Moving with risk: Forced displacement and vulnerability to hazards in Colombia

The paper examines the processes through which people forced from their homes by conflict can become exposed to heightened risk from environmental hazards in the places where they resettle. It reports on research undertaken with internally displaced people who moved to informal settlements in four locations in Colombia. With one of the world’s largest displaced populations and a high annual incidence of hazard events such as landslides and floods, enabling people to create a durable sense of security in their places of resettlement is a major development challenge for the country. However, as the testimonies from individual experiences and perspectives makes clear, this problem is not one that can or should be addressed simply by enforcing existing land use and tenure regulations. The study combined qualitative interview methods with arts-based elements designed to facilitate and open up dialogue with research participants. We found that creating a permanent home, however modest, has symbolic meaning that reflects both personal struggle and collective effort: it represents security and stability, even in sites people know are associated with hazards. In tracing how they have interacted with multiple forms of risk, our work shows how displaced people have had to weigh up the threats they face against limited resettlement options, in an ongoing context of marginalisation. For complex reasons, this is a population that tends to be excluded from formal disaster preparedness and mitigation. However, there are indications that this prevailing situation could be challenged, promoting greater flexibility on the part of governmental organisations and enabling communities to become more engaged in disaster risk reduction. In bringing empirical depth to a topic of global significance at the intersection of displacement, disaster and development, we support the call for adaptable approaches to disaster risk management that can support displaced people more effectively and equitably

The key to peace is ours: Women's peacebuilding in twenty-first century Colombia

My dissertation investigates the role of women activists in the construction of peace in twenty-first century Colombia, combining a social movement studies framework with feminist, antimilitarist political economy. It is a a multi-method, feminist ethnography of three networks of women’s peace organizations founded in Colombia in the mid-1990s: Ruta Pacífica de Mujeres, the Movimiento Social de Mujeres Contra la Guerra y Por la Paz, and the Red de Mujeres del Caribe Colombiano. In it I show that by directing material and symbolic claims at the key structural foundations of armed conflict, women’s peace activism is fomenting a unfying, counterhegemonic social movement voice in the country. The dissertation is divided into two parts. The first traces the history of the women’s peace movement, and finds that it arose from a feminist movement born into armed conflict and have never had a safe space to operate. Since the 1990s the Colombian women’s movements have been joining to form national-level networks and gaining transnational legitimacy and visibility. Nonetheless, activists continue to face persistent challenges from within and without, beyond the persistence of war: notably, the concentration of movement resources among urban elites and the exclusion of feminists of color who live in outlying regions. Despite this, my dissertation argues that women peace activists are subverting many of the presumptions inherent to Colombia’s conflict and its longevity. In the second section, I identify four key personae on the stage of war and its discourse: confusion, victimhood, the body, and peace. I argue that each has played an important role in perpetuating and strengthening the patriarchal, militarized capital accumulation at the heart of the conflict, and that the activists under study are appropriating and reinterpreting these personae in such a way as to destabilize the foundations of war in the country. Using data gathered with several qualitative methodologies, including ethnographic observation, semistructured interviews, and archival research, I conclude that their organizing represents a potentially counterhegemonic, unifying social movement force that has the potential to play a transformative role in Colombia’s new reality