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Women’s Experiences of Environmental Harm in Colombia: Learning from Black, Decolonial and Indigenous Communitarian Feminisms
Abstract
This chapter explores Indigenous and Afro-descendent women’s diverse experiences of environmental harm in Colombia. To do so, it brings green criminology into conversation with the decolonial, Black and Indigenous feminism that has emerged from across the Americas as a way of exposing the connections between gendered harms and structural violence. In doing so, we wish to highlight how platforming and learning from this feminist scholarship and activism can lead to a more nuanced understanding of environmental harm and its legacies in Colombia. In the chapter we outline the continuum of environmental harms experienced in Colombia, and the ways in which colonisation, conflict and neoliberal extractivist policies have particularly harmed Indigenous and Afro-descendent populations. We then highlight four important contributions made by feminist literature to understanding of the gendered impacts of these harms. First, their theorisation of the connections between territorial and bodily autonomy for Indigenous and Afro-descendent women. Second, their exposure of the gendered vulnerabilities associated with dispossession and forced displacement. Third, the attention they draw to the ‘everyday’ gendered nature of environmental harms, and fourth the important role of women in resisting environmental injustice and protecting their communities and territories.
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Social movements in the global South have contested neoliberal development, a major cause of forced displacement, already for decades. Since it is usually the poor, low caste women who suffer most from large-scale development projects, they have been active in forming movements that contest neoliberal development and neocolonialism, often struggling also against patriarchalism, sexism, and hetero-normativity. The phenomenon has been referred to as "feminization of resis-tance", and it has been studied from many different perspectives across disciplines. However, in conceptualizing women's resistance, their political engagement, and activism in the global South, Western theoretical approaches often build on a limited, Eurocentric or Anglo-American perspective, ignoring many aspects that are crucial in non-Western contexts. While especially Western political science is increasingly often criticized for its false universalism, whiteness, and elitism, the demand to decolonize feminism have recently gained more ground in this context. Through an analysis of ethnographic fieldwork with social movement activists in Kolkata, India, and in Kathmandu, Nepal, this article discusses feminization of resistance in South Asia, highlighting the importance of decolonizing forms of feminist solidarity while also reflecting on its potentials and challenges in the context of engaged social movement research. Drawing on activists' views, critiques, 1 I thank the two anonymous reviewers for constructive and helpful comments on the first version of this manuscript. I also extend my thanks to my colleague Sara Motta, as well as Laura Junka-Aikio and Hanna Laako, the two co-founders of our research collective Bordering Actors for wonderful and inspiring discussions which have helped me to express and formulate many of the ideas presented here. TIINA SEPPÄLÄ-FEMINIZING RESISTANCE, DECOLONIZING SOLIDARITY: 13 conceptualizations, and suggestions, this paper argues that taking into account their perspectives, that is, learning from movements-while simultaneously trying to unlearn one's own academic privileges-creates potential not only for enriching and broadening the theoretical debate on feminization of resistance, but, can also contribute to efforts of decolonizing Western political thought and feminism.
This introductory book adopts an interdisciplinary and critical perspective, incorporating contributions from economics, politics, ecology and more. The book explores local impacts, such as ecological and health degradation and violence, along with spillover effects that redefine democracy and justice. Significantly, presented for the first time in English is a comprehensive overview of the theoretical innovations currently being discussed in the South, such as the distinction between appropriation and production modes, a redefinition of surplus to include social and economic features and new understandings on conflict dynamics. Gudynas discusses the Latin American peculiarities of extractivisms produced by both conservative and new-left governments, making clear that it has very deep roots in culture and ideologies. Finally, Gudynas offers solutions for the future
In recent years, interest has grown in how Transitional Justice (TJ) can approach colonial harms and their long-lasting effects, because of a lacuna in both TJ practice and academic research . Scant attention has been paid, particularly, to how peace processes themselves can be undermined by ongoing colonial legacies. In this article, we offer an in-depth case study on Colombia, particularly the Havana Peace Accord of 2016, and discuss how the debris – to use Stoler’s term – of Spanish colonialism relating to land, ethnicity and gender have become evident throughout the process: during the negotiations, in the campaigns prior to the referendum, and while undertaking its implementation. We argue that peace processes must account for ongoing harms rooted in colonial projects; in the first instance, to provide structural justice for those who suffer these harms in a broader sense and, also, to protect the specific aims of the peace process in question.
