Anthony Dest

Faculty Fellow

Anthony Dest is Assistant Professor and Gussenhoven Fellow in Geography and Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work is based on long-standing collaborations with Black and Indigenous social movements in Colombia. He is on the executive council of the International Peace Research Association, and his writings have been featured at NACLA (North American Congress in Latin America) and in Spanish at Pueblos en Camino.

Collected Work

Dissident Peace: Autonomous Struggles and the State in Colombia

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In 2016, the peace accords between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC–EP) and the Colombian government promised to bring an end to over fifty years of armed conflict. Yet, despite widespread international acclaim and heavy investments in the peace process, war continued. Dissident Peace provides a rigorous reassessment of the terms of peacebuilding through an ethnography of ongoing struggles for autonomy, based on over fifteen years of research and activism in Colombia.

Participating Years

2023–2024

The State. Abolitionist? Fascist? Communist? Bourgeois?

In imagining and forging the future, there is much talk of the state, but often with little detail.  What should public goods consist of, and how might they be organized? Can the need for coercion (e.g., to pay taxes for public goods) be realized without the carceral and its underlying apparatuses of organized violence? What forms of sovereignty and its delegation (above or below) are possible and desirable?