My research is focused around three main themes: social and political theories of dissent and resistance; the politics of knowledge and the political sociology of development and violence. I have broader underlying interests in governance, political economy, and the role of law and rights in the regulation of populations. I also have interests in gender and feminist theory. (See below for previous and forthcoming publications).

I am currently working on a book, tentatively entitled Docile Dissent: Human Rights, Corporate Responsibility and the Colonisation of Struggle.  In it, I offer an account of how resistance to neoliberalisation is neutralised and contained within manageable parameters. I draw on extensive ethnographic engagement with the international trajectories of peasant and worker struggles against multinational corporations in Colombia to make a broader statement about how the violent elimination of disruptive political subjects has become increasingly blurred with the making of a terrain of docile dissent which invests and erases struggles in specific contexts. I explore how this serves to close political space and to cement the abandonment of populations to the dictates of the market. 

A second project, with Doerthe Rosenow (Royal Holloway), interrogates the appropriation of some of the concepts of Michel Foucault and explores the possibility of a more politicised engagement with questions of critique and resistance through the lens of actually-existing struggles.  I am also working on a couple of single-authored papers on related themes.

PhD supervisees

Frances Thomson (land commodification and forced displacement in Colombia -with Ben Selwyn)

I welcome proposals for PhD supervision in the broad areas of: international politics of resistance and dissent, human rights, labour movements, multinational corporations, gender, politics/sociology of knowledge, continental political thought (particularly Michel Foucault, Jacques Ranciere), development & political violence.

Academic journal articles

Lara Montesinos Coleman, 2013. “The making of docile dissent: neoliberalisation and resistance in Colombia and beyond”, forthcoming in International Political Sociology 7:2.

Lara Montesinos Coleman and Karen Tucker. 2011. ‘Between Discipline and Dissent: Situated Resistance and Global Order’, in Globalizations 8:4, pp. 397-410.

Lara Montesinos Coleman and Serena A. Bassi. 2011. ‘Deconstructing Militant Manhood: Masculinities in the Disciplining of (Anti)globalisation Politics’, in International Feminist Journal of Politics, volume 13: 2, pp. 204-224.

Lara Coleman. 2007. ‘The Gendered Violence of Development: Imaginative Geographies of Exclusion in the Imposition of Neoliberal Capitalism’, in British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9:2, pp. 204-219

Responses to commentaries in academic journals

Lara Montesinos Coleman and Serena A. Bassi. 2011. ‘Militant Manhood Revisited: A Note on Method and Madness’, in International Feminist Journal of Politics 13:2, pp. 238-245.

Book chapters

Lara Montesinos Coleman and Hannah Hughes. 2013. “Notes on the limits of the field”, forthcoming in Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal and Nadine Voelkner (eds.), Critical Methods in Security Studies (publisher TBC).

Lara Montesinos Coleman and Karen Tucker. 2012. ‘Between Discipline and Dissent: Situated Resistance and Global Order’, in Lara Montesinos Coleman and Karen Tucker (eds.), Situating Global Resistance: Between Discipline and Dissent (Abingdon: Routledge).

Books

Lara Montesinos Coleman and Karen Tucker (eds.). 2012. Situating Global Resistance: Between Discipline and Dissent (Abingdon: Routledge: 2012).

Martín Ayala, Lara Coleman, Gearóid Ó Loingsigh, Josep Lluís Montesinos, Oscar Pedraza Manuel Vega Vargas and Marcela Vega Vargas. 2010. Por Dentro E’Soga: Un Análisis de los Impactos de la BP en Casanare (Translation: “Inside its a noose: an analysis of BP’s impact in Casanare) (Bogotá: Ediciones Desde Abajo).

Journal special issues

Lara Montesinos Coleman and Karen Tucker (eds.). 2011. Special issue of Globalizations 8:4 on ‘Disciplining Dissent’.

Book reviews (invited submissions)

Cynthia Cockburn. 2010. From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis (London: Zed, 2007), in Minerva Journal of Women and War  4:1, pp. 104-5.

My advice and feedback hours for the Spring term are:

Monday 2-4pm

Office: C357

Coleman, Lara (2013) The making of docile dissent: neoliberalisation and resistance in Colombia and beyond. International Political Sociology, 7 (2). pp. 170-187. ISSN 1749-5679

Coleman, Lara and Bassi, Serena (2011) Deconstructing Militant Manhood; masculinities in the disciplining of (anti) globalisation politics. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 13 (2). pp. 204-224. ISSN 1461-6742