Another History of Violence

Abstract

A conceptual framework of “geographies of terror” can serve as a critique of contemporary dominant geopolitical discourses on the “war on terror” and as a methodological tool for studying the impact of terror and its spatial manifestations on local populations on the ground. Applying this framework to the study of violence in Colombia's Pacific coast region allows critical engagement with the discourses on “forced displacement” that have become institutionalized in Colombia to refer to the systematic terror campaign unleashed by armed groups on rural black populations in this region. Beyond the usual focus in displacement debates on humanitarian assistance and resettlement of the displaced population in the cities, this framework stresses the need to empirically engage with and conceptually address the situation in the countryside, where rural dwellers are threatened by armed actors on an everyday basis but also resist the imposition of these regimes of terror.