Ulrich Oslender’s research while affiliated with Florida International University and other places

This forum discusses the concept of ‘total peace’ (paz total) and the notion of ‘peace regions’ (regiones de paz) recently coined by the government of Colombia to advance in the implementation of the Peace Accords signed back in 2016 with the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces FARC. Broadly drawing on a radical and critical geopolitics perspective, the forum’s contributions offer a set of interpretations, exploring a wide range of different aspects, such as the relations with the previous concept of ‘territorial peace’ (paz territorial), the changing geographical dynamics of the armed conflict, the proliferation of unlawful armed structures and drug trafficking, and violent processes of capital accumulation. Moreover, specific themes such as environmental conflict, the political reintegration of the guerrillas, gender and differential approaches, and ethnic and peasant communities’ perspectives are also addressed, without losing sight of the more general question of the country’s territorial reordering.

La bonanza en los precios globales de las materias primas a comienzos del siglo XXI produjo un aumento importante de la inversión extranjera directa en América Latina, en especial en operaciones de minería a gran escala. Desde entonces ha aparecido un corpus de literatura crítica en torno al concepto de «neoextractivismo» que ha analizado esta nueva fase extractiva de recursos naturales en esta región del mundo. En este artículo, hacemos un análisis crítico del enfoque neoextractivista y de la relación entre la extracción de recursos y el desarrollo económico. Lo importante es el énfasis que nos proponemos hacer en que el enfoque neoextractivista no se configura mediante una postura analítica unificada. En su lugar, es heterogéneo, con diferentes énfasis que van desde la ecología política, la geografía, la sociología y la economía política. También argumentamos que las discusiones dentro de las diversas miradas al neoextractivismo indican algunas reelaboraciones de temas anteriores abordados en la teoría crítica latinoamericana, como la economía del desarrollo y en especial la teoría de la dependencia.

Colombia has the second largest black population in Latin America, after Brazil. Roughly 11 million Afro‐Colombians make up 26 percent of the national population today. While black resistance can be traced back to the early days of maroonage, Afro‐Colombian social movements began to significantly change the political landscape in Colombia with the passing of the country's new Constitution of 1991, which provided a new political opportunity structure for black mobilization. This entry uses a framing perspective to review the changing contexts for Afro‐Colombian mobilization, from an initial focus on social justice and racial equality, via ethnic‐territorial and human rights, to the implementation of Colombia's peace accords in the 2000s.

Discussions in decolonial literature have recently drawn on the concept of “ontological conflict” to reflect on the conflictual entanglements of diverse cosmologies. In Latin America (as elsewhere) these conflicts are frequently of a territorial nature, with indigenous and black communities making claims to communal land rights as indispensable part of their respective ways of being-in-the-world, which the post-colonial state has increasingly begun to acknowledge, often in the form of new political constitutions. In this article I examine the role of cartography in the resolution of such ontological conflicts; in particular a participatory mapping exercise in Colombia known as “social cartography,” which aims to challenge dominant cartographic representations and empowering local communities vis-à-vis the state. At the same time, I reflect on the limits of such an emancipatory vision and on the ways in which Colombia's version of counter-mapping has been coopted by dominant power. Inspired by the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality framework, I contextualize this experience within other radical mapping exercises, or “cartographies otherwise,” in places such as Australia, Palestine and the Straits of Gibraltar, to finally suggest that the art of decolonizing cartography may be seen as a tool of Hardt & Negri's project of a multitude in resistance.

Miami is not a newcomer to the history of gentrification that has reshaped the urban fabric in cities all over the world. Yet a new mega project to be implemented in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood represents a strategic capitalist modification of the city’s previous processes of class-based and racialized socio-territorial dispossession and displacement. As we argue in this paper, Little Haiti’s Magic City Innovation District stands emblematic for a global boom in financialized urban corporate accumulation, which presents new challenges to local communities. We ask, what practical political options does a predominantly poor minority community have in confronting such challenges? Our discussion of Miami’s Little Haiti suggests two conclusions: first, that real estate mega speculation potentially exacerbates politico-social divisions within such a community, subverts its capacity for resistance, and renders it more vulnerable to large-scale dispossession and displacement; and second, that mega speculation exacerbates socio-territorial divisions and inequalities within the fabric of a wider metropolis.

Michael Taussig, Palma Africana (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), pp. 258, $25.00, pb. - Volume 52 Issue 2 - Ulrich Oslender

Recent debates in decolonial thinking have engaged the notion of the pluriverse to question the concept of universality at the heart of Western epistemology and hermeneutics that has historically underpinned processes of colonial domination and exploitation. The idea of the pluriverse calls for a coexistence of many worlds as an acknowledgment of the entanglements of diverse cosmologies. These entanglements are often of a conflictual nature, in that different ways of being in the world are intricately linked through the colonial matrix of power, leading to what has been termed ontological conflicts. Although much of this literature on decoloniality is highly sophisticated on a conceptual level, it often displays a dearth of ethnographic evidence, which would strengthen its theoretical claims. In this article I attend to this critique by first reviewing the principal arguments regarding the pluriverse and ontological conflicts to then offer an in-depth examination of what such a pluriverse might actually look like in particular places. For this I examine the world in the Pacific coast region of Colombia that is constituted through what I call the aquatic space—an assemblage of relations resulting from human entanglements with an aquatic environment characterized by intricate river networks, significant tidal ranges, and labyrinthine mangrove swamps. This aquatic space, I argue, has informed the political organization of Afro-Colombian communities in the region in a conflict with capitalist modernity, which, crucially, is not merely about land rights and resource extraction but an ontological conflict over ways of being in the world. I finish by suggesting that the pluriverse constitutes a third space, challenging our accustomed ways of thinking spatially and ontologically. Key Words: Afro-Colombia, aquatic space, coloniality of power, modernity, third space.

La pregunta que este número de Astrágalo quiere responder no es la vacuidad de la lucha en un mundo con pocas alternativas, sino el papel que le correspondería a la arquitectura como resistencia, desde una perspectiva histórica y de prácticas proyectuales y cívicas, y si es posible mantenerla hoy. En un contexto de espacialidades de la instantaneidad y de continua transformación (mutación) de tejidos y morfologías urbanas, de alteración de estructura jerárquica de un territorio urbano multiescalar –debemos dejarlo claro-, muchos de los mecanismos y acciones de resistencia ya se han reabsorbido y no se les presume utilidad alguna. En continuidad con el número 24, Estéticas de la globalización: Apogeo y resistencias, el comité editorial quiere encontrar una voz sin anuencia que pueda acondicionar un hacer, frente a esa lógica mundializada en la particularidad “regional-global” de América Latina.