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“Genocide” is a key frame through which death is given social significance. Scholars have argued that genocide sits at the top of a hierarchy of grief – signalling it as the most profound paradigm through which those killed can be mourned. How does the mourning of life unfold when legal and social conceptualizations of genocide diverge? And what does this divergence tell us about the power of “genocide” as a label for violence? Focusing on the extermination campaign against Colombia’s Patriotic Union (UP) political party, this paper examines how recent transitional justice programmes have interpreted the question of genocide and violence against political groups. I specifically trace the development of two separate, discursive registers of genocide: one legal and one of “common parlance.” In so doing, I contribute to scholarly concern with the question of genocide and political groups in two ways. First, I interpret the exclusion of political groups from legal definitions of genocide as a question of grieveable life. Secondly, scholarly debate has focused on whether or not political groups ought to be protected under genocide law. I diverge from these questions to trace how emergent genocide discourses include political groups as a socially but not legally included within the term’s purview. I thus argue for scholarly attention to how political groups are interpellated in a manner that neither fully recognizes nor denies their status as victims of genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean for crime and repression to be borderless? In any context, those advocating for justice in the wake of systematic crimes would be beyond fortunate to include someone with Lessa's intricate knowledge and dedication within their ranks. Lessa is admirably exacting in describing the victims, naming those responsible, illuminating the methods they used, and grounding when and where they committed their crimes. [Extracted from the article]

Colombia's 2011 Victims' and Land Restitution Law (the Victims' Law) seeks to restore hundreds of thousands of hectares of land to displaced conflict victims. Forced displacement in Colombia has largely been understood through a focus on violent land-grabbing dynamics, through which armed actors (typically paramilitary forces) displaced rural populations to use the stolen land for large capitalist ventures. Through a focus on land restitution in Colombia's Magdalena Medio region, I detail the precise legal measures used to prosecute these legacies of land grabbing, as well as the controversy arising when those powerful legal measures are trained on relatively small, good faith owners of once-dispossessed land. This article examines land restitution as an important means of undoing violent patterns of land concentration, yet cautions against presupposing that all patterns of violent displacement can be understood through a land-grabbing analytic. Those who come to own land in the wake of conflict may have directly used violent means or, contrarily, have acquired land without direct or indirect recourse to violence. How land restitution programs detect and manage these distinctions bears upon post-conflict legal land regimes' precarious capacity to either ameliorate, or potentially exacerbate, violent legacies of forced displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The small body of scholarship that examines the intersection between forced displacement and physical disability draws important attention to the material difficulties simultaneously disabled and displaced people experience. Instead of focusing on disability as a condition lived against the spatial backdrop of forced displacement, this paper approaches disability and displacement as mutually referential spatial conditions. Based on fieldwork with internally displaced landmine victims in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio region, this research highlights how the intersection between physical impairment and forced displacement produces both disabling spatial imaginaries of fear as well as painfully embodied rhythms of daily life. Nonetheless, this paper draws attention to urban agricultural projects’ enabling potential to produce grounding rhythms of labor for landmine victims. Finally, this paper suggests that contexts of forced displacement require close consideration of spatial imaginaries of fear as well as experiences of direct structural violence as key factors underpinning the social production of disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This research theorizes Colombia's 2011 Victims’ and Land Restitution Law (the Victims’ Law) as a biopolitical program that intends to foster the lives of conflict‐affected populations through providing an array of reparation measures. Based on fieldwork with internally displaced landmine victims in Colombia's Magdalena Medio region, I highlight how the Victims’ Law constitutes the identity of which populations count as “victims” worthy of reparations, how such parameters are contested, and how landmine survivors’ sense of themselves as “victims” is mediated via their experiences with the Victims’ Law and the reparation programs it provides. In particular, I highlight the possibilities and limitations of reparation measures that hinge on small‐scale business incubation programs for landmine victims to show how a legally recognized victimhood category presupposes “self‐responsible” neoliberal subjects who must confront contexts of conflict and state neglect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]