Some ethnographies of the state have analyzed issues concerning the state’s imagination, subjectivity and everyday practices in contexts of political violence (Aretxaga 2005; Krohn- Hansen 2008), and specifically in contexts of armed conflict (Das and Poole 2004; Sanford 2004; Ramírez 2011; 2015; 2019; Tate 2015) and post-conflict settings (Nelson 2004; Stolen 2005; Olson 2013). However, these contexts have been rather overlooked.
Analyzing the state by focusing on its margins (Das and Poole 2004; Sanford 2004; Ferme 2013; Olson 2013; DeLugan 2013; Okubo 2013) continues being an important theoretical approach to studying contexts where the state is often characterized by governments and even scholars as ‘failed’, ‘weak’, or ‘partial’. As Das and Poole (2004) point out, this approach invites us to analyze the political, regulatory and disciplinary practices that constitute the state in these contexts.
Nelson (2004) studies images of the postwar Guatemalan state from the margins by focusing on discourses of duplicity. The author points out that indigenous people see the state as two-faced: “one legitimate, the other criminal, corrupt, and murderous; one rational, the other irrational and magical” (p. 135). She points out that the image of the two faces appears in several postwar ethnographies in Guatemala as “people explain how they survived the government’s counterinsurgency campaigns” (p. 121).
Stolen (2005) presents an ethnographic account of state formation from the margins by focusing on returned refugees’ notions of the state in Guatemala. She examines the relationships between these peasants and the state as well as their perceptions during different stages of migration. She finds that these are not only relationships of antagonism and resistance but also of “active engagement in order to become included in the Guatemalan state” in the context of the post-peace accords (Stolen 2005:146).
Other ethnographic works examine the links between political violence and the subjectivity of the state (Aretxaga 2005) and the connections between the use of massive violence and terror by the Dominican state and the social and cultural production of legitimacy among Dominicans (Krohn-Hansen, 2008).
Aretxaga’s research (2005) links the analysis of political violence with the subjectivity of the state by addressing the topic of state terror in the case of ETA terrorism and the Spanish state. She emphasizes the “state being constructed as a subject of mimetic desire” and not as a “subject of the law or a rational subject.” Desire, fear, and subjectivity appear as an essential part of the state. The state is constructed as an “excitable body, a loosely connected ensemble of characters and bureaucracies held together by a phantasmatic identification with terrorism” (Aretxaga 2005:219).
Some anthropological works on the state point out that state building cannot be separated from the deployment of state violence (Krohn-Hansen and Nustad 2005). However, in his book about political authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic, Krohn-Hansen (2008) shows that although violence and terror were important for the Trujillo regime, they alone cannot explain its perdurability. The author argues that particular forms of masculinity, patronage, family, and
Olson (2013) analyzes the ways in which democracy promotion, supranational institutions, and encounters at the margins of the state shape how Ixiles in Guatemala experience the state in the aftermath of war. He argues that violence in the aftermath takes place in different ways at the margins of the Guatemalan state, including through the symbolic violence of secrecy as a routine practice and the violence of the new neoliberal government that recognizes human rights and multiculturalism at the time that it exacerbates poverty.
Ethnographic works conducted in the Colombian regions affected by armed conflict have analyzed state effects (Tate 2015), images of state absence and weakness (Tate 2015), militarism (Ramírez 2019), the meanings of the state for cocalero campesinos in a region where the state’s monopoly is contested by illegal armed actors (Ramírez 2011), and state imaginaries in frontier regions where the state is represented as absent (Ramírez 2015).
For example, in her study about the Plan Colombia, Tate points out that narratives about the absence and weakness of the state have been used to justify the ‘strengthening of the state’ and paramilitary forces, which were seen by some social sectors as necessary to fill the absence of the state. In practice, constructing the presence of the state “has meant the strengthening of the military apparatus,” without analysis of “what qualities of the state would be strengthened” (2015: 118).
By studying the relationships between cocalero peasants and the Colombian central state in a region where the state’s monopoly over violence is contested by guerrillas and paramilitary groups, Ramírez (2011) analyzes the intersections between the symbolic dimension and local meanings of the state and state violence. While the state treats the cocalero campesinos as criminals and sponsors military abuse of human rights, the state also provides “services and institutional space for citizen participation” (Ramirez 2011:181). Ramirez (2015) also shows that while frontier zones in Colombia are depicted as violent and characterized by the absence of the
state and lawlessness, state and non-state actors also employ violence in the center on an extensive scale.
Anthropological studies that focus on transitional justice question common assumptions such as the possibility of achieving reconciliation through transitional mechanisms (Hayden 2011) or critically discuss understandings and ideas regarding justice, truth commissions, and national reconciliation (Wilson 2003). Some studies examine truth commissions or reparations programs. For example, Theidon (2013) shows that the Peruvian Truth Commission brought a language of trauma that did not match local narratives of suffering in Quechua-speaking campesino communities. Ethnographic studies that examine the implications or effects of these mechanisms in terms of state-building, or how relationships between populations and specifically victims and state institutions or officials are shaped, are rather scarce.
For example, Buur (2001), in his research about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC) examines the relationships “between the ‘onstage’, visible, public spectacle of the SATRC process, and the ‘backstage’, invisible, inside of the bureaucratic machinery of truth production” (p. 150). He suggests that the ritualized public representations emerging from the public SATRC were effective performances of the new nation-state. However, there was also the invisible daily work of bureaucracies in the SATRC. This work was not only about finding the truth but also distinguishing between the relevant and the irrelevant truth or producing a bureaucratically constructed truth.
Beyers (2018) examines how land claim forms elicit emotional responses in land restitution processes. The author focusses on land claim forms as a site for observing encounters between the “newly constituted citizen and the transitional state.” Beyers points out that land restitution as a transitional program implemented in South Africa was designed to “help reconstitute the state as
a social fact and to redefine what it means to be a citizen.” However, processes of restitution are seen by claimants as complicated and bureaucratic and fail to deliver on promises of redress.
My research can also be located within the body of studies discussed above. I contribute to understanding relationships and encounters between campesino communities and officials, experiences of the state, state images, citizen-state relationships, and change and continuities regarding these aspects in contexts of transition from armed conflict to post-conflict conjunctures. Most of the studies mentioned above have focused on contexts of armed conflict or political violence with less exploration of relationships between populations and bureaucracies and state processes in contexts that are framed as post-conflict settings.
My research contributes not only to analyzing experiences of the state in rural communities during the last decade of the armed conflict in the context of violent state practices carried out in these communities, but also examines the present conjuncture by analyzing relationships and interactions between campesino communities and state actors in current state processes such as policies of reparations and the formulation of the PDET.