Suchergebnisse

AbstractThinking about justice beyond law involves understanding justice as a process that campesinos (peasants) in Colombia link to aspirations for a good life. I argue that environmental justice draws on distinctive temporalities and spatial scales. By temporality, I refer to how campesinos think about justice as a process to overcome their long history of community injustice, not as a reversal of a single event or action. I also refer to campesinos' everyday life, through which they define the territorial management underlying their enduring social inequality. Justice does not entail fixed spatial scales but rather the interplay between forms of state and local spatial orderings that may clash or coexist. These spatial‐temporal dimensions have crucial consequences for addressing environmental justice, such as redress beyond individual compensation; thinking about scale beyond legal frameworks of jurisdiction; reflecting on the unequal distribution of responsibilities for environmental changes; and addressing notions of response‐ability—that is, the capacity of campesinos to respond, not only to react, with both patience and urgency to socio‐environmental harms.

This working paper is the result of a preliminary analysis of a research project that aims to understand the articulations between local state formation, development and violence. Such articulations are generative of a certain form of governance and of a political subjectivity mainly shaped within the language of neoliberalism. This entails a limited form of state intervention through development projects that leave most of the responsibility to guarantee well-being and even life itself to local inhabitants. As a secondary, and more preliminary line of analysis, I address how within such complex articulations we can understand mechanisms of social inequality (distanciation, exclusion, hierarchization). The specific scenario under study is located in the Colombian Caribbean Coast, where an alternative project on coca eradication was implemented. This project had the stated purpose of forging new relationships between local peasant communities and state institutions and creating new livelihood possibilities.

This article addresses the complex legal endeavour to shape the frontiers between two of the most fundamental liberal rights in multicultural nation states: the right to cultural difference and the right to religious freedom in Colombia. I follow one dispute, between members of the indigenous Arhuaco group who are Evangelical Christians and their indigenous local authorities. This example illuminates longstanding debates surrounding the relationship between religion and politics within legally plural states. I put together different scales of analysis for understanding: (i) the legal definition of the right to religious freedom and the right to ethnic cultural difference as private or public and individual or collective; (ii) the debate about the political meaning of religious practice by studying, for example, how it relates to claims over inequality and land access; and (iii) the importance of understanding the meaning of conversion for addressing the legal difficulty of creating a sustainable boundary between these two rights.

The practice of multiculturalism in Colombia is exercised within complex disputes and claims arising among many social actors, beneficiaries or not of differential rights. This article addresses two paradoxes of the political arrangements of multiculturalism in Colombia related to the spatialization of indigenous difference and its political implications. The first one refers to the way in which a legal indigenous subject is shaped, using the fact that an indigenous person lives in "his/her" rural reservation as one of the main features. The second paradox is the political isolation that has taken shape between indigenous peoples and peasants. In this way, I try to prove the importance of studying not only the cultural policies, but also the political culture which enables and builds multiculturalism. ; La práctica del multiculturalismo en Colombia se ejerce en el contexto de complejas disputas y reclamos provenientes de diferentes actores sociales, beneficiarios o no de derechos diferenciales. En este artículo se estudian dos paradojas de los arreglos políticos del multiculturalismo en Colombia, relacionadas con la forma como se espacializa la diferencia indígena; y con ellas, se examinan sus implicaciones políticas. La primera paradoja es la forma como se juzga quién es o no un sujeto indígena legal, utilizando como una de las características predominantes el que un indígena viva en "su" resguardo rural. La segunda paradoja es el aislamiento político que se ha configurado entre indígenas y campesinos. De esta forma, se pretende demostrar la relevancia de estudiar no solo las políticas culturales, sino también la cultura política que posibilita y construye el multiculturalismo.

Multiculturalism, constructed as a liberal utopia intended to recognize marginal populations, commonly draws upon deceptive mechanisms that reify the old trope of anthropological "savage slots" (a term borrowed fromTrouillot 2003). Such slots configure the relationship between politics and places: the fixation of ethnicity in a territory and the creation of strong frontiers—both physical and symbolic—between grantees and nongrantees of differential citizenships. In the case analyzed in this article, those frontiers reify the distinction between peasants and indigenous peoples; two group categories widely mobilized in the context of indigenous land expansion in the northern region of Colombia (South America). This article explores how an environmental "utopic space" used by state institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), has turned into a fetish that hides a segment of Colombia's most dramatic reality: the violent context wherein paramilitary threats force small peasant landholders to sell and leave their land.

AbstractThe installation of cable cars as part of slum beautification projects has begun to circulate among politicians, planners and residents as a magical solution that offers social and economic integration to historically marginalized urban areas. This paper analyzes the way in which a cable car project became a fetish for the inhabitants, politicians and planners ofCazucá, a very deprived, abandoned and stigmatized area on the outskirts ofBogotá,Colombia. The highly positive value given to the cable car project must be understood within the specific local context without judging its 'false promises' a priori. The promise of the cable car inCazucá reveals at least two crucial political reasons for the current potency of such projects: a complex history of political failures and the political value cable cars have acquired nationally and internationally. We analyze how, for both residents and politicians, the mere possibility of a cable car awakened long neglected desires for visibility and created new ones, such as those related to tourism. They see the cable car as an 'engine for social change', a way to ensure the commitment of national and international funds, and a venue to brand the city on a global scale.