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The objective of this article is to analyze how the experiences of girls, boys, and adolescents in the context of the Colombian war have been received and incorporated into the institutional work of memory construction. The analysis is based on a review of reports produced by the Historical Memory Group of the National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation and the National Center for Historical Memory. The article begins by highlighting the inadequacy of articulated language in capturing the childhood and youth experiences of violence. It then examines how the testimonies of children and adolescents have been included in institutional memory reports to determine the validity attributed to the knowledge these testimonies can provide. Finally, the article concludes that the experiences of suffering in childhood and adolescence are not adequately addressed in institutional memory work, and there is a form of epistemic injustice that diminishes the importance and centrality of these testimonies as sources of knowledge about recent Colombian violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article exposes the relationship between the narratives of memory and forgiveness within the indigenous movement in the department of Cauca (Colombia) along with the construction of their identity as subjects affected by violence. The article stems from multilocal fieldwork conducted with members of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), indigenous Nasa and Coconuco authorities and elders, and collaborators from the department’s indigenous movement. The text concludes that indigenous memory is influenced by recursive structures of time and space, where past events are still occurring in the present, as the violated subjects, especially the ancestors and the territory, remain in the here and now. This configures an ecological approach to political ontology, prompting a redefinition of the web of social interactions entangled in the genesis of armed violence, and the kinds of rituals geared towards forgiveness for the harms and violence inflicted by the armed conflict. The novelty of the article lies in its assessment of the notions of memory and forgiveness within the indigenous community of Cauca, represented by the CRIC, as a bearer of a non-anthropocentric ethical proposition to address the effects of violence from the normative perspective of reharmonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Colombiana de Sociologia is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Departamento de Sociologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper is an approach to the way in which the State takes shape in the margins of the Colombian nation. It also inquires about the way the law work in such spaces, in postpeace agreement contexts. It is based on the testimony of two men who were actors in the Colombian armed conflict. The information was collected under the methodological approach of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Our conclusion is that the so-called post-conflict is a stage where alternative legal orders emerge as embodiments of State institutions. This means that the margins are spaces where the State has not consolidated effective and stable forms of social regulation. This situation opens a space for the emergence of local actors who play a role as intermediaries and no formal personifications of the State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this regard, the paper states that the official reports of memory are perceived as distant narrative devices by the local actors whose memory these reports seek to reflect. A tension is thus established between the local close memories that circulate within the communities themselves and the distant commemorative memory that is directed toward the external social and political space where the disputes for the national memory take place. The article is based on an extensive fieldwork carried out in the pile dwelling populations of the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, an area that was the epicenter of two massacres executed by right-wing paramilitary armies in 2000, within the context of the Colombian armed conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the epistemological limits of the narration resulting from the specialized work on memory. It is based, on the one hand, on fieldwork carried out in the stilt villages of Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta (Colombia) between 2017 and 2018. The focus of the fieldwork was the local reception of the National Centre for Historical Memory (CNMH) report, published in 2014, on the paramilitary massacres that had occurred in that area. And, on the other, on the research team's participation in the writing of the CNMH report on anti-personnel mines in 2017. The strength of the text, a dialectical exercise between the anthropology of violence and the hermeneutical phenomenology, rests on it being a self-critical piece of work written from within the expert system. We propose the existence of a necessary representational distance (not contingent) between the account as a form of local expression and its translation into a narration that is projected outside the context in which local stories are produced. The article concludes that, beyond the very experience of violence represented in such accounts, it is the logic of the expert system that draws the contours of the politics of evidence in the field of memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales is the property of Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Objective/context: This article analyses the political function assumed by a truth commission, as an entity situated at the center of disputes regarding memory typical of societies dealing with a violent past. The text proposes that rather than the construction of the truth, the main function of a truth commission is the promotion and consolidation of a new regime of truth that opposes that which has been constructed through a violent past. Analyzing the Colombian case, the article critically examines the concept of reconciliation, which underlies the work of a commission of this type, as a mechanism of transitional justice. We propose that the truth commission avoids the promotion of a national reconciliation, understood as a pact to hide the violent past behind an insurmountable wall that steers us away from assuming responsibility and consequences in the present. Instead, the article sets out that the truth commission must promote reconciliation within society; that is, a process that seeks to preserve certain communicating vessels with a violent past, in that it addresses the causes that propitiated the emergence and naturalization of this violence. Methodology: The study was guided by the Gadamerian premise of questioning one's own certainties. Based on experience in research in the area of memory, and on the researchers own experience in the production of official historic memory reports, what underlies this article is a hermeneutic work of general enquiry into the functions of memory in transition periods, and, in particular, into the challenges faced by a truth commission. Conclusions: The article concludes that the central task of a truth commission is not so much the recovery of specific memories (this happened in this way), but rather the construction of the social framework for the legitimation of the memory of suffering. This requires an effort to incorporate the suffering in society's general representation, its needs, and its values. In this sense, although described as an instrument for seeking the truth, the real social and political purpose of the truth commission may be its capacity to build a new regime of truth that opens a present space through which to understand the current patterns of violence and recognize its current agents. The article also concludes, about the Colombian case, that the Commission for the Clarification of the Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition should function as an enabler of a narrative public sphere. In this order of ideas, it must create frameworks of meaning in which to unfold counter-hegemonic narratives that may even become bothersome in social terms. It is about opening up a possibility for different social agents traditionally situated at the margins of the State, to take a position from which to dialogically confront the State itself and the groups that have sought to impose their narrative through armed command or control of the public sphere. Originality: The boom of such studies on memory in the second half of the twentieth century has meant that the topic has been approached from many disciplines and perspectives within the social sciences. Ours is a hermeneutic approach that does not attempt to account for the contents of memory or the nature of the truth produced in the institutionalised work of memory; rather, it situates its analysis among the possibilities for the development of a space for the narrative resonance in which it is possible to produce an alternative regime of truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the traditional reading of Hobbes' political theory as an absolutist government model in which the sovereign has limitless power. Therefore, this research reviews the three key assumptions that support this reading, namely, the natural evil of humans in the state of nature, the conception that the sovereign should inspire fear among his subjects to thrive, and the idea that subjects should obey the sovereign state blindly. In analyzing each assumption, Hobbes' political theory is discussed from an inferential and critical perspective to state that it outlines a system in which state power is restricted by the basic rights of individuals, especially the right to life and freedom. This derives from the structural foundations of a liberal state ideology, rather than from the principles of an unlimited despotic state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Analisis Politico is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Antropología Social is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Estudios Politicos (01215167) is the property of Universidad de Antioquia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The acts of armed violence can pour a new sense over the spaces where a community build its social identity. In Nueva Venecia, a small pile-dwelling village in Magdalena (Colombia), three different armed actors (the guerrilla, the right-wing paramilitaries and the Public Force) gathered the local people, at three different times, on the same social space: the main square. In the first meeting, people was warned, by the first one of the three groups, about the possibility of a slaughter that could happen there. In the second occasion, local people was both victim and witness of the way that the second one carried it on. In the third meeting, the third group offered excuses for what happened. The paper analyses the way in which these three acts determined three marks of the continuum of violence over the local nodal space of memory. The article is organized around the last act, when national Army and Police representatives organized a public ceremony of forgiveness because of the paramilitary massacre. The study of such a ceremony shows it as a stage where agents of confronting memories are trying to achieve social legitimacy rather than a true act of symbolic reparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]