Liminal Bodies and Spaces: Farianas’ Gendered Contestations in Northeast Colombia

ABSTRACT

This article is a narration about the contradictory feelings of occupying a space of transition between carrying a gun, and building ‘a new life’, as women ex-guerrillera, in the context of the post-peace agreement in Colombia. It draws upon two ethnographic fieldworks conducted in the northeastern region of Colombia in 2019 and 2022. It analyses the political, spatio-temporal, and embodied dynamics of their reincorporation, drawing on two key concepts that speak to this feeling of occupying a space ‘in-between’ war and ‘civilian society’: liminality and borderlands. The article mobilises liminality as an analytical and empirical tool to delve into those dynamics and show the gendered contestations that precisely arise from this ‘in-betweenness’ that eludes dichotomous analyses of war and peace.

Introduction

The word zozobra refers to a feeling of anxiety and affliction, with an impression of not being balanced, and always on the verge of lurching. It is the feeling that you are not completely collapsing, but you are always on the limit, a groundless feeling. You cannot find a place of quietude. You feel overwhelmed by intense emotions that leave you with unpleasant sensations about the present and the future. It is to feel vulnerable and disoriented in time and space. But it is also an opportunity, a space, for change.

Zozobra is mentioned as a central emotion by the women ex-guerrilleras with whom I have entered into conversations about their ‘transition to civilian life¹’ in the aftermath of armed struggle. In March 2022, when I met with Sonia, in a crowdy, loud lunch place in the city of Bucaramanga,² I asked her if we could discuss a little more about the feeling of zozobra that was mentioned during the collective meeting we had with other women militants the day before.³ She responded that this feeling ‘is latent and will be latent all your life; it will be normal, to learn to live [with it]. The only thing you have to control is how to control those fears’.⁴ After more than 8 years of having left the armed struggle, she still feels in transition, especially given the fact that she was never part of a formal reincorporation process.⁵

The feelings expressed by Sonia have been documented by other research conducted in Colombia and Latin America about women involved in ‘contentious politics’ (Nieto-Valdivieso 2020, 92). Between here (the civilian society) and there (the guerrilla), between war and peace, and between militarism and feminism, women ex-guerrilleras experience numerous transitions in post-peace agreement settings. It is this embodied and spatial liminality that I wish to explore in this article, arguing that giving an account of this feeling of in-betweenness is central to improving reincorporation⁶ processes.

Therefore, this article is a narration about the contradictory feelings of occupying a space of transition between carrying a gun, and building ‘a new life’ in the context of the post-peace agreement in Colombia. Starting from the embodied stories of women⁷ ex-militants from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (Farc-ep) – the farianas –, my overall aim is two-fold. First, I wish to explore the temporal, spatial and embodied feelings of ‘in-betweenness’ experienced by the women ex-militants in reincorporation zones. Second, I want to sketch out the gendered contestations occurring in those liminal spaces between ‘peace’ and ‘war’, which, I argue, resist conventional understandings of peacebuilding and show the pitfalls of reincorporation processes. I investigate the ‘embodied-emotional-experience’ (Chacón 2016) of the farianas⁸ in a particular geography, the northeastern region of Colombia.

This region is an example of a long-standing war-peace continuum in Colombia that eludes any dichotomous analysis. It is in this context between war and peace that the Territorial Spaces for Training and Reincorporation⁹ [Espacios territoriales de capacitación y reincoporación – ETCR] have been settled down to facilitate the reincorporation process of ex-combatants from the Farc-ep. The ETCR are settlements where some farianas are experiencing, on the one hand, their embodied transition from the insurgent armed struggle into integrating civilian values (Estrada-Fuentes 2018) and where, on the other hand, they are currently engaged in initiatives to ensure economic survival and tackle gender-based violence (Farc 2020). In this sense, both their bodies and the territorial spaces of reincorporation (the ETCRs) are analysed in this article as liminal spaces where gendered norms are reproduced but also, contested.

