Ethnic Land Rights as a Faustian bargain? On the Afro-Colombian struggle for alternative livelihoods and its limits

From the 1990s onwards, ethnic minorities in Latin America have been granted collective property rights to protect their natural livelihoods and culture from extractivism and armed conflict. In the Colombian case, this legal innovation was largely the product of Afro-Colombian communities’ activism around cultural identities whose legal outcomes have been celebrated in post-development literature as evidence for subaltern groups regained self-determination and emancipation from unsustainable extractivist development models and violence. While other authors have since pointed to collective land rights’ essentialising tendencies and actual limitations in challenging extractive capitalism, including the Colombian drug economy, less attention has been given to what explains their limited outcomes in securing alternative livelihoods. Drawing on evidence from two Afro-Colombian communities, this paper argues that ethnic land rights tend to disregard the communities’ own material entanglement with extractivist capitalism and that this complicates the search for effective ways of securing ethnic communities’ livelihoods.