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Differentiating Between Santos and Uribe
Abstract
This chapter describes a more recent development in the Community’s radical narrative, in which President Juan Manuel Santos is perceived to be ‘the same’ as ex-President Álvaro Uribe, despite different official rhetoric on peace and victims’ rights. It describes how the Community’s four demands have been translated into orders by the Colombian Constitutional Court, leading to an attempt at a presidential apology which was received ambiguously by the Community, and the attitude that Community members have to state reparations programmes. Drawing on conversations with Community members about current topics such as the peace process, it shows how the radical narrative functions as a self-reconfirming framework.
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Este artículo reflexiona sobre las opciones por parte de civiles de resistir pacíficamente en conflictos armados. Los argumentos desarrollados aquí se basan en una investigación de campo en la Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó, Colombia. El marco analítico y teórico por medio del cual se delimita en este artículo la aplicación del término ‘resistencia’, se basa en las consideraciones conceptuales de Hollander y Einwohner (2004) y en el concepto teórico de ‘resistencia legítima’ de O’Brien (1996). Después de un breve análisis del conflicto, describiremos los procesos socio-históricos de la zona de Apartadó, y las experiencias auto-organizativas de sus habitantes, las cuales favorecieron la conformación de esta iniciativa de paz. El análisis de las dimensiones y de los objetivos de la resistencia de la Comunidad de Paz permite reconceptualizar la idea de ‘resistencia legítima’ de O’Brien.
This text focuses on the cultural construction of the category of victim as an affirmation of civility. Over the last few years Colombia has seen the emergence of a genre of language dedicated to narrating experiences of suffering in the form of personal testimony. This highly emotive language creates bonds between different members of 'civil society' who find common ground in sharing 'the truth' concerning the acts of violence perpetrated in recent years. I argue that the idiom of personal testimony produces political effects since it creates a shared version of the violent events occurring over the last decade. Moreover it opens the way for an ethics based on the recognition of demands for reparation by providing a symbolic mediation between subjective experience and the society at large. I examine the social construction of the category of victim in three different settings: the mobilization of the indigenous community in response to violent acts; the massive protests held in 2008 against these acts; and the campaign for approval of the Victims Law. I also highlight the crucial role played by women and indigenous peoples in testifying publicly about this violence as a way of arriving at the truth, a process leading to the construction of a shared narrative and to the generalization of moral principles vis-à-vis acts of violence perpetrated in the name of 'politics'.
Based on data from qualitative fieldwork, documents and secondary literature, this article lays the groundwork for a better understanding of " zones of peace " in Colombia's borderlands. It builds on two empirical cases: Samaniego in the department of Nariño that borders Ecuador, and Las Mercedes in the municipality of Sardinata, Norte de Santander, at the border with Venezuela. " Zones of peace " are understood here as territories in which local communities have attempted to persuade armed actors to abide by certain rules to mitigate the effects of the armed conflict locally. We begin by briefly discussing zones of peace as local peacebuilding initiatives in the context of the Colombian armed conflict before focusing on how the location of zones of peace in Colombia's borderlands can impinge on their emergence, evolution and contributions to peacebuilding. We find that such a location can both constitute an incentive and a barrier for the emergence, evolution and peacebuilding contributions of these peace zones. Two aspects, in particular, need to be taken into account in the study of such peace zones: their distance from the political and economic centres, which has resulted in the marginalization of these territories and their use by violent non-state actors for drug trafficking, as well as the transnationality of borderlands, which provides communities an opportunity to interact with citizens of neighbouring countries at peace.