This article outlines the field of critical criminology and how its development was essential for the development of green criminology. Through a personal trajectory, I use my experiences first as a student and later as Professor of Criminology at the University of Oslo as an entry point. I draw on my involvement with the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control to explore how critical criminology has influenced green critical criminology. Critical criminology, with its focus on the crimes of the powerful, is concerned with victims of injustice, and a social harm approach was, I argue, a necessary foundation for non‐speciesist, green critical criminology. The article concludes by elucidating the challenges for a green critical non‐speciesist criminology, which includes a presentation of my current research project, ‘Criminal justice, wildlife conservation and animal rights in the Anthropocene – CRIMEANTHROP’.
This exploratory study develops a "southern green cultural criminology" approach to the prevention of environmental harms and crimes. The main aim is to understand differing cultural representations of nature, including wildlife, present within four Colombian Indigenous communities to evaluate whether they encourage environmentally friendly human interactions with the natural world, and if so, how. The study draws on primary data gathered by the Indigenous authors (peer researchers) of this article via a set of interviews with representatives of these four communities. We argue that the cosmologies that these communities live by signal practical ways of achieving ecological justice and challenging anthropocentrism.
Generally, the traditional Indigenous ways of 'knowing and seeing' the natural world lead to more protective behaviours than the dominating economic approach that represents the interests of the global North. Indigenous ways of living and remembering are however, currently threatened with erosion by several global dynamics. While many of the most powerful forces involved in the extinguishment of Indigenous peoples and their cultures are visible and direct forms of violence, there are also structural, systemic and invisible factors at play. In this article, based on original primary data collected within communities of four Colombian Indigenous peoples, we identify the four main silent dynamics producing the extinction of Indigenous cultures in Colombia. We refer to the operation of these forces as a form of genocide and connect them to the simultaneous occurrence of an ecocide.
This article presents the life stories of six indigenous women from the Amazonian region, who coordinate local women processes through indigenous organizations and networks. Since the political and legal visibility of violence against indigenous women in Colombia is weak and limited, we aim to analyze their experiences from an intersectional perspective. For this purpose, we employed multiple methodologies, including body mapping and social cartography. Thus, by reconstructing their experiences and attempts to make visible violence against them, we could perceive some of its multiple modalities, which are quickly captured by the great category.
In the context of current decolonial geographical debates calling for action-oriented approaches to changing geographical knowledge construction, we propose cuerpo-territorio as a way to achieve this goal in Anglophone feminist geography. In Anglophone geography, emotions and embodiment have been studied through a range of ethnographic methods. There are intrinsic limitations of verbal and written data, however, because sensitive emotions might be triggered by an interviewer’s questions and participants might be reluctant to share those. Cuerpo-territorio is a distinct geographical, decolonial feminist method grounded in the ontological unity between bodies and territories. We show how this visual, hands-on, and participatory method can overcome these limits and bring about coproduced validated knowledge. By having participants draw the territory on the body, knowledge is cocreated with the voices and experiences of participants having primacy in the research process. This coconstructed knowledge is produced in an accessible format for participants and the general public, facilitating a process of advocacy by participants themselves. We make the case that research in Anglophone feminist geography concerning embodiment can benefit from employing cuerpo-territorio. This article responds to the need for more practical and methodological action toward decolonizing geography and strengthens existing literature in Anglophone feminist, decolonial, and indigenous geographies that make the connection between embodiment and land through the use of the cuerpo-territorio method from Latin America.
Entre el etnocentrismo feminista y el esencialismo étnico: las mujeres indígenas y sus demandas de género
In 2016, Colombia’s left-wing guerrilla FARC-EP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia—Ejército del Pueblo) began demobilisation. While demobilisation and the ensuing peace accords brought renewed hope that the country could imagine different political and social relations—and new ecological and economic conditions—multinational corporations filled the ‘void’ left by FARC-EP forces. Corporate interests in Colombia’s natural resources predated the demobilisation. However, extractive processes were restricted by the dynamics of the armed conflict. In 2016, immediately following the demobilisation, deforestation in Colombia jumped 44 per cent. In the transitional demobilisation period, huge swaths of the country were opened for economic development. Thus, while the environment is often a victim in armed conflict, in Colombia, conflict contributed to the preservation of some areas. Among the forms of development that have emerged in Colombia, ‘ecotourism’ has risen quickly to the fore. While ecotourism may offer some promise, it should be viewed with caution.
