Turf Wars

People of African descent living in the Colombian Andes had long been struggling, as peasants and workers, for political participation and equal citizenship. When the 1991 Colombian Constitution enabled them to claim territory as ethnic groups, their demands became part of a growing worldwide phenomenon of citizenship claims that are based on territory and expressed through cultural distinction.

Turf Wars looks at two such claims pursued by Afro-Colombians in the 1990s and investigates how territory serves to connect and disconnect citizen and state in the context of today's changing state authority, legitimacy, and institutions. Drawing from a detailed and rich ethnographic study of everyday Afro-Colombian life, the author underscores the centrality of territory to modern states and the consequences of legal categorizations of race and ethnicity. Though focused on Afro-Colombian struggles for political space in their country, Turf Wars also illustrates how these struggles are part of events and entities operating on a much broader global front.