Journal of Law and Political Economy

Focusing on the case of the municipality of Marmato, Caldas, within the Colombian mining regime, this article argues that a global economy based on intensive resource-accumulation activities reshapes the state apparatus in normative and institutional terms. This article discusses how the Colombian mining regime has been articulated within a transnational lawmaking process and is legitimized by a classic development discourse that reproduces the continuity of particular (neo)colonial forms of exploitation. It shows how certain forms of capital accumulation and exploitation in (neo)colonial contexts, like those developed in large-scale gold-mining projects, persist under constitutional democracies due to the reprimarization of the economic processes. The extractive dynamics of the twenty-first century not only demonstrate that the constitutional state is permanently re-inscribed in a (neo)colonial rationality, but also show how the (post)colonial period is reconfigured through a sort of constitutionalization of the (post)colony.