Gendered violence is historically and presently a colonial tool that wields power over and against Indigenous peoples, attempting to destroy or erase their sovereignty and lives. Decolonization is necessary in movements addressing gendered violence in settler colonial nation-states. In this article, we forefront Indigenous organizing as a practice of survivance and decolonial feminist theory building. We argue that decolonial feminist critique deepens our understanding of complex iterations of gendered violence. By witnessing resistant Indigenous community responses to sexual violence, we can begin to imagine and build coalitional decolonial feminist possibilities. Witnessing, we argue, is a decolonial heuristic for engaging with resistant subjectivities at the colonial difference as embodied theory and praxis of decolonial feminism.
The neocolonial turn toward extractivism intensifies the use of violence while fostering land dispossession, racism, and militarization of social life. Afro-Colombian women resist this process by using their subjectivities politically, strategically, discursively, and textually. An examination through the lens of black/decolonial feminism of the first national Mobilization for the Care of Life and Ancestral Territories, led by 40 black women from the Department of Cauca in 2014, shows that black women’s emotions and collective affections were driving forces that exhibited both their exclusions and their resistance. These feelings may be seen as catalysts through which their lived experiences are expressed and performed in the material world. Examination of this event suggests that a more radical analysis of black women’s historicity, subjectivities, and struggles is needed to better capture and understand experience-based epistemologies that challenge hegemonic forms of knowledge production.
Green criminology was officially inaugurated 29 years ago. Since then, it has largely enriched the criminological discipline by introducing new critical perspectives, theories, concepts, and areas of research. In the past five years, the attention of green criminologists has been directed at the Global South as the geographical site that experiences the severest consequences of harmful environmental practices. This book presents in an ordered and reader-friendly way, an inclusive overview of the basic pillars of a Southern green criminology, providing a comprehensive theoretical, philosophical, and methodological description of them. Such criminological direction is simultaneously a scientific and a political endeavour, aimed at combating the environmental harms that affect the geographical and the metaphorical Souths.
The main topic of this book is the conflicts that arise in the interaction between human beings and our natural environment, seen from a Southern perspective with a focus on the victimisation of the South. The book is divided into two parts. The first part presents the pillars of a Southern green criminology from a theoretical perspective. The six chapters in Part I outline the elements that comprise the scientific paradigm I lay out: ontology (Chapter 2), epistemology (Chapter 3), and methodology (Chapter 6). Part II addresses key topics of interest to green criminologists: climate change, land-grabbing, biopiracy, animal exploitation, and human environmental victimisation. I conclude with a proposal for how to prevent Southern green criminology from losing its relevancy and for transforming the many social dynamics that produce ecological discrimination into contributing constructively to a just future. This conclusion draws inspiration from my knowledge exchanges with members of more than 20 Colombian Indigenous communities.
This is the first book exclusively dedicated to the topic of a Southern green criminology. Its appearance is propitious, thanks, first, to the strength of the umbrella project of a Southern criminology and second, because of the pressing nature of environmental threats that are pushing the entire world to seek alternatives to prevent and curb environmental harms in every corner of the globe (Næss, 2008).
While green criminology has grown in its scope and orientation, the field is still limited, being primarily practiced by Northern, and with publications written almost exclusively in English. In this chapter, I argue that because of its ability to study instances of environmental degradation, green criminology could be used as decolonial tool by identifying, exposing and confronting cases of colonial environmental discrimination, marginalization and exploitation. Using the example of Colombia, I argue that one way green criminology could aid the decolonial project of Southern criminology is by being a ‘stereoscopic tool’. This approach, while allowing for the recognition of colonial dynamics, also facilitates combining Western and Southern knowledge, ideally resulting in deeper analyses of both environmentally harmful practices and the potential and actual responses to them.
Artículo aparecido en Hypatia, vol 25, No. 4 (Otoño, 2010).
Traducido por Gabriela Castellanos.
