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Paper short abstract:

One of the impacts of violence is generation of fear which affects people’s actions. By changing usual practices displacement process starts before the actual physical relocation and continues after resettlement as people’s mistrust persists and they continue being informed by their past experiences

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on a ten-month fieldwork undertaken in the department of Cundinamarca, Colombia. It forms part of a research aimed at better understanding of the experiences of the processes of forced displacement and emplacement. I propose to explore how exposure to (performative) violence, predominately carried out by paramilitaries, influences the feeling of displacement. I assume that not to 'feel displaced' means feeling relatively comfortable where one lives in a given context and situation, with the usual doubts, concerns and problems one faces in day-to -day life. From this starting point my paper examines how fear that is the result of violent conflict launches displacement as a temporal process. While people accommodate living in terror and fear, living in fear means not living one's life fully. One is in a state of alert and changes one's practices. It is no longer only the armed groups that perform surveillance, people themselves also do it. The changes in the usual way-of-being in order to survive, like ley de silencio or short-term relocations, can be seen as the beginning of the displacement process. After the decision to migrate is finally taken, the experiences of life before displacement continue affecting people's view of the world. People continue curtailing their lives - their relations and actions, in some cases also political participation. Thus part of experience of the past continues, and fear takes on a different, recycled, form.