Theoretically, the article first takes on the proposal of Nieto-Valdivieso (2020) to extend Anzaldúa (1987) borderlands theoretical framework to women ex-combatants’ return to civilian society. Following Nieto-Valdivieso’s framework, I show that reincorporation zones are liminal spaces or ‘in-between worlds’ in a continuum between military/civilian, individual/collective, combatant/citizen, etc. They are, ultimately, spaces of embodied, emotional and gendered contestations where ‘peace’ implies difficult questions about identity, care economies and insurgent femininities.

Second, the article mobilises liminality as an analytical tool to delve into those dynamics and show the gendered contestations arising from this ‘in-betweenness’ that eludes dichotomous analyses of war and peace. Through the concept of borderlands and the extension of its theorisation for the case of women ex-combatants by Nieto-Valdivieso, it contributes to the study of liminality both in feminist geography and in peace and conflicts scholarship, especially regarding Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) processes. In this sense, it participates to the academic debates in feminist scholarship on geographies of war and peace by bringing liminality and borderlands into the literature on gender and political reintegration. As such, the article’s main theoretical contribution is to extend the concept of liminal space to liminal bodies¹⁰ by engaging with a concrete case study.

Empirically, this translates into opening the possibilities for political reincorporation: the article shows that embracing liminality would allow for a more accurate picture of the needs of women ex-guerrillera and women leftist militants generally when transitioning from violent settings towards building peace and engaging in non-armed politics. Additionally, it offers empirical insights into how embodied insurgent identities are crucial to the post-peace agreement gendered contestations, which would gain to be included in DDR programs not only in Colombia but globally. In fact, it is especially a timely moment to understand the complexities of the identity and spatial borders experienced by women ex-combatants in Colombia with the ongoing preliminary negotiations between the Colombian government and guerrillas such as the National Liberation Army [Ejército de liberación nacional – ELN] (Mesa Cárdenas 2023) where it will be crucial to draw from the lessons learned in terms of political reincorporation.

The article is divided as follows. I first begin with a note on the contextual background of the research and the methodological steps undertaken during the two multi-sited fieldworks (Marcus 1995; Santamaría, Acosta, and Fernandez 2020). In this section, I also present the women who have conversed with me. Second, I propose initial considerations of using liminality as an analytical and empirical tool for better capturing the reincorporation process of women ex-guerrillera. Third, I proceed to analyse three mutually constitutive forms of in-betweenness in the reincorporation of the farianas: (1) the war-peace continuum of the north-eastern region; (2) the ETCRs as liminal spaces and; (3) embodied liminalities and how the figure of ex-combatant means inhabiting borderlands. The last section proposes to see this in-betweenness as a possibility for reincorporation by exploring examples of gendered contestations that occur in those territorial spaces.

Background and Methodology

In this section, I account for the methodological and contextual background of the research I conducted in the northeast of Colombia by first explaining the multi-sited ethnography and the fragile context of the post-peace agreement. In the last part of this section, I present the farianas who have participated in my research and their role in the current context of the implementation of the peace agreement.

Multi-Sited Ethnography

This article draws upon two fieldworks conducted in 2019 and 2022, when I entered into conversation with the farianas for my PhD dissertation and my postdoctoral research on their reincorporation as a deeply embodied and emotional process.¹¹ Particularly, I have been interested in sketching the multiple sites of their militancy and the obstacles they encounter in pursuing leftist/insurgent politics by other means than armed violence. Territorial and temporal dynamics – embodied, geographic and emotional – soon appear in their narratives and in my fieldwork diary, where I constantly referred to the sensation of being/seeing/feeling in-between two worlds.

