¿Mantendrá la noción de amenaza una influencia decisiva sobre la política colombiana en el postconflicto?

Austin Zeiderman argumenta que la relación entre Estado y ciudadanía en Colombia ha girado alrededor de amenazas y se pregunta cómo cambiará la vida política en el país si el proceso de paz las mitiga

Will the politics of threat carry over into post-conflict Colombia?

Focusing on the politics of urban security in Bogotá, Austin Zeiderman argues that the relationship between the Colombian state and its citizens is structured around threats soon to be alleviated by the peace process, raising questions about the future of the country’s politics

Beyond the enclave of urban theory

This essay offers a methodological intervention into conceptual debates in urban studies. Despite significant analytical and political differences across an otherwise heterodox field of inquiry, these debates have been overly confined to a theoretical register. In this essay, I propose an alternative, inspired by Stuart Hall, which focuses on the concrete work accomplished by our key concepts in specific historical conjunctures. I make this argument with reference to my own research in Colombia, focusing specifically on racialized violence and displacement in the port‐city of Buenaventura. I argue that Hall's method, particularly his work on ‘race’, offers a way to engage questions of global urbanism without necessarily treating them as theoretical questions. Like ‘race’ in Hall's analysis, concepts like the ‘urban’ and the ‘global’ are ‘articulating principles’ of social formations, producing both discursive and material effects, and possessing social, cultural and political lives of their own. Alongside efforts to democratize the privilege of thinking and speaking in the language of ‘theory’, Hall's method exposes that privilege to more fundamental questioning

In the wake of logistics: situated afterlives of race and labour on the Magdalena River

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted aboard a cargo boat on Colombia’s Magdalena River, and on historical accounts of fluvial transport, this article examines the racial formations on which logistics depends. Logistics is organized around flows at the heart of capitalist modernity, which are made possible by labour regimes whose racial underpinnings have both persisted and changed over time. Tracking continuities and divergences in riverboat work along the Magdalena River, I propose that our understanding of logistics is enriched by attending to historical articulations of race and labour. Inspired by scholars who reckon with the afterlives of racial slavery as well as by those who track precisely how that legacy unfolds in geographically and historically situated ways, I propose the analytic of situated afterlives, which focuses attention on the persistence of racial hierarchies and on their perpetual instability

Urban futures: idealization, capitalization, securitization

This article offers an analytical reflection on how urban futures have been imagined throughout history and into the present. Considering this question at a global scale, it examines the place of urbanization within the development of the modern/colonial order, accounting for the imagined futures that have supported this world-historical process. Three thematic sections—idealization, capitalization, and securitization—frame the discussion. Capturing desires for societal betterment alongside attempts to extract economic value and imperatives to govern anticipated threats, these heuristics provide insight into forms of urban future-making and future-thinking that continue to reverberate across contemporary projects, debates, and struggles. This lays the groundwork for the critical analysis of urban futures that identifies what is at stake in imagining the future of cities in one way rather than another

Submergence: precarious politics in Colombia's future port-city

This article examines popular politics under conditions of protracted precarity in the rapidly expanding port-city of Buenaventura on Colombia’s Pacific coast. It begins by identifying the intersecting economic, ecological, and political forces contributing to the precarity of life in Buenaventura’s intertidal zone. Focusing on conflicts over land in the waterfront settlements of Bajamar (meaning “low-tide”), it then describes the efforts of Afro-Colombian settlers and activists to defend their territories against threats of violence and displacement. In doing so, they must navigate historical legacies of ethno-racial politics as well as formations of liberal governance and their multicultural and biopolitical logics of vulnerability and protection. The socio-material conditions of the intertidal zone, and in particular the figure of submergence, are used to illuminate the forms of political life in Colombia’s future port-city. The struggles of Afro-Colombians to contest violent dispossession in Buenaventura reflect the racialized politics of precarity under late liberalism

Antropología y ciudad: hacia un análisis crítico e histórico

Departing from a theoretical discussion of the relationship between anthropology and the city, we problematize the foundations of both urban and anthropological studies. Rather than viewing the city as a stable and universal category, we emphasize the possibilities anthropology has to approach cities as products of historically-situated social practices. We illustrate this proposal by focusing on urbanistic projects in the city of Bogotá during three historical moments and by analyzing contemporary imaginations of the cities of the future

Security, uncertainty, and urban futures: a conversation with Austin Zeiderman

How has the opposition between “civilized” urbanity and “barbaric” rurality conditioned future imaginaries in Latin America? What are the historical links between urbanization and attempts to establish social and spatial order during colonization, after independence, and in other political conjunctures? In the following conversation, anthropologist Austin Zeiderman reviews historical perspectives on Latin American cities with a focus on the future. With an interest in the genealogy of urban imaginaries, he sheds light on contemporary preoccupations with future uncertainty and the specific role that security plays therein. Ever since the conquistadors set foot on the continent, he argues, the future has exerted affective power via hopes, threats, and visions of both utopian and dystopian possibilities

Concrete peace: building security through infrastructure in Colombia

Public and scholarly debates in Colombia have often framed the work required to achieve peace as la construcción del posconflicto, or "the construction of the post-conflict." This focuses attention on the imperative to build the legal and bureaucratic institutions necessary for transcending a half-century of violence and ensuring a stable and lasting transition. At the same time, this framing also encapsulates the work of building post-conflict Colombia in a physical sense. Focusing on a nationwide process of development aimed at laying the infrastructural foundations of "the Colombia of the future," this article examines the expectations attached to the built environment at this critical conjuncture. Taking inspiration from a felicitous phrase coined by the Ministry of Transport's Twitter account, #PazEnConcreto, it highlights the real-and-imaginary work of building a "concrete peace" through the construction of roads, airports, and bridges. By analyzing infrastructure projects expected to mediate the transition to a new stage of history, the first objective is to examine the cultural, political, and economic logics according to which Colombia's future has been imagined and built. The second objective is to consider what this case suggests about the political agency of the material world in the domain of violence, peace, and security. As a notoriously intractable armed conflict continues alongside periodic peacebuilding efforts, substances like concrete, and the construction projects they support, become material and symbolic resources in the struggle to control a deeply uncertain process of historical change

“Apocalipsis anunciado”: un viraje en la política de riesgo en Colombia a partir de 1985

Este artículo se propone indagar sobre el surgimiento del riesgo y la prevención en las políticas nacionales y distritales en Colombia. Se toma como foco de análisis la ciudad de Bogotá y se utiliza una metodología que combina herramientas históricas y antropológicas. Establecemos su marco temporal a partir de 1985, pues la coyuntura que se presentó en noviembre de dicho año con la tragedia de Armero y la toma del Palacio de Justicia, tan sólo una semana antes, generó en el ámbito de la cultura política un nuevo énfasis en el tema del riesgo