At the margins of the global market : making commodities, workers, and crisis in rural Colombia

"Drugs, violence, mafias, death squads, guerrilla armies, authoritarianism, corruption, crisis, death. These are the images conjured up when I tell people about my research on labor regime dynamics in rural Colombia. Sensationalized in popular films and mass media, Colombian society is often likened to its most valued export, cocaine, its politics a dysfunctional banana republic, and its population poor and powerless victims. To many consumers of these media images, people living predominantly in core centers of global capitalism, these depictions of Colombian everyday life might appear chaotic and surreal in comparison to the routinized, orderly, and lawful realities of their own social and economic livelihoods."