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Paper short abstract

Analyzing community-legal archives is challenging where State monopolies are disputed. Guerrillas controlled territory exercising violence and regulating communities’ daily life. I explore blurred governances through handbooks assembling legal notions, community rules, and guerrilla orders.

Paper long abstract

Modern states control the monopoly of violence, justice and order. But ¿What happened when alternative groups, besides the States, hold these monopolies? Colombia´s guerrilla FARC exercised governance in southern areas of the country using doses of violence and “bastard justices” to regulate the day-today life of communities. In FARC areas of influence, community-based level handbooks known as “Cartillas comunitarias” set forbidden behaviors within communities. A social leader mentioned: “FARC´s punishments worked as those of our parents. First, they forgive the kids. Second, they conciliate with them. Third, they receive physical punishment. The same applied for FARC´s justice. When someone broke the rules, we send them to FARC and they applied timely justice”. Relationships between guerrilla and communities are blurring. Usually varied from ecological landscapes, politico-military interests, and the presence or absence of the State. I would like to explain the challenges during my ethnographic in Colombian Amazon basin trying to understand FARC mechanisms to control population and territory. During fieldwork, I had access to community-handbooks produced by “Juntas de Acción Comunal” as hybrid legal byproducts. At some point these documents blend state-legal notions, community rules and guerrilla orders. I would like to explore the blurring area of ordinary concepts of power, identity and state construction to disentangle the production of these documents. I will focus on FARC´s Combatientes del Yarí handbook contrasted with interviews and ethnographic work in southern departments of Colombia (2017-2020). In those places governances are blurred and community handbooks pose challenges for legal-community archive analysis.