Burocracias humanitarias en Colombia: conocimiento técnico y disputas políticas en la implementación de la Ley de Víctimas y Restitución de Tierras

Abstract

Through an ethnographic study of the policy of reparation to victims in Colombia, this article examines the processes of the production of expert knowledge along different scales and disputes of humanitarian bureaucracies in Colombia. These emerge from the institutional deployment of development and peacebuilding paradigms, at least since 1982, with the creation of the National Rehabilitation Plan (PNR), the Social Solidarity Network (RSS) in 1994, the Presidential Agency for Social Action and International Cooperation in 2002, and the Department of Social Prosperity (DPS) in 2011. With the subjugation of some paramilitary groups in 2006 (Justice and Peace Law), the Victims and Land Restitution Law in 2011, and the peace agreements with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People’s Army (FARC-EP) guerrillas in 2016, transitional institutions associated with truth, justice, and reparation proliferated, and with them, specific bureaucracies and expertise. Thus, the article specifically examines the technical and political tensions between different professional and ideological configurations associated with the implementation of reparations policy and how these disputes are essential to understanding the moral and ideological dimensions of humanitarianism and development in Colombia. It also studies the role of cooperation agencies in inter-institutional strengthening as a specific dimension of the formation of the Colombian State. These articulations configure a moral economy of humanitarianism characterized by institutional experimentalism and the formulation of social projects, expectations, plans, and ideas that never reach the status of having been realized. This strips such policies of any transformative or emancipatory potential. Thus, from an ethnographic perspective, the article provides an account of the techno-political tensions of humanitarian bureaucracies at the middle scales of regional, national, and global institutional structures.