Bordering on Chaos:
Regionalizing War in the Andes
Bordering on Chaos is an ethnographic study of the regional specificities of Colombia's civil war, and the causes and consequences of populations in displacement, refuge and return. Our Research Associates draw upon anthropology, human rights, and critical legal studies to explore how globalization and the "new world order" challenge the sanctity of nation-state borders, resulting in claims to global citizenship and appeals to the "international community"" that outpace the capacity of the current legal framework of international human rights, humanitarian, and refugee law.
Praxis is exploring what post-Cold War refugee policy might look like if moved from a state-centered model to a transnational approach, and if the experiences and demands of populations in displacement, refuge and return informed the design and implementation of these policies and interventions. While current concepts of citizenship and rights are theoretically and legally connected to the nation-state, a central feature of globalization is the transcendence of borders. The reality of globalized flows of media, cultural forms, technologies and people has outpaced the existing legal framework: somehow capital accumulation is afforded a degree of protection and flexibility that people are not.
In this project our Research Associates explode the notion of the "refugee experience" in the singular by examining three distinct trajectories that have resulted from political violence in the Andean region. This multi-sited research project will take us from the return experience of the Peace Communities in Urabá, to the internal displacement of 2.7 million Colombians, many of whom inhabit the squatter settlements that corset Bogota, to the refugees who arrive by the thousands on the Colombian-Ecuadorian border. Displacement, refuge and return are points on a fluid continuum of human suffering and resilience.
Colombia's civil war affords the opportunity to study the processes by which people become displaced internally and transnationally; as well as assess the needs articulated by these groups and the policy responses developed by transnational organizations. Praxis will contribute to rethinking international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law by conducting ethnographic research with both the populations displaced as well as the policymakers for whom these "liminal people" are the object of humanitarian intervention. Changing concepts of sovereignty ---- and the weakening of nation-states as the fundamental political unit ---- leave us with the challenge of identifying transnational forms of conferring and upholding human rights. The international community is an amorphous entity, existing as a subject to whom appeals are made yet these appeals lack judicial enforcement. Thus our Research Associates seek to identify new mechanisms of transnational governance and humanitarian intervention that can be placed in the service of ensuring human life and dignity.