Véronique Benei (London
School of Economics)
Civil form(ul)ations: Negotiating state bureaucracy among “internally displaced people” in Colombia
This paper focuses on the civil procedures involved in the making of the status of desplazado in Colombia. Colombia today has one of the highest rates of internally displaced people; these often flee the violence perpetrated by paramilitary and/or guerilla groups and find refuge in nearby towns where they can get themselves registered as ‘displaced’ in order to access various forms of aid (material, financial, and psychological in the most exhaustive of cases). Not all displaced people do avail themselves of these possibilities, however. Those who do go through lengthy administrative procedures and many bureaucratic hurdles, not only to prove their status but also to access some of the aid scheduled for them. In all these negotiations documentation becomes a crucial node in constructing regimes of truth while simultaneously producing the category of the desplazado. Foremost in the negotiation of these state procedures is the language in which both claims, demands and appeals on the one hand, and official replies and requests for more evidence on the other, are couched. Focusing on several key documents and case studies, I explore the variegated ways in which these negotiations are undergirded by (mis)understandings of shared humanity and idioms of civility harking back to colonial times and crucial to the contemporary production of a discourse of citizenship.
