This thesis shows the global historicity of current development practices, and how mining policies have incessantly shaped the nature and operation of the rule of law in Colombia, an insight that can illuminate similar practices in other regions of the Global South. In particular, this thesis examines from the decolonial thinking and from a critical development perspective, the legal and institutional framework for the extraction of mineral resources, and specifically, of gold mining in Colombia. Firstly, the author analyses how the Colombian constitutional State, leaded by a development discourse and in the framework of a global economic and political order based on an extractive model, has reshaped its legal and institutional apparatus in colonial terms, within a transnational law-making process in which the global order and the local order are strongly connected. Secondly, the author analyses how this process has made possible that the extractive paradigm reproduces colonial legacies through new legal mechanisms, which in turn make that the Colombian State reinserts itself permanently in a peripheral position in a context of ‘global coloniality’. In order to understand the scope and the implications of the Colombian mining legal order in a particular case, the author examines the mining conflict in Marmato between the traditional miners and the Canadian mining companies. In methodological terms, this research is embedded in a social-legal perspective and is based mainly on the following methods: genealogical analysis, participant observation, semi-structured interviews and archival work. The methodological framework empathises in a historical view, in order to understand the 'coloniality' of the regime of accumulation and extraction of resources, that is strongly connected to the elements of foreign investment and development, which in turn have been articulated within the legal order and the institutional apparatus of the Colombian constitutional State.
