https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8322-0268
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Abstract
After more than 50 years of civil war, the lack of a clear itinerary, unanticipated crises, and contingencies are seriously affecting the termination of the longest-lasting internal war in Latin America. The 2016 Peace Agreement signed between former guerrilla group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP) and the Colombian Government established the ex-combatants’ reinsertion into civilian life as key to the quest for pacification. Doubtlessly, after their demobilisation, the fighters’ relocation and reintegration posed major challenges in this ongoing path to conflict resolution. The fragile implementation process is accompanied by countless practical obstacles, severe political obstructions, and vital insecurity problems. From 2017 to 2020, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork in several demobilisation camps (Espacios Territoriales de Capacitación y Reincorporación or ETCR), including the collection and analysis of photos, videos, and documents. In this article, we reconstruct the landmarks in the reinsertion process by focusing on the modifications of the use, and the symbolic production of spaces in two of these camps. Our research illuminates they ways in which the ex-combatants reconfigure their personal and social space. The results demonstrate that self-initiated spatial reconfiguration practices play a crucial role in the ex-combatants’ reintegration into Colombian civil society. These changes are embedded in the interaction with adjacent local communities, public authorities and national or international institutions. Our case study yields insights for research on transitions from war to peace in cognate contexts.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The data discussed in this article are based on the joint project ‘Peace Laboratories: Analysis of ZVTN and its occurrence in the normalization process of former FARC-EP combatants’, which involved researchers from Colombia, Germany, and Spain. Special thanks to all informants from ETCR Tierra Grata and ETCR Pondores for their collaboration. In this article, the authors use pseudonyms to protect them. Special thanks to our colleagues in this project, Andreas Hetzer and Ana-Lena Dießelmann, and their generosity in using their contributions for research. Raúl Fernández San Miguel, Luis Bernardo Bastidas, Helen Pach, Max Gropper, Tom Kaden, Ana Maria Diaz Jordan, and Valentina Villada Arteaga helped with data collection, analysis, and interpretation. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and Robert Glaser for his help with language revisions. A special thanks to Michael Soto, who conducted more extensive ethnographic fieldwork in two other ETCRs in the Department of Meta, for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Colombia has a Gini Index of 54, indicating high income inequalities, as the second-most unequal country in Latin America after Honduras (Gini Index of 52). During the series of ongoing nationwide protests that started on 28 April 2021, hundreds of victims lost their lives, and more than 200 persons remain disappeared. The economic, social, and political causes of the crisis are multiple: Inequality has worsened, and the economic impact of the pandemic has left 42% of Colombians living on less than $90 monthly (Rubiano Citation2021). Unemployment rates, especially amongst the youth, are very high. Moreover, Colombia hosts more than 2 million refugees from Venezuela. Finally, police brutality, human rights violations, and the unresolved peace process contribute to the protests.
2 Surprisingly, 50.21% of voters rejected the peace agreement with FARC. Consequently, the government initiated a process of renegotiating the agreement. The substantially modified Final Agreement to End the Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace was signed by the government and FARC-EP in a far less festive act on 24 November 2016 in Bogotá (cf. Charry Joya Citation2018, 85ff.).
3 In the 2018 election, FARC won 5 seats (out of 172) in the House of Representatives, and 5 (out of 108) in the Senate. Using the same acronym FARC while changing what it now stands for, namely, Fuerza Alternativa Revolucionaria del Común (Alternative Revolutionary Force), illustrates how continuities and changes coexists when transiting from military to civil logic.
4 According to the Peace Agreement
They aim to guarantee the CFHBD [Bilateral and definitive cease of fire and hostilities, for its acronym in Spanish] and DA [Arms surrendering, for its acronym in Spanish], and to initiate the process of preparation for the Reincorporation into civilian life of the FARC-EP structures in the economic, political and social spheres in accordance with their interests, as established in Point 3, sub-point 2 of the General Agreement, and the transition to legality (Final Agreement Citation2016, 62; our translation).
5 The concentration points served as short-term assembly spots from which the demobilised were to be taken to the camps and ceased to exist quickly.