n un tiempo bastante cercano aun, la sim-ple mencion del termino “Historia” –con mayuscula– equivalia a una explicacion: la Historia quiere, juzga, condena… Hoy en dia, aunque de manera diferente, la Memoria se ha convertido en esa palabra que nos exime de tener que dar mas explicaciones. La Memoria es un de -recho, un deber, un arma; duelo, trauma,
Social movements are arising in unexpected places, producing effects not nor mally associated with our traditional understandings of either politics or movements. No longer, and perhaps never, solely the highly visible, modernist expressions of resistance to the state, movements are not only enacting poli tics through protest and cultural contestation, but are generating diverse knowledges. From heated debates over the meaning of Italy’s alter-globaliza tion movement; to careful direct-action strategizing in Chicago’s cooperative bookstores; to conferences on Native American environmental justice issues, contemporary movements are important sites of knowledge creation, refor mulation and diffusion. We call these “knowledge-practices.” Building on interdisciplinary approaches to the study of social movements, we argue that when we recognize movements as processes through which knowledge is gen erated, modified and mobilized, we gain important insights into the politics of contemporary movements. This recognition also has important method ological implications. It requires that we shift the mode of engagement in our research, blurring established social scientific boundaries and promoting a more relational-symmetrical approach. [Keywords: Social movements, knowledge-practice, modes of engagement, place-basedness]
Los imaginarios geográficos sobre la región del Urabá han profundizado la guerra y motivado el conflicto entre las diversas territorialidades. Han quedado cicatrices que muestran la huella del Estado en la manera de ordenar los territorios y dar respuesta al conflicto social y armado. Es decir, se produce sufrimiento social en la aplicación de modelos de seguridad, imponiendo el modelo hegemónico capitalista. Quedan resonando preguntas en este artículo desde la territorialidad vivida por las comunidades, como respuesta a la ruptura de procesos sociales y políticos que han vivido: ¿qué son territorios de seguridad y qué son territorios de paz con dignidad?, ¿cómo se pueden construir los territorios de paz con justicia?, ¿cómo protegerlos?, ¿qué valores hay que asegurar o proteger?, ¿para quién es la seguridad? Sigue abierto un llamado a la conciencia ética del país, a los planificadores del “desarrollo”, a los “ordenadores” del territorio. Se evidencian geografías que demandan respeto al derecho a la memoria, a la vida, a la justicia espacial, a vivir en armonía con la naturaleza, que requieren relacionar a diversas escalas las acciones de las comunidades que han renunciado al olvido y hacen de la memoria potencia política para defender los territorios, como procesos que se viven en medio del conflicto.
Colombia, a partir del año 1991, consagró un nuevo concepto de Estado, cuya filosofía es la esencia humana. En ese sentido, conceptos como dignidad humana y justicia se constituyen en pilares fundamentales, cuyo reconocimientoy efectiva materialización garantiza la existencia de este tipo de Estado. En armonía con esto, el presente trabajo tiene como fin dar a conocer el distanciamiento que se evidencia entre la praxis de la institucionalidad y lo plasmado en la Carta de 1991, frente al deber de respetar, observar y garantizar derechos de los ciudadanos, lo cual se afirma en atención al análisis realizado a la postura política denominada Ruptura con el Sistema Judicial apropiada por la Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó en el año 2003,como respuesta de resistencia ante la sistemática vulneración de sus derechos, propuesta que consideramos encuentra respaldo en la Constitución y el derecho internacional de los derechos humanos, con base en los postulados teleológicosque persigue esta clase de Estados.