Resumen: Este trabajo se pregunta cómo pensar sobre
interacciones íntimas, cotidianas de resistencia a la diferencia
colonial, defi niendo intimidad no exclusivamente ni
principalmente en términos de relaciones sexuales, sino de
la vida social entretejida entre personas que no están actuando
como representantes o funcionarias. Se parte de la
idea de que la lógica categorial dicotómica y jerárquica es
central para el pensamiento capitalista y colonial moderno
sobre raza, género y sexualidad, y de que los colonizados
fueron defi nidos desde el primer momento de la colonización
como no-humanos, cuya animalidad les impedía ser
vistos como hombres y mujeres, aun considerando a las
mujeres blancas como no-hombres. Se muestra el vínculo
entre la introducción colonial del concepto instrumental
moderno de la naturaleza que es central para el capitalismo,
y la introducción colonial del concepto moderno
de género. Se propone un feminismo descolonial, con un
fuerte énfasis en una intersubjetividad historizada, encarnada,
entablando una crítica de la opresión de género
racializada, colonial y capitalista, heterosexualista, como
una transformación vivida de lo social. En oposición a la
jerarquización dicotómica que caracteriza la colonialidad
capitalista y moderna, se plantea el movimiento hacia la
coalición que nos impulsa a conocernos el uno al otro
como sí mismos que son densos, en relación, en socialidades
alternativas y basadas en formas tensas, creativas,
de habitar la diferencia colonial. Para ello es necesario el
análisis de la opresión de género racializada y capitalista,
es decir, de “la colonialidad del género”, a fi n de vencerla
mediante el “feminismo descolonial”.
Palabras clave: Género, feminismo, colonialidad,
descolonial, modernidad
Toward a Decolonial Feminism
Abstract: This paper asks how to think about intimate
everyday interactions of resistance to colonial difference,
defi ning intimacy not exclusively or even primarily in terms
of sexual relations, but of social life interwoven among
people who are not acting as representatives or functionaries.
It starts out from the idea that the dichotomous
and hierarchical categorial logic is central for modern
capitalist and colonial thought about race, gender and
sexuality, and that the colonized were defi ned from the very
beginning as non-humans, whose bestiality did not allow
for their being seen as men or women, even when white
women were considered as non-men. The link between the
colonial introduction of the modern instrumental concept
of nature is shown to be central for capitalism and for the
colonial introduction of the modern concept of gender. A
decolonial feminism is proposed, with a strong emphasis
on an incarnate, historicized intersubjectivity, posing criticism
of the racialized, colonial, capitalist, heterosexualist
gender oppression, as a lived transformation of the social.
In opposition to the dichotomous hierarchization characteristic
of capitalist, modern coloniality, it is proposed to
strengthen the movement toward coalition which impels us
to get to know each other as dense, in-relation selves, in
alternative socialities based on tense, creative habitations
of the colonial difference. For this we need the analysis
of racialize3d and capitalist gender oppression, that is, of
the coloniality of gender, in order to overcome it by means
of “decolonial feminism”.
Key Words: Gender, feminism, coloniality, resistencia,
modernity
Este artículo trata algunos aspectos menos tratados y desarrollados de la teoría del «extractivismo»: el «extractivismo epistemológico» y el «extractivismo ontológico». Siguiendo las aportaciones descoloniales de la indígena canadiense Leanne Betasamosake Simpson y de la boliviana Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, el autor desarrolla una teoría sobre las dimensiones más desconocidas del «extraccionismo» que el «occidente imperial y neocolonial» ejerce sobre el resto del mundo. En este trabajo se hace también una crítica a la repetición de patrones coloniales en ciertas teorías descoloniales en América Latina.
Em Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System (2007), propus uma leitura
da relação entre o colonizador e o/a colonizado/a em termos de gênero, raça e sexualidade.
Com isso eu não pretendia adicionar uma leitura gendrada e uma leitura racial às já sabidas
relações coloniais. Ao invés disso, eu propus uma releitura da própria modernidade capitalista
colonial moderna. Isso se dá porque a imposição colonial do gênero atravessa questões sobre
ecologia, economia, governo, relaciona-se ao mundo espiritual e ao conhecimento, bem
como cruza práticas cotidianas que tanto nos habituam a cuidar do mundo ou a destruí-lo.
Proponho este quadro conceitual não como uma abstração da experiência vivida, mas como
uma lente que nos permita ver o que está escondido de nossas compreensões sobre raça e
gênero e sobre as relações de cada qual à heterossexualidade normativa.
