Filtered violence: Human rights law, forced displacement and land politics in Colombia

Abstract

How does human rights law arbitrate the spatial dimensions of violence? This paper broaches this question from a “critical geographies of human rights” standpoint to grapple with how human rights law defines the spatial dimensions of the very violence it sets out to confront. Through a focus on Colombia’s 2011 “Victims’ and Land Restitution Law” (the Victims’ Law), I demonstrate how human rights law does not just attempt to ameliorate legacies of violence, but that it circumscribes the spatial valences of violence in particular ways. Colombia has one of the world’s largest displaced populations and since 2011 has managed an extensive restitution program designed to restore land title to conflict victims who lost or sold property due to armed conflict. In this case, human rights law is productive of a “juridical gaze” that illuminates the spatial dynamics of forced displacement in a manner that obscures or only indirectly addresses the relationship between forced displacement and inequality in land ownership. Drawing on contemporary debates concerning the relationship between human rights and neoliberal inequality, I argue that that human rights law produces spatial renderings of violence that reflect the underlying degree to which human rights projects recognize or eschew material inequality and its relationship to violence.