Winifred Tate
I am a political anthropologist examining struggles for democracy, citizenship and political change in the wake of the more than a century of prohibitionist drug policy regimes.
I am currently the director of the Maine Drug Policy Lab at Colby College, which brings together policymakers, scholars and students, providing evidence-based analysis for addressing critical drug policy issues in our state and beyond, and conducts research on problematic drug use and access to treatment in Maine. Our research in Maine focuses on how drug use, addiction and recovery is imagined and experienced by community members, law enforcement and health care providers. My current project, "Women, Drug Use and Recovery in Maine," employs qualitative methods to center the experience of women, which has been largely neglected in both scholarship and policy debates.
My research in Latin America is focused on Colombian communities and entrenched paramilitary violence, human rights abuses and illicit economies. My scholarly commitments originate with my experiences as an activist and advocate focused on Colombia; I worked for three years as the Colombia policy expert at the Washington Office on Latin America before completing my doctorate at New York University. I am the author of two books, the award-winning Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia (University of California Press 2007) andDrugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: U.S. Policymaking in Colombia (Stanford University Press, 2015), which was published in Spanish as Drogas, Bandidos y Diplomáticos (University of Rosario Press, 2015). My current book project, Paramilitary Politics, draws on research I have been conducting over the past decade on paramilitarism, globalization and community resistance, examining the forms, legacies, and deep histories of Colombian violence. I am particularly concerned with how this violence shapes the daily lives, practices and possibilities of residents in rural communities, the production of history about this violence, and its legacies in contemporary Colombian politics. I share photos and stories from my fieldwork in an ongoing instagram ethnography project, Imagining War & Peace in Colombia.
I am currently the director of the Maine Drug Policy Lab at Colby College, which brings together policymakers, scholars and students, providing evidence-based analysis for addressing critical drug policy issues in our state and beyond, and conducts research on problematic drug use and access to treatment in Maine. Our research in Maine focuses on how drug use, addiction and recovery is imagined and experienced by community members, law enforcement and health care providers. My current project, "Women, Drug Use and Recovery in Maine," employs qualitative methods to center the experience of women, which has been largely neglected in both scholarship and policy debates.
My research in Latin America is focused on Colombian communities and entrenched paramilitary violence, human rights abuses and illicit economies. My scholarly commitments originate with my experiences as an activist and advocate focused on Colombia; I worked for three years as the Colombia policy expert at the Washington Office on Latin America before completing my doctorate at New York University. I am the author of two books, the award-winning Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia (University of California Press 2007) andDrugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: U.S. Policymaking in Colombia (Stanford University Press, 2015), which was published in Spanish as Drogas, Bandidos y Diplomáticos (University of Rosario Press, 2015). My current book project, Paramilitary Politics, draws on research I have been conducting over the past decade on paramilitarism, globalization and community resistance, examining the forms, legacies, and deep histories of Colombian violence. I am particularly concerned with how this violence shapes the daily lives, practices and possibilities of residents in rural communities, the production of history about this violence, and its legacies in contemporary Colombian politics. I share photos and stories from my fieldwork in an ongoing instagram ethnography project, Imagining War & Peace in Colombia.
less
InterestsView All (24)
Uploads
Books by Winifred Tate
Winifred Tate explores the rhetoric and practice of foreign policy by the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, Congress, and the U.S. military Southern Command. Tate's ethnography uncovers how policymakers' utopian visions and emotional entanglements play a profound role in their efforts to orchestrate and impose social transformation abroad. She argues that U.S. officials' zero tolerance for illegal drugs provided the ideological architecture for the subsequent militarization of domestic drug policy abroad. The U.S. also ignored Colombian state complicity with paramilitary brutality, presenting them as evidence of an absent state and the authentic expression of a frustrated middle class. For rural residents of Colombia living under paramilitary dominion, these denials circulated as a form of state terror. Tate's analysis examines how oppositional activists and the policy's targets—civilians and local state officials in southern Colombia—attempted to shape aid design and delivery, revealing the process and effects of human rights policymaking.