This article is thus situated at the intersection between this sensation and the farianas’ testimonies regarding the spatiality of peace and war (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2016) – specifically its continuum in the post-peace agreement setting. It draws upon two main methods: biographical interviews and ethnographic observations compiled in a fieldwork diary and long-term informal (and ongoing) conversations with the farianas. These conversations have been long-standing and prior to my fieldwork in 2019, given that I have begun to inquire into women combatants’ political reintegration since 2013 with different actors, agencies and feminist collectives, especially in the cities of Bucaramanga and Cúcuta. These conversations are still ongoing and take different forms, such as collective meetings, virtual encounters,¹² talks, podcast episodes, joint writing pieces or everyday WhatsApp conversations.

In 2019, I conducted a four-month fieldwork in the northeastern region of Colombia – particularly in two ETCRs, Filipinas (department of Arauca) and Caño Indio (department of Norte de Santander) – during which I interviewed 16 women ex-guerrilleras, 5 women urban militants¹³ and 4 women practitioners, who were key stakeholders in the reincorporation process (mostly working as gender advisors, with the UN Verification Mission¹⁴ or in the implementation of the Peace Agreement).¹⁵ The ETCRs are located¹⁶ in different zones of the country, mostly in the same regions where the initial transitory zones were implemented when the Farc-ep disarmed and aggrouped under the auspices of the UN Verification Mission (Capone 2018).

Methodologically, those ETCRs were chosen for two main reasons. First, I have had several years of previous contact in the region, which allowed me to conduct fieldwork in line with my ethical and longstanding commitment to the reincorporation process in this area. Second, despite still facing high levels of violence, the northeastern region is still less researched than several other ETCRs, such as those with a heavier presence of international cooperation and research projects.

In 2022, I had the opportunity to finally go back to the region after the peak of the pandemic. I was able to return to Caño Indio, but the ELN armed strike during the first round of the 2022 elections did not allow me to travel to Arauca, and most of the women ex-combatants were locked down for the same reason.¹⁷ During this fieldwork, I conducted collective interviews and workshops, follow-up interviews and new interviews with both ex-urban militants and ex-guerrilleras. I also shared and discussed with them the results of my PhD dissertation, so we could also think about the way forward together. This moment gave space to new questions and critical reflections on the state of ‘peace’ in their lives. The notes taken during the observations of the two fieldworks and the transcripts of the interviews were subsequently coded in NVivo software following thematic analysis (Paillé and Mucchielli 2016). The next sub-section delves into the historical context of the armed conflict in the northeastern region.

Northeast Colombia: A Fragile Context

The Northeast of Colombia is a region located at the border with Venezuela and consists of the departments of Norte de Santander (especially Catatumbo) and Arauca.¹⁸ Both departments have historically been spaces categorised as ‘red zones’, meaning they have been confronted with different forms of violence and continuous militarisation of life. On the one hand, Catatumbo has been a region highly influenced by the dynamics of transnational global capitalism and its violent manifestations, such as the massive exploitation of oil and palm oil (Hristov 2015) and the culture of coca. On the other hand, Arauca has historically been dominated by guerrilla groups in almost all spheres of political, administrative, and judicial systems (HWR 2020). This has led to State abandonment in terms of structural necessities but heavy military presence. Additionally, the violence of the armed conflict has further complexified the access to those regions, which are largely understudied in the academia. Even if a peace agreement was signed in 2016 with the Farc-ep, and the left gained historic victory in 2022 with former M-19¹⁹ Gustavo Petro becoming president, peace remains intangible in those regions. But it is not an open war either. They are sites of ‘perpetual waiting’ (Stavrevska 2021) for a peaceful future that never materialises.

Therefore, ethnographic research in Northeast Colombia is uneasy and volatile, highly dependent on the political context of the moment. This research was conducted during such a moment, following the signature of the peace agreement between the Farc-ep and the Colombian government in 2016. This agreement put an end to more than 60 years of armed conflict between the State and this leftist guerrilla. However, it has not ended the armed conflict per se due to the remaining guerrillas in arms, mainly the ELN and dissident factions of the Farc-ep, and other armed groups, such as the neoparamilitaries and the criminal gangs (Paarlberg-Kvam 2021).

