Law and Violence in the Colombian Post-Conflict: State-Making in the Wake of the Peace Agreement

Colombia's 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC guerrilla extends beyond the end of the war, and beyond measures for the disarmament, demobilization and reincorporation of former guerrillas. A large portion of the agreement is dedicated to the extension of the presence of the Colombian State into those areas of the country formerly under FARC control. The premise behind this extension, shared by Colombian elites as much as by former guerrilla leaders, is that if the State remains absent, then the areas will be occupied by criminal organizations interested in controlling the FARC cocaine trade, and, more generally, the vast and sparsely populated territories will further descend into barbarism. This premise resonates with a long arc of persistent aspiration for a national identity that is shaped by the opposition between civilization and barbarism. The expansion of civilization has, especially since the transformations effected by Colombia's 1991 Constitution, been increasingly identified with the expansion of the rule of law, and hence with law's mythical powers to order society and control barbarism. Violence is then equated to lawlessness, and the remedy for violence equated with the expansion of the Estado social de derecho, the State that embodies the rule of law in the Colombian Constitution. The foundational narrative of civilization versus barbarism, inherited by the hopes placed on the rule of law, and on the recipes for State-building, by the 2016 Peace Agreement, continues to obscure the continuities between law and violence, and particularly the fact that the execution of legal institutions in formerly " lawless" territories continues to enact the violent moment of the adoption of legality. Both theoretical and empirical explorations of the present process of the expansion of the Colombian State requires critical examination of the hopes vested on law, a critical examination that needs to engage with the many continuities between law and violence explored in contemporary political philosophy, and developed in Jean and John Comaroff's ethnography. The productivity of this approach is highlighted in the essays in this dossier, which share the impulse to interrupt the foundational narrative of civilization and barbarism that remains in the institutions of the present post-conflict endeavor.