As peace consolidates in Colombia, can biodiversity survive development? We discuss challenges and opportunities for integrating forest biodiversity conservation into developing, war-dilapidated economies of post-conflict regions, paving the way for a green economy and climate resilient society.
p>This article raises the question of whether recently implemented legislation in Colombia and Brazil (1) provides the necessary tools to prevent the harms of wildlife trafficking (WLT) and (2) influences humans’ practices concerning the use of nonhuman animals. These questions are investigated from the dual perspectives of green criminology and public policy. The analysis is based on a qualitative empirical study undertaken in Colombia and Brazil whereby we discuss the function of the legislation in Colombia and Brazil in preventing illegal WLT. We consider the legitimacy of different practices of WLT and evaluate them with respect to species justice and environmental justice.</p
Since its inception, green criminology has attempted to highlight instances of environmental degradation and destruction, as well as examine and analyse the causes thereof and contemplate the responses thereto. Efforts to reduce environmental crime and curb environmental harm, more generally, have not gone unimpeded, however. Activists around the world are being killed in record numbers trying to defend their land and protect the environment. In this article, I consider the role of socially engaged scholars who reject the idea or ideology of ‘neutral scientists’ in light of the risks faced by environmental defenders. As such, this article replies to the claims that activism and the production of knowledge must be clearly separated. To do so, this article draws upon examples from Latin America to underscore the importance of an ‘activist criminology’ (Belknap in Criminology 53(1):1–22. doi:10.1111/1745-9125.12063, 2015) attuned to environmental harms and injustices perpetrated on those seeking to prevent the despoliation of the Earth.
The possibility of commercially exploiting plant, animal and human genetic resources unlocked by biotechnology has given rise
to a wide range of cultural, environmental, ethical and economic conflicts. While supporters describe this activity as bioprospecting,
critics refer to it as biopiracy. According to this latter view, international legal agreements and treaties have disregarded
opposition and legalized the possibility of appropriating genetic resources and their derivative products through the use
of patents. The legal framework that permits the appropriation of natural genetic products in Colombia also criminalizes aspects
of traditional ways of life and enables a legally approved but socially harmful land-grabbing process. The article describes
these processes and impact in terms of the inversion of justice and the erosion of environmental sustainability.
Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space-place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.
www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520267671
Drawing on revealing, in-depth interviews, Cecilia Menjívar investigates the role that violence plays in the lives of Ladina women in eastern Guatemala, a little-visited and little-studied region. While much has been written on the subject of political violence in Guatemala, Menjívar turns to a different form of suffering—the violence embedded in institutions and in everyday life so familiar and routine that it is often not recognized as such. Rather than painting Guatemala (or even Latin America) as having a cultural propensity for normalizing and accepting violence, Menjívar aims to develop an approach to examining structures of violence—profound inequality, exploitation and poverty, and gender ideologies that position women in vulnerable situations— grounded in women’s experiences. In this way, her study provides a glimpse into the root causes of the increasing wave of feminicide in Guatemala, as well as in other Latin American countries, and offers observations relevant for understanding violence against women around the world today.
The violence and de/reterritorializing strategies used by armed groups in Colombia disproportionally affect indigenous peoples, especially indigenous women, whose ethno-gender roles, forms of territoriality, agency, and autonomy are being altered. Conflict and new forms of territoriality restrict the satisfaction of ethno-gender-based material needs and interests, with negative impacts on women’s own and their families’ lives. At the same time, they offer some women new roles, agency, and autonomy and empowerment through individual and collective action. Policy makers should strive to open up these windows of opportunity for indigenous women while protecting them from the depredations of war.
La violencia y las estrategias de des/reterritorialización utilizadas por grupos armados en Colombia afectan desproporcionadamente a los indígenas, especialmente a las mujeres indígenas, cuyos roles etno-géneros, formas de territorialidad, agencia, y autonomía están siendo alterados. El conflicto y las nuevas formas de territorialidad restringen la satisfacción de necesidades materiales e intereses de tipo etno-género con impactos negativos en las vidas propias de las mujeres y de las de sus familias. Al mismo tiempo, presentan nuevos roles, agencia, autonomía, y empoderamiento a algunas mujeres a través de la acción individual y colectiva. Los formuladores de políticas deberían esforzarse para abrir estos espacios de oportunidad para mujeres indígenas al mismo tiempo que las protejan de las depredaciones de guerra.
