Counter-powers. The daily life of transitional justice: Women, songs and resistance in Bellavista, Bojayá

Abstract

This article reconstructs the lives of women under transitional justice by narrating their history in Bojayá, in the Colombian Pacific, where one hundred children and adults were killed in clashes between the FARC guerilla and the paramilitary in May 2002. The stories reveal how the women, through games, social construction of the territory, and alabaos (funeral dirges), construct a fundamental counter-power through which to understand transitional justice. Using photographs of post-conflict realities in Colombia and ethnographic work carried out since May 2016 in the area, we argue that these sub powers build a kind of infrapolitics that collaborates, challenges, and reconstructs the power of the State as a nodal agent of the “transition” in Colombia. In this sense, the women use and endure the suffering, their condition as victims, and the reality created for them by transitional justice, as a new means by which to bargain conditions of citizenship in precarious contexts.