Seminar: "(Un)making Caucanistan", with Nick Middledorp

Nick Middledorp, University of British Columbia, will be visiting ICTA-UAB to give a workshop on climate adaptation, risk-governance systems and inequalities.

Title: "(Un)making Caucanistan: the Dissident FARC War Machine, Narcomilitarism, Youth, and Indigenous Strategies of Resistance in Cauca, Colombia".

Speaker: Nick Middledorp, University of British Columbia.

• Date: Tuesday, October 27th 2026
• Time: 11h
• Venue: Sala Z/033, ICTA-UAB, and online https://zoom.us/j/95853133274?pwd=fRW4SDrbOPPr3bCe5cn2o8EkjsFChd.1

Grounded in ethnographic research and physical accompaniment of Cauca´s Indigenous Movement between 2020 and 2025, this paper traces the FARC´s ontological drift and post-2016 Peace Accords transformation and resurgence as an extractivist war machine.   Territorial control and the loyalty of the population is disputed with Cauca´s Indigenous Movement, leading the Dissident FARC to pursue hegemony through various strategies including homicides of Indigenous Movement members and the recruitment of children and youth through the promotion of narcomilitarism on social media. In turn, the Indigenous movement attempts to prevent child recruitment through initiatives aimed at reinforcing children´s sense of ethnic identity and belonging. The paper argues that the interplay of material conditions and ontological crisis fuel Cauca´s current iteration of internal armed conflict, with implications for both Colombia and for the wider Andean-Amazon region, as Indigenous “life and territory defenders” struggle to avert terricide – the simultaneous destruction of ecosystems and Peoples. 

Keywords: Colombia, FARC, Terricide, Ontological Crisis, Indigenous Resistance

Nick Middeldorp (1989) is a PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia. He previously conducted research on opposition to mining in Honduras; and worked on Indigenous rights and environmental justice issues at the Interamerican Institute of Human Rights (IIDH) in Costa Rica before starting his PhD. Between 2021 and 2025, whilst living in Colombia, Nick worked for the Dutch environmental justice organization Both ENDS, supporting Indigenous Ngäbe communities in Panama in their claim against European development banks for the financing of the Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam. 

Selected past publications

Middeldorp, N. (2026). Protection and care in the face of direct and structural violence: learning from indigenous life and territory defenders in Abya Yala. Frontiers in Environmental Science, Vol 14, https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2026.1766752

Middeldorp, N. & Le Billon, P. (2019). Deadly environmental governance: authoritarianism, eco- populism, and the repression of environmental and land defenders. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Vol 109 (2), 324-337. 

Middeldorp, N., Morales, C., &. Van Der Haar, G. (2016). Social mobilisation and violence at the mining frontier: the case of Honduras. Journal of Extractive Industries and Society, Vol. 3, (4): pp: 930-938.