In Febrary 2005, eight people were killed in a massacre in the peace community of San José de Apartadó (Urabá). The victims included a two-year-old boy whose head was bashed in with a cudgel. Even though the Inter- American Court of Human Rights had previously obliged the state to implement special protective measures in this community, the government did not react. It did not even issue a declaration condemning the massacre afterwards (Yarce, 2005a: 8A). Three weeks later, President Uribe responded by saying that the peace experiment in San José had to end. According to Uribe, the community was defying...

The present book is based upon the assumption that discourses areliving texts,which simultaneously describe and prescribe realities (Jackson, 2005; Weldes et al., 1999). In this sense, discourses are not just ‘mere linguistic artefacts’ but rather have material effects, constructing and producing identity categories (Hall, 1996a). At the same time, discourses come into being within contexts, positioned, constituted and constitutive of power relations (Said, 2003a). This is the reason why in this section concerning the DSP, I first set the Colombian context. I have tried to outline it as briefly but as completely as necessary to articulate the different...

The first question that arises when addressing security discourses is the meaning of security itself. Any specific concept of security entails certain implications. Even though security is regarded today as a basic need, what passes under the label ‘security’ is actually quite wide.¹ Conceptions of security range from traditional understandings in military terms, that is, the classical idea of national security, to contemporary conceptions of comprehensive and human security incorporating virtually every aspect of the political, social, environmental and cultural dimensions.

Answering the question of what constitutes security is inextricably linked to insecurity, or to what security is not. Attempts...

As has been explored in the first and second chapters, representations are articulated in particular contexts. This fact makes discourses embedded and constitutive of specific historical, political, cultural and social circumstances within a matrix of power relations. The representations of in/security depicted in the Democratic Security Policy have a history in themselves. It is to this historicity of discourse that we now turn our attention.

The present chapter aims to contextualise the release of the DSP in Colombia. When addressing its precedents, one date immediately surfaces: 20 February 2002, theendof peace. On 20 February 2002, President Andrés Pastrana...

In the previous chapters, we provided an overview of how violence in Colombia has been represented and examined the theoretical framework and the general and specific contextualisation for the emergence of the Democratic Security Policy (DSP). Taking into account the DSP’s emergence at an undecidable moment within the hegemonic articulation of the end of peace in 2002, this has illuminated the analytical tools necessary to rethinking the DSP in an active voice. In this chapter, I want to pursue a detailed analysis of how the DSP constructs and produces political identities in a way that reproduces political violence.

This task...

As repeated throughout this book, the process of identification is a constant and unfinished negotiation (Stern, 2005). The working definition of identification which sustains this research is based on the notion that identity is anarticulation(Hall, 1996a) for which the revealing of discursive formations is not enough to recognise processes of identification. Subjects need to invest in their positions to perform, albeit imperfectly, their subjectivities as specifically constituted in particular representations.

The ideal identity category that the DSP constructs for the ‘state’ was examined in the previous chapter. This ideal is pictured as an authoritarian entity that is recovering...

I began this research with the thesis that the state in/security discourse contributes to shaping political identities in such a way that the writing of war is intermingled with the writing of peace, ultimately moulding political imaginaries in Colombia. Such imaginaries are written according to security concerns, legitimising state and non-state violent actions that propel the very political violence the state promises to end. The state in/security discourse produces – it does not prevent – more violence. This thesis has been partly confirmed in examining the relationship between in/security and identity throughout this book. At the same time, it has also become...