Reparation beyond Statehood: Assembling Rights Restitution in Post-Conflict Colombia

This thesis is an ethnographic study of rights restitution as an arrangement that establishes boundaries, and how those boundaries are translated, challenged, and exceeded. Following the guidelines of International Humanitarian Law and its version contained in the Law of Victims and Land Restitution (1448/2011), the Colombian government established a wide network of professionals in charge of registration and reparation for claimants registered as victims of the armed conflict (7,999,963 people in April 2016). In these procedures of recognition and reparation, technologies like forms and protocols become crucial for the mediation of rights restitution. As a starting point, I trace the trajectories of technologies of recognition and reparation across assistance centres, governmental offices and sessions of psychosocial assistance. I am interested in functionaries and applicants’ experiences of forms and protocols, the procedures of recognition and reparation, and the circulation of official numbers as narratives of rights restitution. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, a central concern of this thesis is to ask what technologies of recognition and reparation assemble. I interrogate the translation of experiences of pain and mobility into numbers and the circulation of those numbers by state representatives. I also explore some of the material forms of organisation developed by registered and unregistered interlocutors, as arrangements beyond the boundaries of state interventions. I describe how some of those alternative orders translate state interventions and enact spaces of material justice. Instead of reproducing the notion of reparation as a cornerstone of rights restitution in transitional justice societies, I suggest that a different sort of Reparation might occur beyond the boundaries of post-conflict statehood and within its intersections with alternative arrangements.