Intimate war across borders: Terrifying encounters, recognition, and “the Colombian armed conflict” in Quito, Ecuador

Abstract

Much anthropological scholarship on war—particularly “civil war”—focuses on violence perpetrated between organized political groups within the confines of a national space. In contrast, this article examines how “internal armed conflict” manifests across international borders, irrupting as interpersonal violence in spaces that are supposedly external to war. More specifically, I demonstrate how “the Colombian armed conflict” unfolds between refugees and their persecutors in Quito, Ecuador, through fleeting encounters based upon processes of life-threatening recognition. These everyday encounters constitute “intimate war,” a relational condition of world-making involving terrifying social attachments—threatening verbal and physical gestures and cues—between “strangers,” or people who are not necessarily familiar with each other. In this context, refugees enact strategies of evasion to avoid detection by their persecutors, such as bus hopping, visually scanning their surroundings, and avoiding other Colombians. Terrifying encounters across borders, and refugees’ strategies to avoid them, unsettle normative assumptions about the desirability of recognition, where and how war happens, and what constitutes escape.