How are the limits of state power imagined and acted upon in a place where the state supposedly does not exist? This dissertation explores the kinds of political formations that emerge at the real-and-imagined limits, or frontiers, of the state in a region of northwest Colombia called Urabá. For the last 50 years, Urabá has been one of the most violent hotspots of the country’s civil war. Both locals and outside observers almost unanimously explain the region’s violent history and its unruly contemporary condition by pointing to “la ausencia del estado,” the absence of the state. But, as an even cursory review of its history shows, Urabá has in fact been a persistent site of state-building projects, raising a second question: How did this region become understood as stateless in the first place?

In short, this dissertation is about how “statelessness” became and remains a powerful ideological and material force in Urabá, beginning in the early 1900s and into the contemporary moment. It follows the accumulated weight of violent contradictions arising from recursive waves of statecraft in Urabá: from the United Fruit Company, to insurgent guerrilla groups; from paramilitaries, to technocratic planners. My aim, in other words, is to understand “the absence of the state” historically and ethnographically, not to debunk it as a bizarre case of collective false consciousness. Indeed, rather than analyzing the region as a case of state absence or failure, I argue that Urabá’s violent political-economic conflicts have produced surprisingly resilient, though by no means benevolent, regimes of accumulation and rule.