Search

For T. H. Marshall citizenship, the acquisition of rights followed a temporal sequence: civil rights, followed by political and finally social rights. In Latin America the sequence of rights was, however, quite different from that in England. Countries with a populist tradition like Argentina and Brazil first granted social rights, while Colombia and Venezuela, where the populist impulse was weaker, first achieved political rights. In both cases,civil rights were granted in a limited and biased manner. The consequence of this inversion is the presence of a citizenship of ?low intensity?(O?Donnell). In this paper I ask how the institutionalization of the social affects the extension of citizen?s rights? While O?Donnell?s thesis is not without insight, I argue that the best explanation for the appearance of low intensity citizenship is to be found in the social narratives through which elites attempt to forge a sense of community. This approach fits with Marshall?s dynamic view of social citizenship as that which creates ?a horizon of legitimate expectations.? This paper concentrates on the capacity of social languages to create this horizon or, expressed in a negative manner, in the presence of languages that hinder the translation of social benefits into full-fledged rights. The paper illustrates the theoretical argument by the case of Colombia in the 1910-1948 period. In Colombia the social is the result of a matrix of narratives emphasing, hygiene, populism, economic liberalism, Catholic morality and labour. Gender intersects these different narratives. These combinations of narratives precluded the formation of actors with capacity to further citizens? rights. As a result the state lost its capacity to mediate conflicts as the country entered in the period known as La Violencia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the various ways that Colombia’s material power as a regional state, as well as its cultural power during the nineteenth century shaped Panama in ways that many Panamanians today are only vaguely aware. It will also look at Colombia’s resurgent role in Panama as both a material power and a cultural force in the wake the U.S. withdrawal from the isthmus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As is traditional in leftist Latin American rebel organizations, the main Colombian guerrilla movements - the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) - have important rates of female members. Estimated to between thirty and forty percent of the membership of these armed non-state actors (ANSAs), women have reached the level of commanders, but failed to reach the top. In spite of this important participation, women and gender issues are often excluded from the analysis of armed conflict and ANSAs. Existing studies that do include women combatants often portray the issue in a dichotomous way, suggesting that they are either more 'empowered' than women in Colombian society in general, or that they are as oppressed - or more - than the average Colombian woman. Using a combination of field research and literature review, this paper outlines a way out of this binary understanding, by illustrating the complex and contradictory realities of women combatants in Colombia. Through a gender analysis of their roles and the reasons for women and girls to join the FARC, as well as of sexuality and relations in the group, we undertake a mapping of the complex gendered power relations this ANSAs. This analysis could contribute to a basis for gender-sensitive policy-making in the area of conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Colombian state is widely understood to be failed due to its inability to monopolize violence. Yet such an understanding of the state is misleading in that it suggests that the state is entirely ineffective, incapable of any form of territorial control. An analysis of policy mechanisms through which the Colombian state controls territory suggests that the Colombian state is far from impotent. In fact, it is highly successful in regulating access and giving meaning to domestic space. In this paper, I analyze state policies to create, maintain, and recuperate public space and the effects these policies have on citizenship as it is increasingly defined through participation in proper forms of consumption and exchange. The state has focused on ambulant street vendors as the sole impediment to the creation, safe use, and enjoyment of public space by citizens, thus framing street vendors as security threats and non-citizens. The state seeks to ameliorate these problems through the "formalization" of vendors, forcing them into fixed spaces, hours, merchandise, and saving patterns. Based on three months of field work, policy analysis, and extensive interviewing, this paper argues that the state's efforts to create public space for citizens seek to maintain state legitimacy, despite visible "failures". In doing so, it relies upon the framing of certain (citizen) populations as security threats, and thus non-citizens who do not deserve the same rights as the "market citizens" the state embraces as part of its modernizing and legitimizing project. This paper raises salient questions regarding the crafting of policies to improve both the quality of public space as well as the working conditions and prospects of street vendors. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colombia has been engaged in internal insurgencies for forty years. Only recently has the government, with the heavy support of the United States, begun to make headway against the three armed groups - FARC, ELN, and AUC. The ability of the intelligence agencies, especially the civilian - led DAS, has generally been found wanting. The intelligence community in Colombia has been undergoing reform for two decades though the pace has increased recently in response to a series of scandals. This paper will analyze the reforms and seek to assess their impact in terms of transparency, democratic control, and effectiveness. The views expressed here are the author's alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of Navy or the Department of Defense. