Rearmament and the Periodization of Colombian History

• In Event: Troubled Times: Reflections on the Periodization, Temporality, and Historicity of Colombia’s Armed Conflict

Abstract

Historian Gonzalo Sánchez has persuasively argued that the policy of amnesty has bequeathed Colombian history its default periodization. Indeed, the amnesties that thread throughout Colombian history delineate its bellicose chapters, from the partisan wars of the 19th century, through la violencia of the 1940s and 50s, until the late 1980s when the term amnesty fell out of favor and was replaced by demobilization. This paper looks to contemporary dynamics of rearmament to problematize further the place of amnesties and demobilizations in periodizing Colombian history. Through an ethnographic case study of former FARC and AUC combatants living in a violent urban periphery, I raise the question: What if Colombian history were periodized by rearmament rather than disarmament? That question leads to others: How would a focus on rearmament compensate for top-down historical analysis that endows individuals, be they government officials or guerrilla leaders, with inordinate historical agency? How might an ethnography of rearmament transform the historical project of identifying change over time into a historical perspective more attuned to the continuities that undergird Colombia’s ever-mutating assemblage of conflicts.

Author

• Alexander L Fattal, Pennsylvania State University