Reincorporation Zones as Liminal Spaces: Gendered Contestations from Northeast Colombia

Keywords: Colombia, Borderlands, Embodiment, Female Ex-guerrilleras, Peace, Gender
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 25

Abstract

This paper is about how gendered contestations occur in liminal spaces between ‘peace’ and ‘war’, resisting conventional understandings of peacebuilding. It delves into the embodied-emotional experience of female ex-combatants in their reincorporation to civilian society in the northeastern region of Colombia.

Catatumbo and Arauca have been historically spaces categorized as violent. Territory of the violent global transnational capitalism in the case of Catatumbo (Hristov, 2015) and of the historical presence of guerrilla groups in the case of Arauca (HWR, 2020), those regions have been understudied and abandoned by the Colombian State. Even if a peace agreement was signed in 2016 with the Farc-ep, it feels no peace in those regions. But it is not an open war either: those territories are examples of a long-standing war-peace continuum taking place in Colombia, eluding any dichotomous analysis.

In this war-peace continuum, female ex-Farc-ep are engaged in reorienting their armed struggle into a nonviolent one. The paper shows that reincorporation zones are liminal spaces where gendered contestations of the binary division between war and peace occur. I draw upon fieldwork conducted in Colombia in Filipinas and Caño Indio reincorporation zones and the proposal of Nieto-Valdivieso (2020) to extend Anzaldúa’s borderlands theoretical framework to female ex-combatants return to civilian society. Following Nieto-Valdivieso, I argue that reincorporation zones are liminal spaces or “in-between worlds” in a continuum between military/civilian, individual/collective, combatant/citizen, etc. They are, ultimately, spaces of embodied, emotional and feminist contestations where peace is being rethought from care economies, insurgent femininities and endogenous projects.