Forthcoming in May from Stanford University Press
Papers by Winifred Tate
terrain of Colombia’s Atlantic Coast. This article examines how local elite assessments of how to ‘do corruption right’ were mobilized in the late 1990s by paramilitary commanders to legitimate their state building efforts, and were equally important to their project of territorial control. Here, I examine three registers of corruption talk. I first address anti-corruption claims public declarations made by paramilitary commanders decrying the corruption practices of the traditional political class. These same paramilitary leaders engaged in armed clientelism: using threat of violence, in addition to the delivery of state-funded projects, to gain both electoral loyalty and control of state agencies. The second register of corruption talk I consider are elite assessments of paramilitary. I argue that by approving of paramilitary governance as a means of reigning in excessive corruption, elites in the Monteria region of Colombia’s Atlantic Coast not only justified their own support for paramilitarism, but also exonerated themselves for their own ongoing corrupt practices. Finally, I consider how paramilitary links to drug trafficking have been erased in public discourse, in part through media portrayals of paramilitaries in telenovelas, nightly serialized television dramas.
Book Chapters by Winifred Tate
Winifred Tate explores the rhetoric and practice of foreign policy by the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, Congress, and the U.S. military Southern Command. Tate's ethnography uncovers how policymakers' utopian visions and emotional entanglements play a profound role in their efforts to orchestrate and impose social transformation abroad. She argues that U.S. officials' zero tolerance for illegal drugs provided the ideological architecture for the subsequent militarization of domestic drug policy abroad. The U.S. also ignored Colombian state complicity with paramilitary brutality, presenting them as evidence of an absent state and the authentic expression of a frustrated middle class. For rural residents of Colombia living under paramilitary dominion, these denials circulated as a form of state terror. Tate's analysis examines how oppositional activists and the policy's targets—civilians and local state officials in southern Colombia—attempted to shape aid design and delivery, revealing the process and effects of human rights policymaking.
Forthcoming in May from Stanford University Press
terrain of Colombia’s Atlantic Coast. This article examines how local elite assessments of how to ‘do corruption right’ were mobilized in the late 1990s by paramilitary commanders to legitimate their state building efforts, and were equally important to their project of territorial control. Here, I examine three registers of corruption talk. I first address anti-corruption claims public declarations made by paramilitary commanders decrying the corruption practices of the traditional political class. These same paramilitary leaders engaged in armed clientelism: using threat of violence, in addition to the delivery of state-funded projects, to gain both electoral loyalty and control of state agencies. The second register of corruption talk I consider are elite assessments of paramilitary. I argue that by approving of paramilitary governance as a means of reigning in excessive corruption, elites in the Monteria region of Colombia’s Atlantic Coast not only justified their own support for paramilitarism, but also exonerated themselves for their own ongoing corrupt practices. Finally, I consider how paramilitary links to drug trafficking have been erased in public discourse, in part through media portrayals of paramilitaries in telenovelas, nightly serialized television dramas.
Las organizaciones no gubernamentales dicen que juegan un papel central en definir las políticas internacionales estadounidenses, en particular sobre el tema de derechos humanos. Aquí, examinaré la influencia de los derechos humanos y grupos humanitarios en los debates sobre la política internacional hacia Colombia, enfocándome en el diseño y las apropiaciones adicionales subsecuentes para el Plan Colombia, un paquete de asistencia multibillonario que comenzó en el año 2000. Propongo que ONGs fueron capases de usar el legado del activismo por los derechos humanos del pasado que se concentraba en América Latina, pero que no logró una movilización popular alrededor de éste tema. Examino los problemas estructurales que limitan ese tipo de movilización, así cómo exploro la manera en que las ONGs sí usaron las condiciones legislativas que se colocaron al paquete de asistencia para que la preocupación sobre los derechos humanos se mantuviera como parte de los debates acerca de las políticas Estadounidenses. Este caso de estudio contribuirá al registro histórico sobre cómo las políticas se establecen y desarrollan, para ser parte de la literatura creciente que explora la manera en que reclamos de derechos humanos se transforman en políticas gubernamentales específicas.