Residual Suspicions: Humanitarian Demining and the Fear of Reoccupation

• In Event: Interrupting the Care/Violence Nexus in Times of War and Peace – II

Abstract

“For whom and for what are these territories being released from landmines?” This was a question that locals constantly asked when thinking about the Pilot Project of Humanitarian Demining at El Orejón, Colombia. This question captures the growing concern among the peasant community about the process of prioritization and evidence-making of mine-clearance operations. More generally, it reveals their doubts about the “real” motives behind the arrival of this demining initiative in their village. Rather than a benevolent concern for the safety and wellbeing of rural communities, peasants suspected that the removal of landmines would serve the (obscure) military, economic, and social interests of the Colombian state and its allies. They mainly feared the extension of a private hydroelectric plant (i.e., Hidroituango), environmental licenses for corporate gold exploitation, and the continuation of forced coca-eradication policies. Based on ethnographic research in El Orejón, this presentation explores how the technopolitical practices of humanitarian demining were suspected of being tools that might facilitate the dispossession and reoccupation of land; this time not by actors of war, including landmines, but by actors that present themselves as of post-conflict. Inspired by demining vocabulary, I understand locals’ reservations about humanitarian material practices as “residual suspicions.” This term, I maintain, allows interrupting transitional narratives currently used to understand ‘postwar’ Colombia and its correlated linear temporalities. “Residual suspicions” highlights the lingering effects of the uncertainty sown by the war in rural territories, as well as the emerging sensations of exposure and precariousness that the promises and threats of peacemaking and development evoke.

Author

• Diana P Pardo Pedraza, University of California Irvine