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Paper short abstract

By looking at the enactment of legal reparation for victims of the war in Colombia, this presentation asks how does the frame of care reframe the injury of war? How does bureaucratic practice shape the possibility of care while obscuring and enacting violence? What is cared for?

Paper long abstract

The Colombian government signed Law 1448 in 2011, offering legal recognition and ample benefits to the victims of the country’s war. Framed in the language of repair, the law created an extensive bureaucratic apparatus to administer the services to which victims are entitled. This presentation looks at the unfolding efforts to access the benefits offered by the law. Following the interactions between a bureaucrat and a claimant, I demonstrate how the Victims’ Law becomes a vehicle for clientelist politics in a marginal neighborhood. Clientelism seizes on new political stakes and the institutional frailties endemic to the country’s system of governance for the poor to manage and sustain existing structures of power. Local political networks dole out state benefits, creating personal ties between clients and their patrons by framing their distribution in the language of worth and care. Care, here becomes not just an enactment of personal relationships of political and social belonging, but are woven into broader discourses of state repair. The outcomes of these practices and discourses for claimants are highly contested, as few benefits ever make it the hands of victims and when they do, they rarely materially improve beneficiaries' lives. Yet, these connections produce enduring ties and forms of sociality for newcomers to the city. This presentation asks, what productive and novel spaces of social belonging are produced through this recourse of care? How does this language reframe and bound the injuries of war, and the war itself as a socio-historical object? What is cared for?