El estado es un macho violador: reconsidering the state as a site for peacebuilding

Abstract

In most peacebuilding processes, the state is seen, particularly by the international community, as a primary and central arbitrator in peacebuilding and transitional justice processes. In this article, I critique the global system’s centralisation of the state, using Colombia as a case study. This critique of the state as a central site for peacebuilding in Colombia is driven from three key bodies of work: legal feminist institutional reform, radical Latin American feminist perspectives on the state as un macho violador, and Afro-Colombian intellectual traditions which call for ethnic regional autonomy, particularly from the Pacific region of the country. I engage with this work through my own ethnographic methodology conducted in both the capital of the country, Bogotá, and the Pacific region, primarily the port city of Buenaventura in Valle del Cauca. This critical gaze of the undefinable state thus brings into question if the state can ever use force or violence in a legitimate fashion, and offers alternative approaches from Black and feminist intellectual traditions. This article contributes to debates on peacebuilding and transitional justice by challenging the state’s presumed legitimacy in those processes in the case of Colombia.