Violence and Democracy in Colombia The Conviviality of Citizenship Defects in Colombia’s Nation-State

Abstract

This essay aims to utilize the concept of conviviality for connecting the coexistence of seemingly contradictory phenomena in Colombia. It argues that while conviviality implies a normative content – a society in which members do not slaughter each other is better than one in which members resort to violence – the meekness of that normative claim suggests that it is better used as an analytical tool that seeks to connect the contradictions that coexist in the real lifeworld. Colombia’s history of violence and democracy is such a contradictory case. Comparativists have situated Colombia’s deficits on the “extra-institutional playing field”, lamenting that it is a “besieged” or “threatened democracy”. Conviviality helps us to specify these “extra-institutional” defects by suggesting impediments exogenous and endogenous to the state-building logic of the Colombian nation-state.

Interspecific Contact Scenes: Humans and Street Dogs in the Margins of the City

“…At first sight, a biopolitical take on animals might seem to reinforce the nature-culture divide. Against such an assumption, one can consider with Giorgio Agamben (Agamben 2004(Agamben [2002: [33][34][35][36][37][38] that the "bare life" of animals is nothing natural but a political act of dividing life into two seemingly separate spheres: social life (bios) on the one hand and the "bare" life (zoé)…”

“…Living out in the woods together with a pack of dogs is, in La mujer de los perros, by no means a scenario of regression into a "feral" state of evolution but, on the contrary, the possible starting point for a basic inventory of alternative scenes of interspecific conviviality where the opposition of owning dogs on the one hand and belonging to their collective on the other hand ultimately becomes, if not meaningless, at least secondary in relation to the ongoing process of differentiation of the relationship between the woman and the dogs. 33 This relation cannot only be described in terms of interaction between different species but also as an "intra-action" (Barad 2007) within one collective.…”

Inequidades y convivialidades en movimiento La familia y los inicios de la migración del Triángulo Norte de Centroamérica hacia los Estados Unidos

“…En Centroamérica, en las décadas de 1950 y 1960, la edad promedio de las madres registró el extremo más bajo (18 a 21 años). Pero en 1993, entre las mujeres de 15 a 19 años se observaron tasas alarmantes de fecundidad superiores a 100 por 1,000 en Honduras, El Salvador y Guatemala (Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe 1993: [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39].…”