The nineteenth century was an era of breathtakingly ambitious geographic expeditions across the Americas. The seminal Chorographic Commission of Colombia, which began in 1850 and lasted about a decade, was one of Latin America’s most extensive. The commission’s mandate was to define and map the young republic and its resources with an eye toward modernization. In this history of the commission, Nancy Appelbaum focuses on the geographers’ fieldwork practices and visual production as the men traversed the mountains, savannahs, and forests of more than thirty provinces in order to delineate the country’s territorial and racial composition. Their assumptions and methods, Appelbaum argues, contributed to a long-lasting national imaginary. What jumps out of the commission’s array of reports, maps, sketches, and paintings is a portentous tension between the marked differences that appeared before the eyes of the geographers in the field and the visions of sameness to which they aspired. The commissioners and their patrons believed that a prosperous republic required a unified and racially homogeneous population, but the commission’s maps and images paradoxically emphasized diversity and helped create a "country of regions." By privileging the whiter inhabitants of the cool Andean highlands over those of the boiling tropical lowlands, the commission left a lasting but problematic legacy for today’s Colombians. © 2016 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Scholars have shown how memory is an embodied and spatial practice that potentially generates more just possible futures, and that peace is a politicized and contextually specific process, but how does place-based memory performance actually contribute to social movements’ construction of peace? This article explores massacre commemoration pilgrimages and stones painted with victims’ names in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, a group of small-scale farmers living in the war-torn region of Urabá, Colombia. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in Colombia from 2011 to 2014, including participant observation and 49 interviews, I explore the relationship between these spatially embodied practices and the community’s resistance to forced displacement and peace-building project. I argue that these forms of memorialization cultivate key elements for an autonomist ‘other politics’, including solidarity with allies; mobilizing bodies across space to defend life and land; and ongoing reflection, education and strategic planning that strengthen community cohesion and organization. Integrating scholarship on memory performance, peace geographies, and social movements, I illustrate how the San José de Apartadó Peace Community’s massacre commemorations and stones reject vindictive violence and instead build an alternative, transformative and emancipatory politics through internal and external solidarity.
At a time when a global consensus on human rights standards seems to be emerging, this rich study steps back to explore how the idea of human rights is actually employed by activists and human rights professionals. Winifred Tate, an anthropologist and activist with extensive experience in Colombia, finds that radically different ideas about human rights have shaped three groups of human rights professionals working there--nongovernmental activists, state representatives, and military officers. Drawing from the life stories of high-profile activists, pioneering interviews with military officials, and research at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Counting the Dead underscores the importance of analyzing and understanding human rights discourses, methodologies, and institutions within the context of broader cultural and political debates.
All over the world, rural and minority communities are vulnerable to human rights violations, often due to larger economic
interests in their land. This policy and practice note argues that it is important to recognize community initiatives that
denounce and resist such risks as acts of autonomous human rights defence. To illustrate this, it looks at two experiences
of community organization and resistance in Urabá, Colombia: the organization CAVIDA and their Humanitarian Zones in Cacarica,
and the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó. The paper examines the context in which these experiences have emerged, how
the communities were displaced off their land, and how they developed strategies for returning, despite ongoing conflict.
It looks at the risks they face and the combination of complementary protection mechanisms they use in order to remain on
their land. While being context specific, these experiences also have wider resonance for community human rights defence and
protection strategies, especially against violations linked to economic interests and interests in maintaining impunity, and
for pioneering the right to non-participation in armed conflict.
Collective identity entered the social movements literature as an early recogni tion of the importance of meaning-making in shaping movement participants and influencing movement actions In this article, we go against the more usual practice of treating movements as unified actors, and instead, take a decen tered, dialogic approach that recognizes the difficulties and contentiousness of producing movement identities amidst multiple discourses and practices. We illustrate this framework with three ethnographic cases from Canada, Scotland and Nepal, which highlight collective identity and meaning-making through place-based, contingent cultural processes. The cases use the concepts of fig ured worlds, alter-versions of identity, and cultural artifacts to show how col lective identity develops dialogically in practice both within and outside of movements. [Keywords: Collective identity, social movements, dialogic processes, women’s activism, First Nations activism, global justice move ment, Nepal, Scotland, Canada]
Over the past century, the field of social movement studies has moved several times toward the recognition and analysis of meaning-making by social movement participants. It may be time, now, to make a new leap in this direction. What would happen if we not only recognize meaning-making as an important facet of social movement mobilizations, but privilege it as the central feature of such phenomena? This special section explores several implications of this leap.