6 We refer to all zones inhabited by the FARC-EP, initially called ZVTN and later ETCR, as ‘demobilisation camps’.
7 Note that Resolution No 4309 of the Agency for Reincorporation and Normalisation (ARN Citation2019), which established the reincorporation route, was not issued before the end of 2019.
8 As of July 2021, of the 13,997 persons accredited by the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, 9591 resided outside ETCRs, 2539 resided in ETCRs, 887 still to be located (ARN Citation2021). For an initial socioeconomic census cf. Universidad Nacional (Citation2017). According to the Fundación Ideas para la Paz, the three main reasons why ex-combatants left the ETCRs were fights, problems with the infrastructure, and the search for better opportunities in other areas (Garzón et al. Citation2019).
9 See also the documentary Tejiendo Autonomía about the ex-insurgents’ reintegration experience in ECTR Meta, directed by Julián Cortés, mechanical engineer, ex-insurgent of the FARC-EP, and PhD candidate in Social Sciences at Wageningen University (Cortés Citation2020).
10 We borrow this term from Goffman (Citation1983, 8), who refers to such encounters that cause life-changing, sometimes even historical consequences.
11 ‘In truth, the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other’ (Agamben Citation2005, 23).
12 Like the cooperative ECOMUN (Economías Sociales del Común), that was created to foster the implementation of social and solidarity economy initiatives.
13 ‘In fact, social space translates into physical space, but the translation is always more or less blurred: the power over space that comes from possessing various kinds of capital takes the form in appropriated physical space of a certain relation between the spatial structure of the distribution of agents and the spatial structure of the distribution of goods and services, private or public’ (Bourdieu Citation1999, 124).
14 Note that most FARC members, many of whom, since they were drafted as teens, have spent long period of their life, sometimes decades, in mobile combat units, living in tent camps, and moving around remote jungle areas, while hiding from military attacks. For them, the peace process does not only entail the transition from being fighters in a military unit to becoming citizens and civic subjects. It also involves abandoning the former ‘nomadic’ life for a more stationary one.
15 In August 2017, Pondores was officially renamed ETCR Amaury Rodríguez, in homage to a former FARC-EP commander who was killed in combat with the National Army.
16 In some documents, it figures as ETCR San José de Oriente, César or as ETCR Simón Trindad, in honour of Juvenal Ovidio Ricardo Palmera Pineda, alias ‘Simón Trinidad’, an economist and high-ranking member the FARC-EP, who was born in the nearby regional capital Valledupar in 1950. Captured in 2004, he was arrested and subsequently extradited to the USA, and sentenced to 60 years, and is currently being held in a supermax prison in Colorado. His case is emblematic of the problems associated with transitional justice.
17 This is known as a Junta de Accion Comunal (JAC), the typical local self-organized Community Action Board, which has a long tradition in Colombia as a basic unit of social organization at the community and village levels.
18 For a more thorough visual genre analysis of murals in both camps, including the political implications of the shifting visual imagery, see Bastidas and Pach (Citation2021).
19 See the insightful analysis of residents’ spatial appropriation and reconfiguration practices described by Steigemann and Misselwitz (Citation2020), who have studied the ‘practices of homemaking in a state of permanent temporariness’ in German refugee camps. Their research is part of the Berlin-based Collaborative Research Center CRC 1265 ‘Re-Figuration of Spaces’, which has developed a theoretically much more sophisticated concept of reconfiguration than the one we use in our research (see Knoblauch and Löw Citation2020).
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José Fernando Sánchez Salcedo
José Fernando Sánchez Salcedo, PhD in Sociology from Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, is a professor at Universidad del Valle, in Cali, Colombia. His research focuses on social theory and research methodology, with special emphasis on visual sociology. His interests include social communication, social bonds, professional trajectories, and the process of individualisation. Website: https://socioeconomia.univalle.edu.co
Bernt Schnettler
Bernt Schnettler, PhD in Sociology from TU Berlin, is a professor at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research is grounded in the neoclassical sociology of knowledge and inspired by phenomenology, hermeneutics, and ethnomethodology. It includes the advancement of methods for videography, and a number of visual studies on handwork and interaction, commemoration rituals, and visual knowledge presentations. Website: www.soz.uni-bayreuth.de