Making a living in uncertain citizenship

This research paper shows how peasants’ themselves craft possibilities of living through their engagement in the cocaine global value chain. Adopting a politics of production perspective with the addition of a citizenship focus, this research provides a relational understanding of capitalist development, state power and labour agency. It does this by analysing the strategic calculations of cocalero peasants in Bellavista (Colombia) within two different political and economic conjunctures (1991-2002 and 2002-2012) that jeopardised, to different extents, peasants’ citizenship. In one period they fought for and found improved well-being (albeit temporary) whereas, in the other, uncertainty, risk and bare life dominated more profoundly. Overall, using a unique and composite analytic, the paper shows that cocalero peasants’ chances of making a living depend on very fragile conjunctures and their own strategic choices. This augmented politics of production focus appears useful if applied to other perspectives and situations of labour precarity.