Humanitarian Bureaucracies in Colombia: Technical Knowledge and Political Disputes in the Implementation of the Victims and Land Restitution Law
No. 81 (2022-07-01)Author(s)
-
Juan Pablo Vera LugoPontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia.
Abstract
Through an ethnographic study of the policy of reparation to victims in Colombia, this article examines the processes of the production of expert knowledge along different scales and disputes of humanitarian bureaucracies in Colombia. These emerge from the institutional deployment of development and peacebuilding paradigms, at least since 1982, with the creation of the National Rehabilitation Plan (PNR), the Social Solidarity Network (RSS) in 1994, the Presidential Agency for Social Action and International Cooperation in 2002, and the Department of Social Prosperity (DPS) in 2011. With the subjugation of some paramilitary groups in 2006 (Justice and Peace Law), the Victims and Land Restitution Law in 2011, and the peace agreements with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People’s Army (FARC-EP) guerrillas in 2016, transitional institutions associated with truth, justice, and reparation proliferated, and with them, specific bureaucracies and expertise. Thus, the article specifically examines the technical and political tensions between different professional and ideological configurations associated with the implementation of reparations policy and how these disputes are essential to understanding the moral and ideological dimensions of humanitarianism and development in Colombia. It also studies the role of cooperation agencies in inter-institutional strengthening as a specific dimension of the formation of the Colombian State. These articulations configure a moral economy of humanitarianism characterized by institutional experimentalism and the formulation of social projects, expectations, plans, and ideas that never reach the status of having been realized. This strips such policies of any transformative or emancipatory potential. Thus, from an ethnographic perspective, the article provides an account of the techno-political tensions of humanitarian bureaucracies at the middle scales of regional, national, and global institutional structures.
References
Abrams, Philip. 1988. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State”. Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1): 58-89. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-6443.1988.tb00004.x
Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”. En Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 127-186. Nueva York: Monthly Review Press.
Benjamin, Walter, HannahArendt y HarryZohn. 1968. Illuminations. Nueva York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Boyer, Dominic. 2005. “Visiting Knowledge in Anthropology”. Ethnos 70 (2): 141-148. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141840500141097
Buchely, Lina. 2015. Activismo burocrático: la construcción cotidiana del principio de legalidad. Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes.
Crick, Malcolm R. 1982. “Anthropology of Knowledge”. Annual Review of Anthropology 11: 236-313. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.11.100182.001443
Das, Veena y DeborahPoole. 2004. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present Times. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fassin, Didier y MariellaPandolfi. 2010. Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions. Nueva York: Zone Books.
Feldman, Ilana y MiriamTicktin. 2010. In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ferguson, James. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Nueva York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. Londres: Penguin.
Gupta, Akhil. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham: Duke University Press.
Gupta, Akhil y AradhanaSharma. 2006. “Globalization and Postcolonial States”. Current Anthropology 47 (2): 277-307. https://doi.org/10.1086/499549
Krupa, Christopher. 2010. “State by Proxy: Privatized Government in the Andes”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (2): 319-350. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751000006X
Lipsky, Michael. 1980. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. Nueva York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Meister, Robert. 2012. After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. Nueva York: Columbia University Press.
Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories / Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity.Berkeley: University of California Press.
MitchellTimothy. 2006. “Society, Economy and the State Effect”. En The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, editado por AradhanaSharma y AkhilGupta, 169-186. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2004. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
ONU (Organización de las Naciones Unidas, Asamblea General). 2006. “Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly: Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law”. 21 de marzo, A/RES/60/147. http://www.refworld.org/docid/4721cb942.html
Petryna, Adriana. 2009. When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina. Buenos Aires: Clacso.
Rabinow, Paul. 1991. The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. Londres: Penguin.
Riles, Annelise. 2005. “A New Agenda for the Cultural Study of Law: Taking on the Technicalities”. Buffalo Law Review 53: 973-1025.
Serje, Margarita. 2013. “El mito de la ausencia del Estado: la incorporación económica de las ‘zonas de frontera’ en Colombia”. Cahiers des Amériques Latines 71: 95-117. https://doi.org/10.4000/cal.2679
SNARIV (Sistema Nacional de Asistencia y Reparación Integral a las Víctimas del Conflicto). 2014. “Aplicativo del Sistema Nacional de Asistencia y Reparación Integral a las Víctimas del Conflicto”. Viva la Ciudadanía, IIDH, Uariv. http://plataforma.viva.org.co/media/cartillas/Aplicativo_SNARIV.pdf
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Nueva York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vera, Juan Pablo. 2016. “Transitional Justice, Memory and the Production of Legal Subjectivities in Contemporary Colombia”. En Sense of Justice in Latin America, editado por Karen AnnFaulk y SandraBrunnegger, 25-49. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Vera, Juan Pablo. 2017. “The Humanitarian State: Bureaucracy and Social Policy in Colombia”. Tesis doctoral, Rutgers State University of New Jersey.
Wanderley, Fernanda. 2009. “Prácticas estatales y el ejercicio de la ciudadanía: encuentros de la población con la burocracia en Bolivia”. Íconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales 34: 67-79. https://doi.org/10.17141/iconos.34.2009.334
Weber, Max. 1963. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Traducción, edición e introducción por HansGerth y C. WrightMills. Nueva York: Oxford University Press.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.