The coloniality of violence: How transnational capital (re)produces violence against women in Colombia
By: Julia Sachseder, 2019 IFJP Enloe Award Winner
In late 2016, the Colombian former government under Santos and the left-wing guerrilla FARC, the state’s oldest and best-known enemy, have announced a ceasefire deal to end one of the lengthiest conflicts in the Western hemisphere. The war has claimed more than 220.000 lives, and displaced more than seven million people many of whom experienced sexual violence. While violence against women occurred everywhere and across all socio-economic classes, it was disproportionately directed against women who were racialized as Black or Indigenous in resource-rich areas. Clearly, these women were caught up in the crossfire between a decentralized set of multiple actors, including guerrilla groups, state military forces, drug-traffickers and paramilitaries. My research, however, points to the centrality of the latter in the overall (re)production of the very conditions of violence: Paramilitaries not only operated under the behest of drug-traffickers and the Colombian state itself but also exerted violence to enforce displacement of people in order to “clear” fertile land in the interest of (global) economic actors such as transnational corporations (TNCs).
Since the 1980s, peace negotiations have repeatedly but unsuccessfully taken place with various armed groups, including, notably, the 2003 demobilization of the right-wing paramilitary. It is therefore the 2016 peace agreement that has fostered the most optimism that peace will finally be achieved in the postcolonial country given the deal’s unprecedented focus on issues of gender, race, class, land, and other structural sources of inequality.
Farc Camp
Yet, such optimism might have been premature regarding the persistence of structural and overt violence in the post-conflict reconstruction. Since the peace agreement, more than 700 social activists and 140 FARC ex-combatants have been assassinated, massacres have increased, forced displacement has continued, and sexual violence has remained high in both the private and public sphere. Most of the violence, which has disproportionately affected Indigenous and Afro-descendant women, can be linked to paramilitary groups.
These dynamics already indicate that the peace deal in Colombia may at best establish peace for a few, but perpetuates a continuum of violence for many, particularly in Colombia’s remote areas. The lack of scholarly and public attention to the persistence of violence against women however raises several concerns as to the mechanisms that produce and simultaneously render it invisible: How is it possible that violence continues at the same time as the peace agreement is celebrated within and outside Colombia? How is it possible that raping and displacing serve as such facile instruments to secure political and economic interests – and why is it so easy to get away with it without sanctions?
An ethnography of violence against women in Colombia’s armed conflict
Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in multiple conflict-affected zones in Colombia in 2016 and 2017, I shed light on structural – particularly on gendered, racialized and economic – forces that have rendered possible, yet invisible overt and structural violence in Colombia. These forces contribute to the persistence of violence against women and reinforce a system of intersectional power relations without being prevented, and sometimes even actively supported through cooperation by the Colombian state, as well as local and global (economic) actors, including paramilitaries, drug-traffickers and TNCs.
In particular, TNCs, drug-traffickers, and the state act as three kinds of “investors” in land yet to be “cleared for investment.” These entities contract paramilitaries respectively for various purposes, however, eventually (and perhaps implicitly) with the intention to outsource violence to clear land 1) for the implementation of mega-projects (such as those by large companies), 2) for the cultivation and trade of drugs, and 3) for maintaining the state’s own persistence and the country’s position in the global market. To achieve these ends, paramilitaries target those most easily to intimidate, including Afro-descendant and Indigenous groups and, among them, particularly women. In this context, sexual violence must not be simply understood as a by-product of armed conflict, but rather as an integral part of this intimidation, serving as a “fast and easy” strategy of displacement. Paramilitaries prove particularly suitable to do the “labor” of displacing and raping because they form part of a political economy of material power and profit based on the exploitation and appropriation of land. This economic project is deeply intertwined with a symbolic political economy of (hyper)masculinity that not only displays contempt for and even violence towards traits of men that were associated with femininity but also against those who were signified as the “Other”.
In a regional context of deeply entrenched colonial legacies that constitute differential subjectivities, paramilitaries exploit and instrumentalize women’s racialized identity as sexually available, constantly ready, and fundamentally promiscuous. Such gendered and racialized constructions of the “Other” women contribute to the perception that they are subordinated and inferior and thus not fully human, constructing them as primary targets of violence to clear fertile land. From this perspective, the political economy of sexual violence and displacement is deeply entangled and intersects with racist and sexist global ideologies, practices and structures that are (re)productive of violence itself.
Overall, Colombia is a prime example for how TNCs have become a central actor in the armed conflict leading to an increase in displacement and sexual violence. Their involvement in capital accumulation and land acquisition has not only been essential for Colombia's political economy and its position in the global market. Their presence also perpetuated local power relations that pushed already marginalized communities further into the cycle of violence. The strong cooperation between state armed forces and its unofficial extension, the paramilitaries, works to protect large-scale TNCs that continue to directly and indirectly contribute to violence in Colombia. As the appropriation of land may further enrich local and global actors, they may have a vested interest in the maintenance of the state of violence despite the officially declared peace in 2016.
Considering these correlations, it is – in the end – little surprising that violence against women multiplicates and disproportionately affects Afro-descendant and Indigenous women, particularly in those zones that have previously been sites of violent colonization and in which nowadays global economic actors operate with local entities for the production of profit and power. It facilitates the production of profit for TNCs, drug-traffickers, the state and paramilitaries, and helps continuously to foster a relation of structural and often overt violence in “post-conflict” Colombia.
Read the full article online here: Cleared for investment? The intersections of transnational capital, gender, and race in the production of sexual violence and internal displacement in Colombia’s armed conflict
Julia Sachseder is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. She specializes in critical and feminist political economy as well as post-, and decolonial approaches to (in)security and political violence. In her doctoral thesis “The coloniality of violence: The intersections of transnational capital, gender and race in the production of violence against women in Colombia’s armed conflict”, Julia explored the relationship between structural – gendered, racialized and economic – forces in the production of sexual violence and internal displacement as (neo)colonial forms of appropriation and domination.
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