Turf Wars Territory and Citizenship in the Contemporary State [Hardcover]

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 Warslooks 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 Warsalso illustrates how these struggles are part of events and entities operating on a much broader global front.

Ng'weno's research focuses specifically on the claims to territory being made by two distinct Afro communities located in the south-western part of Colombia in the Cauca Valley .... It opens up new ways to understand better the problematic relations among the state, citizens and territory .... Ng'weno's work is therefore highly recommended. Bettina Ng'weno's keen appreciation of how minority citizens must balance race- and ethnicity-based identity claims makes a significant contribution to a literature that has been forced to make an either-or choice between race and ethnicity. At stake in this negotiation is Afrocolombian title to territory, itself crosscut by indigenous-Afrocolombian rivalries, elite mining contracts, a national bureaucracy that controls the transfer of disputed lands, and the presence of armed actorsboth leftist guerrillas and rightist paramilitarywho covet these territories asl,