The causes of the Colombian armed conflict are multiple and contested, but most scholars agree on the centrality of the unequal distribution of land, the persistence of drug production and the exploitation of peasants’ labour and natural resources as the core reasons for its perpetuation in time and space (CNMH 2013; Meertens 2018). Inequalities are one of the main reasons the Farc-ep was born in Marquetalia (Villamizar 2017), making their ties to the land, peasantry, and remote areas very important features of their guerrilla, which has crucial significance for the reincorporation process. The human and ecological costs of more than 60 years of war are devastating: with more than 9,5 million victims,²⁰ violence unfolded into several modus operandi by a wide range of actors, including state terrorism, selective assassinations, massacres, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, forced displacement, among others.

Historically, the two departments concerned by this article – Arauca and Norte de Santander – have been particularly affected by armed violence and State abandonment, where militarisation was adopted as a strategy to the detriment of making structural and sustainable changes. As argued by Meger and Sachseder (2020, 958), the ‘neoliberal development’ put forward by the Colombian State – and global corporations – with the exploitation of natural resources such as oil, coal, gold, and palm oil has been put in place jointly with the ‘outsourcing of armed and lethal violence’ (emphasis in the original text). Arauca and Catatumbo have been – and still are – affected by those policies: both regions are symptomatic of the Colombian fragmented State, where peripheral zones are controlled by non-state armed groups, who, in many cases, made their own laws (HRW 2019, 2020; Ramírez 2010). I return to the particular context of these regions in the analysis of empirical material.

Therefore, despite the peace agreement with the Farc-ep and the recent election in 2022 of a more progressist government, insecurities remain high in different regions of Colombia, including the Northeast. The effects of Duque’s conservative government²¹ are palpable: structural reforms have been slowed down, suspicion and polarisation have arisen about the agreement during its mandate, and the assassination of social leaders and activists has peaked (Paarlberg-Kvam and Anctil Avoine 2019). Indepaz (2023) has been documenting these murders, estimating that 135 activists and 33 ex-combatants have been killed and 73 massacres committed between January and October 2023. Since the signature of the peace agreement, it is estimated that 1450 social leaders and more than 355 ex-combatants who have signed the peace agreement have been killed.

Those insecurities are gendered: most social leaders and ex-combatants murdered are men and, when women and non-binary bodies are targeted, they are often also victims of sexual violence or are attacked because of their work on gender. In several conversations, the farianas mentioned that their work on gender is difficult in rural areas, given that they often receive threats if they insist too much on feminism or gender. They also feel that the work is further complicated by the mistrust in State institutions, the persistence of armed groups, and the threats they sometimes receive from the Farc-ep factions remaining in arms.²²

With the peace agreement, the Farc-ep have chosen certain geographical zones where they have had their historical roots and strategic support for their reincorporation (Capone 2018). However, this has meant that ex-combatants who remained in the ETCR are in remote areas where there is still a strong presence of armed actors, therefore impacting the security and building of peace. This has also led several of them to leave the zones in search of better conditions and access to nearby towns and villages. In sum, if the initial idea of implementing the ETCRs was to promote collective reincorporation to oppose previous DDR programs (Segura and Stein 2019), the current outcome shows a growing individualisation of the process.

Because of the above context and because it is an under-researched region, choosing those two ETCRs of Northeast Colombia is empirically rich for theorising liminality in the war-peace continuum. In the next sub-section, I present the farianas who have agreed to participate in my research despite this fragile context for their reincorporation.

