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Paper short abstract

Based on 6 months of ethnographic research at the Colombia/Venezuela border and Bogotá in 2025 and 8 interviews with Colombian and Venezuelan displaced and migrant, cis and trans lideresas, this chapter draws on their life trajectories to analyse how resistance is entangled with experiences of grief

Paper long abstract

Colombia remains the deadliest country in the world for human rights defenders. The systematic killings of social leaders in Colombia have often been defined as a genocide (Castañeda 2021; Garzón 2021), with 187 social leaders and 39 signatories of the Peace Accords murdered in 2025.

The polycrisis at the Colombia/Venezuela border in early 2025, defined by the USAID withdrawal and the largest internal displacement of our century in Colombia’s Catatumbo, exposed the state's long-standing gendered necropolitical project. Amid this insufficiently addressed humanitarian emergency, gendered violence materialised through the state’s systematic neglect of social leaders and IDPs. Yet, despite the everyday violence of the conflict, forms of resistance emerged from the lideresas. As key negotiators with stakeholders on the ground – including INGOs, the state, armed actors, and civil society –, their leadership is grounded in deep grief and loss. This chapter asks: how do women transition from being recognized as victims by the law to becoming active political actors? what role do grief and loss play in community building? How do their lives, as contested trajectories, challenge the state’s necropolitical project? why is death seen as recognition in social leaders’ narratives, serving as a way of ‘punishing’ the state?

Based on 6 months of ethnographic research at the Colombia/Venezuela border and Bogotá in 2025 and 8 interviews with Colombian and Venezuelan displaced and migrant, cis and trans lideresas, this chapter draws upon their often invisibilised life trajectories to analyse how women's resistance is entangled with grief.