reshape.

In sum, this book is a valuable addition to the classroom, especially for topics related to Political and Legal Anthropology, Contemporary Political Theory, and Latin American Studies. Unlike much of the literature on peace in Colombia, which often employs dense language and complex terminology, Dest’s engaging and clear prose is targeted for a broader reach. Much in line with the author’s understated personal politics, his writing style reflects an awareness of his interlocutors’ reception, and a translation into Spanish is already underway to circulate among them. Moreover, the book encourages deep reflection on complex subjects by blending thoughtful erudition with approachable narration, appealing to readers from undergraduate courses to those engaged in regional, specialized research.

References

MacGinty, Roger. 2014. “Everyday Peace: Bottom-Up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies.” Security Dialogue 45 (6): 548-564.

Rettberg, Angelika. 2019. “Peace-Making Amidst an Unfinished Social Contract: The Case of Colombia.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 14 (1): 84–100. doi:10.1080/17502977.2019.1619655.