Frontier Road: Power, History, and the Everyday State in the Colombian Amazon

Frontier Road is a powerful narrative that uses the history of one road in southern Colombia to demonstrate how state–building processes and practices have depended on the production and maintenance of frontiers as inclusive–exclusive zones, often through violent means. The road known locally as the trampoline of death has connected the Andean and Amazon regions since the mid–nineteenth century and traverses a variety of settlements, landscapes, and ecosystems. In this study, the author uses a unique combination of disciplines, including ethnography of the state, the dynamics of frontiers, and the nature of postcolonial power, to better understand this complex geography. He incorporates a wide range of engaging archival materials to tell this story and draw attention to the political, environmental, and racial dynamics involved over time. In particular, he examines the violence that has sustained the state in time and through space, as well as the ways in which ordinary people have made sense of and contested that violence in everyday life. With important insights into state–society relations, this is a compelling study that highlights the pervasive role of roads in the discursive and material production of frontier spaces. 

Simón Uribe is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of History at the Colombian National University in Bogotá. He earned his PhD from the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics, UK. His research focuses on the anthropology of the state, the politics of infrastructure, and the history of frontiers, and has been published in a number of scholarly journals and books in both Spanish and English.