Linked to extractive practices, territorial dispossession can be traced back to the colonisation of Abya Yala. From a decolonial commitment, this article complicates notions of dispossession and extractivism as merely emerging from war in Colombia and focuses on their presence in Campesinas territories. Based on the conceptualisations of the coloniality of power and coloniality of gender, I narrate how territorial dispossession and extractivism are felt in women’s ‘body-lands’ through foreign tourism/conservation development and new export crops in two rural veredas in the Colombian Andes and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta where I conducted participatory visual projects in 2016. From a relational understanding of place, I also demonstrate the ways that the rural population is resisting and negotiating within these processes. Ultimately, I make a call for feminist scholars to politically commit to the dismantling of the coloniality of gender, and to the resistances to territorial dispossession and extractivism (epistemic and economic) that rural women are leading in place in the Global South.
This article uses two dimensions of Black feminist standpoint epistemology to investigate Black political economy. It suggests that centering on Black women's experiences and analyzing those experiences via intersectional paradigms fosters rethinking the significance of family within gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. The article concludes by identifying how these new views of family might inform gendered analyses of Black political economy.
Three years after the peace accord signed by the Colombian government and the country’s largest guerrilla group, the guerrillas announced a return to arms. The announcement was met with dismay, but not surprise, as the numbers of murdered ex-combatants and social leaders rise and the government’s tepid commitment to the peace process sputters and stalls. At the centre of this violence have been the extractive industries. How should peace studies make sense of the power of extractivism, often described as a key element of postconflict reconstruction around the globe? This article focuses on Colombia as a case study of the contradictions of the postliberal peace, as stated commitments to gender justice and economic redistribution are undermined by commitments to mining and biofuel profits. A decolonial feminist lens, informed by Latin American anticapitalist feminists, sheds light on these contradictions and illuminates possibilities for a transformed peace in a postneoliberal world.
This book draws on participatory ethnographic research to understand how rural Colombian women work to dismantle the coloniality of power. It critically examines the ways in which colonial feminisms have homogenized the "category of woman,” ignoring the intersecting relationship of class, race, and gender, thereby excluding the voices of “subaltern women” and upholding existing power structures. Supplementing that analysis are testimonials from rural Colombian women who speak about their struggles for sovereignty and against territorial, sexual, and racialized violence enacted upon their land and their bodies. By documenting the stories of rural women and centering their voices, this book seeks to dismantle the coloniality of power and gender, and narrate and imagine decolonial feminist worlds. Scholars in gender studies, rural studies, and post-colonial studies will find this work of interest.
en In Colombia’s agrarian spaces, war and extractivism are deeply entangled. Almost four years after the peace accords signed between the national government and the FARC guerrilla, post‐conflict geographies are best characterised by the ongoing dispossession of local populations related to the entrenchment of extractivism. Drawing from ethnographic work carried out in the Colombian Caribbean on the ordinary practices and spaces of social reproduction, the ordinary geographies, this article explores gendered practices of care and their role in both sustaining and disrupting paramilitary violence and agrarian extractivism. The focus not just on the gendered effects of war and extractivism, but on gender’s constitutive role in the configuration of these processes and dynamics, allows us to contribute to recent literature on extractivism, dispossession and violence from a feminist standpoint.
Resumen
es La guerra y el extractivismo están profundamente entretejidos en los espacios agrarios en Colombia. Casi cuatro años después de la firma de los acuerdos de paz entre el gobierno nacional y la guerrilla de las FARC, las geografías del post‐conflicto están caracterizadas por el despojo sostenido de poblaciones locales tras el afianzamiento y la expansión del extractivismo. A partir de trabajo etnográfico llevado a cabo en el Caribe colombiano sobre las prácticas y los espacios cotidianos de la reproducción social, que definimos como geografías ordinarias, este artículo explora las prácticas de cuidado atravesadas por género y su papel en el mantenimiento y la irrupción de la violencia paramilitar y el extractivismo agrario. El enfoque, no solo en los efectos generizados de la guerra y el extractivismo, sino también en el papel constitutivo del género en la configuración de estos procesos y dinámicas, nos permite contribuir a la literatura reciente sobre el extractivismo, el despojo y la violencia desde un punto de vista feminista.