What do we mean by meaning-making? The concept is a broad one that draws on multiple traditions in sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences. At its root is the proposition that humans constantly seek to understand the world around them, and that the imposition of meaning on the world is a goal in itself, a spur to action, and a site of contestation. Meaning includes moral understandings of right and wrong, cognitive understandings of true and false, perceptual understandings of like and unlike, social understandings of identity and difference, aesthetic understandings of attractive and repulsive, and any other understandings that we may choose to identify through our own academic processes of meaning-making.
Meaning-making might be conceptualized in two distinct and complementary theoretical registers. For methodological individualists, it refers to human perception and response. Humans may identify, valuate, and engage with identical perceptual "inputs" in quite different ways, depending on the meanings that we associate with these inputs. The approach of a person with a gun may cause us to run, to smile, to attack, and so on—depending on the meanings that the person and the gun (and other aspects of the context) have for us at that moment. Meaning-making, in this regard, is the mental processing that makes sense out of the senses. It is both idiosyncratic to each person and each moment, and at the same time patterned across ever-changing sets of populations and instances.
For culturalists, by contrast, meaning-making refers to collective contest over interpretation. Institutions, repertoires, and rituals offer a set of ready-made—though always contradictory—interpretations that allow people to assimilate information into established categories of understanding. The recognition of human suffering, for example, may be interpreted in terms of inequality or stratification, exploitation or ability, responsibility or inevitability, and so on. It may lead to collective action to reduce suffering, or not, and the actions to reduce suffering may take any number of forms, depending on the meanings associated with the phenomenon. Notwithstanding variation and contestation, the range of meanings available in any given context is finite. Most societies have ready-made categories for individuals and small groups who make meanings outside of the dominant cultural set: visionaries, prophets, persons with mental illness, and the like.
Meaning-making is not limited to social movements. All action involves meaning-making, just as all action involves contention. However, social movements may be a particularly conducive site to privilege meaning-making, because their activities foreground resistance to the dominant norms and institutions of society. They raise questions about the possibility of alternative world-views and alternative dispensations, and in so doing they challenge participants and observers to re-think meanings that are too often taken for granted. Social movements actively make meaning, challenging established meanings.
Social movement studies have not always stepped up to the challenge of meaning-making. The founding figures, according to the field's various genesis stories, generally ignored their subjects' meaning-making, in two ways. The first way held that the subjects were so different from the observer that their meaning-making was nonsensical, and therefore not worthy of analysis. This approach is evident in the "crowd psychology" of the late 19th century, which is sometimes treated as the direct ancestor of social movement studies. For instance, Scipio Sighele, one of three major founders of this school of thought, based his analysis of "criminal crowds" on the "law" of hypnotic suggestibility, then extended the metaphor to all assemblies, including elected representatives, whose "intellectual level…, already quite humble, descends still further as a consequence of the law that we have enunciated" (Kurzman 2004b:129). Sighele's and other crowd psychologists' estimation of their own intellectual level was anything but humble, and...
The Make-Believe Space is a book of ethnographic and theoretical meditation on the phantasmatic entanglement of materialities in the aftermath of war, displacement, and expropriation. "Northern Cyprus," carved out as a separate space and defined as a distinct (de facto) polity since its invasion by Turkey in 1974, is the subject of this ethnography about postwar politics and social relations. Turkish-Cypriots' sociality in a re-forged geography, rid of its former Greek-Cypriot inhabitants after the partition of Cyprus, forms the centerpiece of Yael Navaro-Yashin's conceptual exploration of subjectivity in the context of "ruination" and "abjection." The unrecognized state in Northern Cyprus unfolds through the analytical devices that she develops as she explores this polity's administration and raison d'être via affect theory. Challenging the boundaries between competing theoretical orientations, Navaro-Yashin crafts a methodology for the study of subjectivity and affect, and materiality and the phantasmatic, in tandem. In the process, she creates a subtle and nuanced ethnography of life in the long-term aftermath of war.
This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global,” the “lifeworld” and the “system.” Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several “tracking” strategies that shape multi-site...
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