Responding to pressure from the United States, in 1996 the Colombian government intensified aerial fumigation of coca plantations in the western Amazon region. This crackdown on illicit drug cultivation sparked an uprising among the region's "cocaleros," or small-scale coca producers and harvest workers. In the summer of 1996, more than 200,000 campesinos joined marches to protest the heightened threat to their livelihoods. "Between the Guerillas and the State" is an ethnographic analysis of the cocalero social movement that emerged from the uprising. Maria Clemencia Ramirez focuses on how the movement unfolded in the department (state) of Putumayo, which has long been subject to the de facto rule of guerrilla and paramilitary armies. The national government portrays the area as uncivilized and disorderly and refuses to see the coca-growers as anything but criminals. Ramirez chronicles how the cocaleros demanded that the state recognize campesinos as citizens, provide basic services, and help them to transition from coca-growing to legal and sustainable livelihoods. Drawing on interviews with cocaleros, social movement leaders, guerillas, and local, regional, and national government officials, she suggests that collective identities in Colombia's Amazon region are shaped by a sense of having been abandoned by the state. Ramirez argues that the notion of citizenship mediates the dilemmas of a movement striving for inclusion in a state that excludes its members socially and politically.

The majorconflicts between the Global North and the South can be expected toresult from the confrontation of alternative conceptions of democracy,mainly between liberal or representative democracy and participatorydemocracy. The hegemonic model of democracy, while prevailing on aglobal scale, guarantees no more than low-intensity democracy. Inrecent times, participatory democracy has exhibited a new dynamic,engaging mainly subaltern communities and social groups that fightagainst social exclusion and the suppression of citizenship. In thiscollection of reports from the Global South-India, South Africa,Mozambique, Colombia, and Brazil-De Sousa Santos and his colleaguesshow how, in some cases, the deepening of democracy results from thedevelopment of dual forms of participatory and representativedemocracy, and points to the emergence of transnational networks ofparticipatory democracy initiatives. Such networks pave one of the waysto the reinvention of social emancipation. This is volume 1 of the Reinventing Social Emancipation project, edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos.