In Black and Green, political scientist and international development specialist Kiran Asher details the complex positions taken by Afro-Colombian movements in support of collective land, local resource management and cultural rights in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia, in the period leading up to and the decade after the democratic Constitution of 1991. This is a study of black social movements and their interactions with the state and NGOs, largely from the perspective of the leaders of movement organisations, with an emphasis on the workings of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Process of the Black Communities, PCN), the successor to the Organización de Comunidades Negras (Organization of Black Communities, OCN), as the group most dedicated to black rights, including territorial control over the Pacific region.

Black and Green provokes nostalgia for a fleeting moment, almost two decades ago, when the 1991 Constitution and the 1993 Law of Black Communities (Law 70) created and reflected the promise of democratic change and rights for rural black communities in the Pacific littoral area of Colombia, where 90 per cent of the population is of African descent (p. 34). By the mid-1990s, the spread of violence by the military, paramilitaries, guerrillas and anti-drug agents had turned a moment of promise to a grim reality of displacement, violence and limited possibilities. Asher had both the good fortune and bad luck to conduct research in the early 1990s, when development plans and black communities' collective rights to land were seen as coexistent and compatible. This was good fortune because she saw the negotiations and dynamics of black movement alliances and discourses, obtaining insight into the dialectics of social movement interactions, with different goals, constituencies and strategies; it was bad luck because change for the worse occurred so rapidly, and Asher was left with the problem of framing a book about hope at a time when that hope requires a largely past-tense perspective. There are some important lessons learned by the social movement activists that Asher chooses to make the focus of the final pages of the book. It took violence and displacement to bring competing factions together, and the role of international attention has come to be crucial to Afro-Colombian struggles for equality.

After a short literature review on development and social movements, Asher reports on the importance of the Pacific littoral for development plans in Colombia. In the late twentieth century, the region became a ‘target of development intervention’ (p. 58) aimed at exploiting logging and biodiversity potential. However, because of the 1991 constitutional provision that recognised the collective property rights of black communities – as implemented by Law 70, which recognised black communities as an ethnic group and provided mechanisms for collective land titles, protecting cultural identity and natural resources – the government faced tensions between its development agenda and those constitutional promises made to Pacific black communities. This tension was exacerbated by disagreements among the three factions of the black movement, which each insisted on a distinct emphasis: traditional politics, grassroots organising, or more radical black struggle to go beyond Law 70.

Chap. 2 addresses the state's attempts to focus Law 70 more on economic and political issues than on ethnic rights. This chapter examines the state's economic logic and its vision for the Pacific by a taking critical look at state projects and programmes. Through a description of meetings and organisations, Asher attends to issues of economic development, ecological sustainability and ethnic rights, which she argues all strengthen the state's power. Although ‘the state’ is an important character in the book and in Asher's analysis, it is taken as a given, a whole, rather than a complex of relations among offices and government officials with a variety of commitments. In chap. 3, Asher focuses on one black movement organisation, the PCN, and its anti-institutional perspective. The chapter examines PCN efforts to develop an ethno-cultural model for economic development and the challenges presented by complex norms (p. 103) of land and resource use at the local level (p. 122). The key point of this chapter is that the ‘heterogeneity of black identities and interests cannot be understood through such binaries as “equality versus difference”’ (p. 103). Asher correctly cautions against ‘romanticizing resistance’ and ‘reducing social struggles to structural effects’ (p. 103).

Chap. 4 traces how ‘black women's subjectivity and agency are shaped differentially, unequally and discursively by and against the political and cultural struggles’ (p. 131). Asher accomplishes this by conducting interviews and attending meetings with members of development cooperatives and black women's organisations. She considers the dynamics of these groups and the disagreements over whether women should organise independently around women's issues or participate in the larger black movement organisations. In this chapter, Asher demonstrates tensions and ideological differences that exemplify women's concerns and organisations. In the final chapter, we catch a glimpse of the sad changes that took hold in the mid-1990s in the Pacific region – displacement, violence, agro-industrial projects replacing plans for sustainable development programmes involving local communities, and the horrendous effects of the US-funded anti-drug trafficking initiative Plan Colombia. The facts are grim; in 1995 there were only a smattering of coca fields, but over the following decade the number increased to 20,000 hectares (p. 165). Afro-Colombians displaced by coca eradication were not considered ‘internally displaced persons’ under the law and therefore ‘were not eligible for protection’ (p. 173). This is one indication of continued prejudice against blacks.

In the midst of this gloom, Asher finds some positive developments in the mid-2000s. A poignant irony is that as matters worsened for black Colombians in their own country, their movements were making international connections, and the terms ‘Afro-Latino’ and ‘Afro-descendant’ were gaining wide currency throughout the hemisphere (p. 155, p. 182). As a result of the hard times, black movement activists began to recognise the importance of coalitions and that the needs of urban black communities were crucial to their cause. Asher reports that although collective land titles continued to be granted, they were increasing ‘in name only’, and massive displacements continued throughout the Uribe presidency (2002–10) (p. 187). There was an increase in black representatives in government ministries, although there is some evidence that this was done to appease the US Congressional Black Caucus (p. 184). In this sense, the book ends on a sad but relatively hopeful note. In the last few pages, we learn that black movement activists are searching for alternatives in an effort to ‘put a brake on negative forces of capitalist globalization and state power’ (p. 189). Asher sees the lesson to be drawn from her study as being that ‘alternatives emerge from the relations between struggles and development’ (p. 189).

Black and Green will work best for an audience with a background in Colombian history and politics; the more general reader will be left with questions about the history of guerrilla forces and La Violencia. For this reason, for someone without that specialist knowledge, the text will feel a bit ungrounded and free-floating. At times, it is difficult to feel one has a stake in the series of descriptions of meetings and organisational statements. It is clear, however, that the slightly disjointed and partial nature of the book is a reflection of the decade in which the author was conducting her research. This book is ideal for those conducting graduate-level research on Colombia and black movement issues in Latin America.