Response to Julieta Lemaitre, Amy Lind, and Catherine Walsh

Abstract

I am grateful that Julieta Lemaitre brought to my mind the imagery of the origins of the State, a thought that had somewhat eluded my imagination when I wrote the piece on neoconstitutionalism in Honduras, but which is of undeniable importance to the topic. I interpret Lemaitre’s reference and the contrast she makes between civil war and ordinary life to be similar to the Hobbesian distinction between the state of nature and the origin of the State form. I cannot help but think that her allusion to civil war as a moment when our passions, fears, evilness, loneliness, poverty, barbarism, ignorance, and savagery have a greater chance to take the best of us, must be related to what Hobbes imagined took place before the State came to “free” us from our destructiveness. Surely, to think that the law and the “peaceful” electoral process brings out the best in us because it reduces violence and the opportunity to be evil must fit squarely in a Hobbesian conception of State and society. But it does not fit the historical record, unfortunately. Imagine for a moment that we go back in time to identify the moment in which we participated in the original creation of the State. We would necessarily find that the inhabitants of the colony were not able to negotiate a truce with their predators to establish a State form that ended violence. The Hobbesian myth of individuals and whole communities voluntarily giving up their power to exercise violence for a state of law that incarnates morality (and monopolizes violence) because it protects them from outside predators (and produces peace) does not tally with the colonial encounter. The colony remains at the margins of the law and is subjected to unspeakable violence, even after colonial occupation ends. The concept of the coloniality of power means the perpetual authorization of terror and the theft of the colony’s civility. This is why in re-founding the State certain social movements in Honduras and other parts of South America like Ecuador and Bolivia demand a peace treaty with their predators, one that will restrain the violence that has been permanently directed at them. But what can be expected from such a truce anyway? Is the State a simple agreed-upon suspension of hostilities by opposing forces that later are kept at bay by a law that produces peace and the good life? Is the State form the necessary framework—el estado de derecho—that “individuals” (predators and victims alike because they are ultimately the same given the circumstances?) need to make the