In this article, I use Lorena Cabnal’s notion of territorio cuerpo-tierra to analyse seventeen in-depth interviews with women leaders of rural social movements and other organisations in Colombia . In the interviews, social leaders condemn violence that is epistemic, systemic, militarised and that permeates all ambits of life. They denounce how the coloniality of power operates, while at the same time they propose alternatives for a better life from their own cosmovisions by enacting food sovereignty and constructing feminisms from ‘below’. I demonstrate how these social leaders’ actions are entangled in decolonial feminist struggles, which undermine the way in which women in the Global South have been constructed as ‘objects’ or ‘in need of saving’. These women are not ‘victims who need saving’, but politically active subjects who enact change locally and nationally through their ‘territories bodies-lands’. Not only do their narratives highlight the intimate relationship of the body with the land, but I argue that we must follow their lead in order to dismantle the coloniality of power.
Gendered geographies of elimination further settler colonialism's influence on conceptual discussions in human geography on contemporary forms of the place‐based death of indigenous peoples. Through work stemming from scholarship on the gendering of settler colonialism, this paper adds to narratives on place annihilation and dispossession of indigenous territory tied to the slow death of racialised, gendered and sexualised populations. Building on incipient reflections in geography with settler colonialism, I explore the geographic implications from the perspective of Epera women, indigenous women belonging to a trinational ethnicity experiencing elimination along the Ecuador–Colombia borderland from the perspective of decolonial feminist geography frameworks. I claim that attrition implied in settler colonialism's logic of elimination is a territorial project demonstrated in place‐based elimination and gendered embodied elimination.
This book examines the politics of harm in the context of palm oil production in Colombia, with a primary focus on the Pacific coast region. Globally, the palm oil industry is associated with practices that fit the most conventional definitions and perceptions of crime, but also crucially, forms of social and environmental harm that do not fit strictly legalistic definitions and understandings of crime. Drawing on rich field-based data from the region, Mol contributes empirically to an awareness of the constructions, practices, and the lived and perceived realities of harm related to palm oil production. She advances criminological debate around ‘harm’ by putting forward a theoretical and analytical approach that redirects the debate from a central concern with the academic contestedness of harm within criminology, towards a focus on the ‘on-the-ground’ contestedness of palm oil-related harm in Colombia. Detailed analysis and arresting conclusions ensure this book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the fields of Green and Critical Criminology, Environmental Sociology, and International and Critical Development Studies.
Millions of nonhuman animals (henceforth animals) are abducted from or killed in their nests, dens and habitats on a yearly basis. This transpires in large parts of the world, although for obvious reasons, it happens more in biologically dense and diverse areas, such as in the Amazonian or Indonesian rainforests, than in areas with less biodiversity or in those places where access by humans is limited. This chapter begins by providing an overview of the dynamics of the wildlife trade (WLT) and the means that are employed to prevent and control it on a global level.Next, I will focus on a study of illegal wildlife trade in Colombia and explore the different practices of wildlife exploitation in this country. In so doing, I will discuss the modus operandi of transgressors and consider whether wildlife trafficking offenders are participating in organized crime. After demonstrating that the basis for wildlife exploitation in Colombia is culturally and historically rooted, I will analyze wildlife trafficking from a species justice perspective. This chapter will conclude with a discussion of how to address the harms of the WLT.
Historically, the commodification of nature has been accompanied by, and resulted in, violent processes generating both human and environmental harm. Ever since colonial times, the plundering of natural resources has served the interests of powerful groups that have benefited from dehumanizing practices carried out in the name of civilization and discourses upheld by the western cultural and political project of modernity. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 (also known as the Congo Conference or the West Africa Conference), organized by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, various European states asserted their sovereignty over Africa and divided the continent into colonies. These declarations were fundamental to legitimizing the extraction of minerals from African territories that contributed to the industrial development of Europe and its role in world politics as a hegemonic actor.
We propose a new way of collectively creating data about gender violence through active participation and mapping women’s bodies and communities. We see this process of data creation, self-awareness and action as inherently linked to the native concept territorio cuerpo-tierra, the landscape of bodies-lands. The concept erases Western notions separating bodies and land and helps to decenter the public–private divide, which is an important obstacle to eliminating violence against women. Drawing on data from our work with Mexican women in the, U.S. and Mexico, we illuminate the continuity of women’s individual bodily experience of violence and collective spatial knowledge of community safety. We conclude that the process and outcomes of body and community mapping linking bodies and land, afford planners the prospect of engaging as partners and co-actants with community members in the goal of making places safe for women.
A new lie is sold to us as history. The lie about the defeat of hope, the lie about the defeat of dignity, the lie about the defeat of humanity. The mirror of power offers us equilibrium in the balance scale: the lie about the victory of cynicism, the lie about the victory of servitude, the lie about the victory of neoliberalism.
