Hoping (not) to Migrate: Personal and Collective Futures Amid Conflict in Colombia

• In Event: The Intersection of Migration and Peacebuilding: Perspectives from Colombia, Venezuela, and Honduras

Proposal

This paper examines how youth envision their future in a context of protracted conflict. I seek to understand how individuals grapple with the possibility of migrating, ultimately contributing to unpack the nuanced ways in which violence fuels migration. Education is intrinsically concerned with the future, a relationship that is exacerbated in contexts of conflict. The growing subfield of comparative education research on conflict and post-conflict settings emphasizes the challenges of transcending violence and educating for a peaceful future (Bellino et al., 2017; Davies, 2005; Freedman et al., 2008). At the same time, issues related to migration, displacement, and refuge have gained significant attention from education scholars, who analyze the uncertain futures that migrant youth face when arriving at a new context (Bajaj et al., 2017; Dryden-Peterson, 2017; Mendenhall et al., 2017).

In this paper, I bridge these two lines of work by concurrently examining youth perspectives of their collective and individual futures. I draw on the case of Colombia, where the internal armed conflict has spanned six decades despite several peace processes (Pizarro, 2017; Unidad de Víctimas, 2022). The ongoing violence has not only produced high levels of internal displacement (over 8 million registered IDPs); it has also contributed to sustained emigration, with a lowball estimate of at least 4.7 million Colombians living abroad and a recent record high in emigration (CERAC, 2023; Unidad de Víctimas, 2023). I analyze 527 surveys and 70 interviews with high school students across four schools in Bogotá and Medellín to examine how students envision Colombia’s collective future and their own individual futures, paying particular attention to students’ views on migration.

Preliminary findings suggest that students see migration as a possible response to grim expectations about the future. Students’ expectations for the potential end of the internal armed conflict were mixed, and they grappled with feelings of hope and hopelessness with regards to the future of Colombia. Some believed that the conflict could eventually come to an end, even if it would not be during their lifetime, and many others thought peace was impossible. Yet students overwhelmingly agreed that youth could contribute to peacebuilding and that it was their personal responsibility to do so.

In the midst of these ambivalent views on the country’s collective future, most of the students I interviewed pondered the possibility of building their personal future abroad. Migration emerged as a very real, potential life choice that students discussed, longed for, and critiqued. For some, leaving was the best possible option, and a few were taking steps to migrate soon or join relatives abroad. For others, contributing to peacebuilding meant building a collective future “where it won’t be necessary to leave and go to other countries to achieve our dreams,” as one student put it. These dual futures – hoping to migrate while hoping not having to do so – were at the heart of youth’s expectations for the future. Both migrating and staying in Colombia were acts of resistance in the face of protracted physical and structural violence.

Author

• Paula L Mantilla Blanco, Columbia University Teachers College