Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (review)

This book incorporates many years of research on social movements and development. The topics addressed are many and diverse and contain thorough discussions and debates. Perhaps it would be useful to start with the question Escobar asks in this book's introduction: "Colombia shows that despite what could be seen as excellent conditions for achieving a peaceful society and democracy, the opposite has happened. Why?" (p. 20). Escobar explicates a series of responses that could be debated by political analysts, but his main concern is to address the failure of development models through a critical view of modernity. Through this approach, Escobar makes important theoretical and methodological advances in a field of knowledge where he has been a pioneer. In his view, the case of the Colombian Pacific region exemplifies how the project of modernity, which subjected the region to the cultural demands of "imperial globality," resulted in considerable population displacement. A second question then emerges: how does a group of Colombian Pacific activists confront, resist, adapt, and defend its territory against the forces of capitalism and globalization? Through an excellent ethnography, Escobar, who has been following the political processes of the activists of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN) over many years, concludes that the cultural potential of the knowledge produced by social movements, and the local histories reclaimed by this and other groups while struggling for the defense of their territory, have implied the "creation of a novel sense of belonging linked to the political construction of a collective life project" (p. 68). In a very sensitive and beautiful way, Escobar introduces the reader into the life of the territory that the activists are both recovering and imagining in order to construct a different relation with global culture. Unlike much of the existing scholarship on globalization, which is diligently contextualized here in both historical and theoretical terms, Escobar's book emphasizes the importance of place. By giving to the notion of place an important position in the construction of the political project of the activists, it becomes clear that its role in the creation of nature, culture, and economy is also a central part of the author's theoretical intentions. Taking a perspective in which ethnographic descriptions complement rich and sometimes dense theoretical discussions, the author presents six key concepts for understanding how local and regional expressions of difference exist in a context of globalization. These key concepts—place, capital, nature, development, identity and networks—form the chapters of the book and allow the author to explore and expand on various fields of study, including political ecology, political economy and phenomenology.

The rich theoretical information of the book notwithstanding, the work is indispensable reading for students and academics, in part because the voice of the activists is always present. In a critical vein, one could perhaps question the extent to which even a group of admirable and brilliant activists can represent a very diverse territory like the Colombian Pacific and whether Escobar's perspective might be a little utopian. Nonetheless, the book is a very important contribution that reflects the author's personal commitment to the Colombian Pacific and his invaluable engagement with the social movements of the region. It is this relationship between academic theory and activists in the Pacific that gives this book its "collective dimension," which Escobar describes as a collaborative effort that goes beyond the validation of theories and contributes to the goals of particular social and political movements (p. 306). In large part that collective dimension has contributed to inform an exceptional book.