In this report I argue that environmental racism is constituent of racial capitalism. While the environmental justice movement has been a success on many levels, there is compelling evidence that it has not succeeded in actually improving the environments of vulnerable communities. One reason for this is because we are not conceptualizing the problem correctly. I build my argument by first emphasizing the centrality of the production of social difference in creating value. Second, I review how the devaluation of nonwhite bodies has been incorporated into economic processes and advocate for extending such frameworks to include pollution. And lastly, I turn to the state. If, in fact, environmental racism is constituent of racial capitalism, then this suggests that activists and researchers should view the state as a site of contestation, rather than as an ally or neutral force.
INTRODUCTION In an ironic twist, one of the most powerful challenges to globalization has come from the indigenous peoples whose localized, “pre-modern” existence was supposed to have crumbled under the pressure of modern capitalist projects – from that of the colonial project to that of the “development project” (McMichael 2000). Encapsulating the clashing forces of this historical short-circuit, the plight and transnational resistance of indigenous peoples expose with unique clarity the cultural, political, and legal issues at stake in the confrontation between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic globalization. Several reasons explain the visibility and importance of the indigenous peoples in such a confrontation. First, the indigenous movement involves populations historically subjected to the cruelest forms of exclusion. In Latin America, depending on the area, between 50 and 90 percent of the indigenous population died during the first century of the Spanish conquest, and few tribal groups survived the assimilationist policies of the postcolonial states (Kearney and Varese 1995). Today, albeit comprising the majority or a large portion of the population in several countries (71 percent in Bolivia, 66 percent in Guatemala, 47 percent in Peru, and 38 percent in Ecuador), indigenous peoples continue to be “the poorest of the poor” (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos 1994). In Guatemala, while 53.9 percent of the population is poor, 86.6 percent of indigenous people fall under the poverty line. © Cambridge University Press 2005 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
This article argues that within the context of settler colonialism, the goal of transitional justice must be decolonisation. Settler colonialism operates according to a logic of elimination that aims to affect the disappearance of Indigenous populations in order to build new societies on expropriated land. This eliminatory logic renders the death of Indigenous peoples “ungrievable”. Therefore, this article proposes a decolonising transitional justice premised on a politics of grief that (1) re-conceptualises Indigenous death as grievable, posing a challenge to the logic of elimination and advancing a “decolonisation of the mind”, and (2) resists a purely affective concept of grief in order to mobilise grief as a political resource to demand transformative structural justice. This article consider deaths at Canada’s Indian Residential Schools as a case study of ungrievability under settler colonialism and the Project of Heart as an illustration of a decolonising form of informal transitional justice.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explores the possibilities for decolonization through an analysis of the "multicultural" state as an ongoing practice of coloniality that recognizes and incorporates indigenous people but only as static, archaic figures defined by a continuous relationship to an idealized past. As Cusicanqui demonstrates, this truncated recognition subordinates indigenous people, depriving them of their contemporaneity, complexity, and dynamism and, therefore, of their potential to challenge the given order. Coloniality and its relations of domination, she claims, are also reproduced in the knowledge production of academic scholars of decoloniality, primarily from the global North. These academics, she argues, appropriate the language and ideas of indigenous scholars without grappling with the relations of force that define their relationships to them, thus decontextualizing and depoliticizing these concepts and marginalizing indigenous scholars from their own debates. Counterposing the Aymara concept of ch'ixi - a parallel coexistence of difference - to multiculturalism and hybridity, which incorporates and flattens or distorts difference, Cusicanqui shows that decolonization must be not only a discourse but also an affirmative practice.
Transitional justice has become the dominant international framework for redressing mass harm. To date, however, transitional justice has not adequately accounted for past colonial harms and their ongoing effects. How to confront and redress structural harm has been beyond the purview of its framework. Taking ongoing historical and structural harms against indigenous peoples in Australia as a reference point, we draw on the insights of settler colonial theory to propose a new justice model for transitional justice. We argue that a commitment to structural justice will enhance the ability of transitional justice to recognize and address structural injustice in settler colonial and other contexts. By elaborating the concept of structural justice with reference to postcolonial and settler colonial theory, this article sets out to support the development of a more robust theory of transitional justice. © The Authors (2014). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.