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Land grabbing has often been analytically related to the weakness of the state in countries of the global South. Yet it is impossible to fully understand this phenomenon without taking into consideration land policies, the paradigms of agrarian development and state-produced visions of the territory. We must acknowledge that the land market is structured by the relations between economic actors – both legal and illegal – and the state. This article seeks to assess, in the case of violent land grabbing in Colombia, the role of the state both as an administrative apparatus and as the place were political power is produced. We will argue that, in spite of the central role played by the state in stripping people from their land, state institutions remain a space of denunciation and mobilization; this conclusion illustrates the power of the state as a reference and its positioning as the central field of the political game.

This paper analyzes the relationship between the Peruvian state and indigenous peasant communities through a long history of recognition, protectionism and dispossession. It focuses on the changes produced by the neoliberal reforms of the nineties and the subsequent economic liberalization of the communal land market that resulted on private investments. By studying different cases of peasant communities from ‘Bosque Seco’ in the Peruvian north coast, we show how the convergence of state action, private enterprises and the response of communal governments not only has transformed the social space by changing property and control regulations, but also how the space has been reshaped as an inhabited place, product of an historical process that gives sense and legitimates the communal institution.

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