First published in Spanish in 2001, María Clemencia Ramírez’s revised and updated book evocatively traces the trajectory of one of twentieth-century Colombia’s largest but most overlooked social movements: the efforts of southern Colombian peasant coca cultivators (cocaleros) to gain recognition from a central state that had long dismissed their region as a site of transiency and disorder. In other words, the book is a “study of marginalization” (p. 17) and its contestation through collective action centered on demands for citizenship. It is also among the first English-language monographs to address the regional consequences of the US war on drugs and its counterinsurgent variants in Colombia.Between the Guerrillas and the State focuses on the California-sized Colombian Amazon, particularly the New Hampshire – sized department of Putumayo. Over the last century, waves of agricultural migrants have been drawn to this internal frontier zone by “an evolving cycle of commodity booms,” of which coca is only the most recent (p. 23). Ramírez establishes how such migration, along with geographic imaginings of Putumayo as a wild place, has led national elites and more established locals to define migrants in exclusively negative terms. Throughout the book, Ramírez captures well “the feeling of abandonment” (p. 9), both symbolic and material, that lies at the heart of Putumayans’ interactions with the outside.In the mid-1990s, the process of identity formation took on new dimensions as Colombia — and Putumayo specifically — produced a growing share of world coca output. Compelled by the United States to take action against the drug trade, the Colombian government commenced aerial spraying of coca and adopted harsh measures against cocaine processing. Linked to cocaleros in other departments through international forums, empowered by the inclusionary 1991 Constitution, and able to draw on decades of their own experience mobilizing for social services, Putumayo’s cocaleros responded with a series of massive civic protests to demand equitable treatment. Through agreements in 1995 and 1996, the cocaleros received from the state not only promises of development assistance but also recognition as Putumayan and Colombian citizens.By the end of the decade, however, the cocalero movement found itself unable to transform into a political movement that could see through these gains. Paramilitaries arrived in the region to counter the FARC guerrillas’ growing strength. The high levels of violence that ensued allowed state officials to once more portray Putumayo as an inherently dangerous area. Paramilitary terror and a stressed FARC also drove political activity underground, a shift intensified by the escalation of government and US pressure for the immediate eradication of coca. Struggles over citizenship became increasingly circumscribed.Ramírez’s ethnographic work in the Amazon region, courageously conducted during the FARC-paramilitary war of the late 1990s, infuses this book with its most compelling material. Ramírez additionally offers two noteworthy insights into “local state formation” that can be generalized beyond Putumayo. First, she shows how the decentralization reforms of the 1980s opened mayoral positions to local leaders, who retained their sense of alienation from the central state. This dynamic leads Ramírez to conceive of state and civil society as existing on a continuum rather than in separate spheres. Second, Ramírez presents a provocative reconsideration of the relationship between the guerrillas and the state. Chapter 6 demonstrates how the FARC did not seek to “replac[e] the broader role of the state” but rather made selective use of state institutions as a means “to govern and control the population” (p. 172). Here are indispensable clues into the durability of the FARC.Yet despite her generally sensitive reading of discourses on deviancy, Ramírez’s portrayal of Colombian history unintentionally replicates tropes about the permanence of the country’s violence. For instance, she naturalizes the FARC’s influence, concluding that “a state of generalized violence has existed ever since” the group’s establishment in the mid-1960s (p. 42). By contrast, several of her informants observe that violence came only with coca in the early 1980s. Furthermore, rather than exemplifying the guerrillas’ “very real local authority,” as Ramírez indicates (p. 45), FARC restrictions on drug traffickers in the late 1980s can alternatively be seen as a fundamentally constitutive moment in the FARC’s evolution.Ramírez’s coverage of larger settings is also at times incomplete. The scale of the FARC’s war in Putumayo circa 1996 and the national background behind the paramilitaries’ arrival in the department deserve more systematic attention. In addition, pertinent comparisons between Putumayo and coca cultivation in Bolivia and Peru are largely relegated to the endnotes.Between the Guerrillas and the State is nonetheless a rich and much-needed addition to our understanding of contemporary Colombia. The seemingly regional story of Putumayo possesses important transnational components and suggests how internal conflicts and US foreign policy can shape social movements and citizenship in Latin America.