After the War
| Date | 01 October 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663916636442 |
| Published date | 01 October 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2016, Vol. 25(5) 545–565
After the War:
ª The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permission:
Displaced Women,
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663916636442
Ordinary Ethics,
sls.sagepub.com
and Grassroots
Reconstruction
in Colombia
Julieta Lemaitre
Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Abstract
This article examines internally displaced women’s narratives of rebuilding their life after
displacement, focusing on questions of moral agency and community governance. The
data come from a 3-year research project (2010–2013) with internally displaced women
in Colombia, during the emergence of a new transitional justice regime. The article finds
in internally displaced women’s narratives of the injuries of war, of their own resistance
and overcoming, and of their aspirations for the future, concerns that go beyond poverty
alleviation and redistribution in peace-building efforts. Internally displaced women’s
narratives also engage with questions of ordinary ethics and community governance,
describing the loss of moral agency in civil war and its painstaking recovery. This article
questions the limitations of transitional justice regimes and peace-building efforts that
ignore concerns with the loss of moral agency and community during civil war as well as
the role of ordinary ethics in peace building at the grassroots.
Keywords
Colombia, community governance, internal displacement, internally displaced women,
moral agency, ordinary ethics, peace building, transitional justice
Corresponding author:
Julieta Lemaitre, Universidad de los Andes, Cra. 1 Este No. 19A-10, Bogota 111711, Colombia.
Email: jlemaitr@uniandes.edu.co
546
Social & Legal Studies 25(5)
Introduction
Decades of civil war in Colombia have also meant decades of grassroots reconstruction.
While reconstruction has sometimes been led by government efforts, notably after the
peace agreements that ended the civil war of the 1950s, for the most part, the physical
and social reorganization of communities affected by war has come from the over 6
million peasants who, in the extended low-intensity conflict spanning from the 1980s to
today, fled to large and midsized cities and rebuilt their lives in the slums.1 Reconstruc-
tion has been for them a lonely and labor-intensive task, involving their insertion in
urban cash economies, the physical construction of self-help housing in informal settle-
ments, and for some, community action, bringing schools, health centers, parks, and
public utilities to the slums that harbored them. Through this process, and through its
many failures and frustrations, forcibly displaced peasants have built new identities and
communities: this is grassroots reconstruction.
The experience of grassroots reconstruction is interwoven with that of rapid urbani-
zation and the poverty it generates. Since the 1950s people fleeing the war were indis-
tinct from economic migrants: for public policy the problem was poverty, and
development the solution. When forced displacement rapidly increased in the 1990s,
public policy shifted toward a humanitarian response, but it never stopped considering
displacement as a problem of poverty, calling for redistribution. Government action
initially focused on humanitarian aid and poverty relief, but since 2004, the Constitu-
tional Court, through massive structural litigation, prodded successive governments to
respond, using socioeconomic rights enjoyment as indicators of success.2 By 2011,
following the adoption of a national victims’ law (Law 1448 of 2011), an expanded
national bureaucracy and institutions adopted the international norms of transitional
justice, but still focused on redistribution, providing not only humanitarian aid but also
poverty relief and monetary reparations to internally displaced people (IDP).3 This
redistributive aspiration undergirds the multiple policies and institutions still being
created, and peace with the FARC guerrilla remains unimaginable without
redistribution.4
This emphasis on redistribution echoes current concerns in the literature. The norma-
tive commitments of transitional justice are a shifting ground, often tied to specific
locations and moments in time (Arthur, 2009; Elster, 2004; Teitl, 2003), but in the last
decade transnational norm-making efforts as well as the scholarly study of transitions
have increasingly advocated redistributive justice. Attention to poverty relief and a
growing interest in local forms of transitional justice are central to what Sharp (2013),
following Teitl’s genealogies, calls the fourth generation of transitional justice, focusing
not on past violations but rather on laying the foundation for a lasting peace, and
redistributive justice has become central to this lasting peace (i.e. Garcı´a-Godo´s,
2013; Lambourne, 2009; Laplante, 2008; Miller, 2008; Waldorf, 2012).