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on terrorism have traditionally focused on non-state actors who direct violence against liberal states. Such studies have also tended to focus on political motivations and, therefore, have neglected the economic functions of terrorism. This article challenges the divorce of the political and economic spheres by highlighting how states can use terrorism to realise interconnected political and economic goals. To demonstrate this, we take the case of the paramilitary demobilisation process in Colombia and show how it relates to the USColombian free trade agreement (FTA). We argue that the demobilisation process fulfils a dual role. Firstly, the process aims to improve the image of the Colombian government required to pass the controversial FTA through US Congress in order to protect large amounts of US investment in the country. Secondly, the demobilisation process serves to mask clear continuities in paramilitary terror which serve mutually supportive political and economic functions for US investment in Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1920s the Standard Oil Company faced the hostility of the left-wing Mexican Revolutionary government, which eventually expropriated the company's properties in 1938. As nationalist rhetoric increased before 1938 in Mexico, Standard Oil explored new fields in Colombia, a country ruled by the foreign- business-friendly, right-wing Conservative Party. The Colombian Conservative Party had given very generous concessions to foreign multinationals, and Standard wanted to couple this political climate with the potential of the Colombian oil fields. In contrast with Mexico, during the first three decades of the twentieth-century, Colombia had enjoyed remarkable political stability. Escaping from nationalism in Mexico, however, Standard Oil faced a different kind of nationalism in Colombia, as the Conservative government ceded to the pressure of the opposition union-friendly Liberal Party's demands. Finally, the right-wing government of Venezuela showed to be the friendliest one towards Standard. However, the company did not trust the stability of the dictatorship and off-shored its refining activities. The paper compares Standard Oil's reaction to growing nationalism in two different political environments, and the way this affected its corporate strategy in both countries. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2003, Lutheran World Relief, as an international relief and development NGO, began a peacebuilding initiative in Colombia. They facilitated the formation of a partnership between peace sanctuary churches in Colombia and six communities of faith in the upper Midwest of the United States, coordinated by LWR staff. This partnership, called Sal y Luz (salt and light in Spanish) has the goal of education and advocacy both in Colombia and in the U.S.. Sal y Luz represents a powerful example of transnational solidarity for peace, which may find precursors in past solidarity movements like those in Central America in the 1980s. There are also implications and lessons of this case study for the broader field of NGO peacebuilding work. How should peacebuilding NGOs most effectively help their constituencies in the U.S. understand and become invested in their peacebuilding work? What benefits does this partnership bring in terms of accountability and effectiveness in peacebuilding? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since his first electoral campaign, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2006; 2006-2010) announced his intention to engage in a process of negotiation with armed groups. He uses extensive measures of exception to incorporate these groups, mainly paramilitary, into civic life as an important component of his 'democratic security policy'. Unlike the 1950s and 1970s when states of exception were used to curtail civil and political rights to the country's population, Uribe uses the exception to produce 'mutations in citizenship'; they refer to changes in the criteria for including groups previously excluded from citizenship, to the granting of additional benefits to groups already included, and to criteria for excluding from benefits to groups declared unworthy of state protection either by disqualifying their life as not worth living or by classifying them as dangerous to the security of the country. The analysis of the Colombian case calls into question premises of contemporary discussions on the sovereign use of the exception. The novelty of the Colombian situation is that authoritarian practices are colonizing the structures of democracy as narratives of citizenship are invoked in support of authoritarian technologies of government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human rights literature tends to treat states as simultaneously the primary abusers of human rights and their primary guarantor. This tension reflects real differences within and between states with respect to their commitment to human rights, but it raises the question of whether strong states are on balance better or worse for human rights conditions. This essay examines that question through a case study of Colombia, a state with a particularly bad human rights record, and through a large-N statistical analysis. Both approaches yield similar conclusions, that weak, low capacity states are dangerous for human rights and strong high capacity states tend to be better. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]