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On September 18th 2025, Critical Pathways is thrilled to host Dr. Jesse Jonkman presenting his book "Underground Politics: Gold Mining and State-Making in Colombia."

Jesse Jonkman is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor of International Development Studies at Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��. His research interests lie at the intersection of resource extraction, ecology, infrastructure, and governance. In this event chaired by Prof. dr. Kei Otsuki (International Development Studies), Dr. Jesse Jonkman will be in conversation with Dr. Diana Vela Almeida (Assistant Professor on Political Ecology of Sustainability at UU), (Globalisation Studies and Humanitarian Action at Groningen ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��) and  (Solidaridad).

About the Book

In the Chocó rainforests of Colombia, local and settler miners turn to gold as a means to get by and get ahead on the margins of capitalism. They eke out livelihoods while worrying about the declining richness of subsoils, their heightened persecution by state troops, the stigmatizing language of politicians, and the extortion of paramilitaries and guerrillas. follows the everyday sociopolitical life of this supposedly lawless gold frontier, revealing how gold-mining communities in Chocó navigate state power in a context of criminalization and political neglect.

Drawing on ethnographic encounters and conversations in mining regions, Jesse Jonkman traces how miners and their surrounding communities reappropriate the state’s legal and bureaucratic tools for their own ends. Far from being outside of state governance, or only on the receiving end of it, mining stakeholders involve legal categories and representatives of the state in their daily organizational practices, rendering mundane and lawful a livelihood that official discourses deem destructive and illegal. In so doing, they bring about another kind of state presence in their gold frontier, through what Jonkman calls “underground politics”—the process by which those ostensibly working outside of state structures are nonetheless active participants in bottom-up state-making.

In Chocó, gold gives rise to social and ecological violence. Yet, Jonkman shows, it also ties into cultural ideals of autonomy, stories of identity and prosperity, and local political formations that simultaneously erode and confirm the authority of the state. Underground Politics unearths contentious forms of extractive organization that, while contradicting the formal regulatory framework, are nevertheless constitutive of state power.