Redistribution is sometimes balanced with other concerns, particularly recognition of
women’s gender-specific vulnerabilities in war and the transition to peace. Feminism has
an increasingly important role in contemporary or fourth generation transitional justice,
advocating for a balance between recognition and redistribution (Franke, 2006; Ni
Anolain, 2012; Rubio-Marı´n, 2006). This proposal has gained traction within
Lemaitre
547
international feminism not just as the redistribution of shame (away from women and
victims) but also as the redistribution of material resources to benefit women. Feminist
scholars hope the mechanisms of transitional justice, especially reparations, will have the
capacity to positively transform women’s lives by securing material gains (Bell and
O’Rourke, 2007), addressing the destitution resulting from war (Rubio-Marı´n, 2012;
Theidon, 2007), subverting the preexisting structural gender inequalities (Rubio-Marı´n,
2006; 2012), and even fostering gender-equitable development (Meertens and Zam-
brano, 2010.)
But do displaced people engaged in grassroots reconstruction share the same norma-
tive commitments? In spite of the call in the literature for more attention to the local (i.e.
Sharp, 2013) there is little research on local understandings of justice. Attention con-
centrates on institutional experimentation in retributive justice (see, i.e. McEvoy and
McGregor, 2008) rather than on the underlying norms. Growing victim’s participation,
especially in trials and truth commissions and in the quest for reparations, seems to
confirm that victims and states share the values of the transitional justice apparatus.
This assumption, however, is unsettled on the ground, where grassroots reconstruction
calls for increased attention to the distinct ethical dimension of local cultures and forms
of community governance. This call does not preclude issues of survival; redistribution
remains central to transitions from war to peace. But it does grounds concerns over
redistributive justice in transitions on a thicker understanding of the injuries of civil
war, an understanding that includes importance of moral agency and moral community.
Marı´a Zabala’s story further illustrates this point.
The Enchanted Valley
Marı´a Zabala is a displaced woman and community leader in a peasant cooperative in the
state of Co´rdoba, in the north of Colombia. Co´rdoba was also the site of paramilitary
experiments with direct governance in the early 2000s. The story of Marı´a Zabala’s resis-
tance to paramilitary governance after her displacement has been widely recorded by the
media and the Centre for Historic Memory (CMH) and Marı´a Zabala’s daughter, Esther
Polo, wrote a book chapter on her mother titled The Legendary Marı´a Zabala (Polo, 2012).5
In the late 1980s, the emerging paramilitary armies murdered thousands of peasants,
including Marı´a Zabala’s husband, his uncle, his nephew, and her husband’s son from a
previous marriage. After their murder, she buried the bodies with the help of her neigh-
bors, and fled to the slums of Monterı´a, the provincial capital, with her surviving
children, and 2 months pregnant with her youngest daughter, Esther. The following
years Marı´a Zabala worked hard to feed her children, washing other people’s clothes,
and cooking and selling food in the street, eventually moving to her own precarious slum
dwelling. She also often received newly displaced people in her home and organized
community women to demand social services, water, and electricity, in the community
action tradition of Colombian slums.6
Like Marı´a Zabala, millions of peasants have fled from violence and rebuilt their lives
in urban slums through the physical construction of self-help housing and public ame-
nities. Since the peace agreements housing and public amenities. Since the peace agree-
ments that ended the civil war in 1959, Colombia responded to rapid urbanization by
548
Social & Legal Studies 25(5)
linking self-help groups in slums with local government through community action
boards (Juntas de Accio´n Comunal). Today, even when the boards themselves don’t
always provide reliable leadership (e.g. due to corruption and politics), the vocabulary
and forms of community leadership learnt through the boards still carry traction among
the poor, including the displaced multitudes.
Marı´a Zabala became one of these community leaders in Monterı´a after her displace-
ment, and eventually organized a group of 27 displaced women to relocate in a coop-
erative farm, under a government land reform program. The group moved to the isolated
farm and set up a series of shelters, working sometimes together, sometimes in family
groups,...
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