Extraction, Immobilization and Substraction: Invisible Forms of State Presence in an Armed Conflict Setting

• In Event: The Visibility and Invisibility of State Governance: A Critical Analysis of Educational Policy and Development Educational Initiatives (Panel 1 of 2)

Proposal

In the guerrilla-controlled zone in which Rafael Baralt School is located, school community members’ fairly standard response to my question “Where is the state?” was "The state is absent." This local understanding of state absence is consistent with the terminology employed by national and international organizations. In analyses of the predominance of political violence in Colombia, we find phrases such as “state abandonment,” “lack of state presence,” and “lack of state capacity” (Ballvé 2020). International institutions like the World Bank take the idea of an absent state even further, referring to "ungoverned spaces" (World Bank 2017, p. 116). Between 2016 and 2018, I conducted archival work, participant observation, and more than 120 interviews at the Rafael Baralt School with educators, parents, students; individuals with close ties to the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN); and representatives of more than fifteen governmental and nongovernmental organizations located in Colombia’s eastern plains and in Bogotá. Building on this original research, in this paper I argue that in guerrilla-controlled area, the state manifests itself through three modes of operation: extraction, subtraction, and immobilization. While extraction entails an unequal exchange, where the school provides data in exchange for precarious and challenging-to-utilize resources from the Ministry of Education, subtraction occurs when the state initiates ambitious programs, such as a universal free lunch program, only to progressively pull resources during implementation. The last mode of operation—immobilization—names those areas of state inaction where legal loopholes meet lack of political will. The paper thus explicates the relationships between the larger educational sector and the school, and how these shape the educational landscape where teachers and students interact. It provides further empirical data to debunk the idea of an “absent state” in protracted armed conflict settings.

Author

• Diana Rodríguez-Gómez, University of Wisconsin-Madison