The Farianas

The participants in my research are women ex-members of the Farc-ep, the farianas, a term I will use in this paper to refer to both urban and rural militants who self-identify as women. The term farianas by itself is open to contestation given that, at the time of writing, the political party of the Farc has switched to Comunes, and the Gender and Diversity branch of the party to Comuneras. This decision was made in 2021, during the second assembly of the political party, both to broaden the audience of the party and to lower the stigmatisation attached to the Farc acronym. I conserve the term farianas here because of its historical relevance (Devia López 2021) and because it was the identity marker used during the conversations and workshops with them.

The women ex-guerrilleras that were part of this research were mostly from a peasant background. Even though they mostly all joined before being 18 and the living conditions of their villages were harsh, they affirm that they did enter the Farc-ep consciously and voluntarily. They have all been active combatants but have also occupied different jobs within the guerrilla, such as dentist, nurse, radio operator, cartograph, teacher, and so on. Some guerrilleras came from urban settings, mostly because the State threatened them due to their active participation in the clandestine party linked to the Farc-ep²³ and students’ movements. Other participants in the research were urban militants, acting in the clandestine cells of the party with ideological and logistical tasks to support the armed branch or to work in mass education.²⁴

Gender regimes are a structuring element of guerrilla warfare (see Dietrich 2017), and those have profoundly affected the women militants participating in my research. While the effects were certainly very important in the militancy of women in the urban and clandestine branches of the organisation, their impacts were higher with the militarised setting of the guerrilla in arms. As also recounted by other research in Guatemala, El Salvador or Peru (Dietrich 2017; Weber 2023), during their armed militancy, women guerrilleras have experienced forms of strict regulation of their feminine and reproductive body while also finding a space in the organisation where they can exercise their agency. Especially important in understanding the affective impacts of returning to civilian society, many farianas perceive that the ‘functional equality’ (Dietrich 2017) – that is to say, the division of labour following an equal distribution between men and women – was making them feel they could have different roles than the ones expected for women in their village of origin (Anctil Avoine 2022b).

The negotiations between the Farc-ep and the Colombian government have opened a space for women guerrilleras to further discuss their gendered position in the organisation and their needs in view of the peace agreement (Boutron 2020). Most of the women participants in my research are also signatories of the peace agreement concluded in 2016. This agreement was acclaimed as one of the most well-thought in terms of gender approach in which the farianas have played an active role in their exchange with women ex-combatants from other countries, feminist and women’s groups, as well as victims and LGBTIQ+ collectives (Anctil Avoine 2022b; Boutron 2020). One aspect of the peace agreement is the reincorporation of ex-fighters into ‘civilian’ society. In the case of the Farc-ep, and with the aim of moving away from prior DDR processes in Colombia, this reincorporation has been framed as territorial, collective and sensitive to ethnic and gendered dynamics (Cárdenas Díaz 2018).

However, its implementation has been extremely slow, especially with the provisions for the gender approach. The indicators, for that matter, demonstrate that only 12% of the gender provisions are considered ‘completed’ while it reaches 30% for the overall commitments of the peace deal (Kroc Institute 2022). This testifies to the many obstacles to materialising gender provisions in the territories where the State is still not very present – like Arauca and Catatumbo, the two regions I delve into in this article.

This transition implies many transformations in terms of identities (name change, redefining the borders of the military/civilian, detachment from the collective, changes in gender regimes); embodiment (experiencing motherhood, detachment from the gun, the occurrence of chronic diseases); emotions (uncertainties, nostalgia, loss in power, anxiety); politics (renegotiation with the collective, reconfiguration of their militancy) and; space (de/reterritorialisation, contradictory feeling about urban ‘new life’, new temporalities linked to the ETCR or cities).

Through the narratives of women ex-guerrilleras, it is possible to understand the feelings of in-betweenness and comprehend affective, embodied, temporal and spatial dimensions of reincorporation that are generally left aside in reincorporation processes (Weber 2021b). Before engaging with the narratives of the farianas, in the following section, I propose to halt and take the pulse of how we can make sense theoretically of this feeling of in-betweenness.

Theorising Liminal Spaces and Bodies

In this article, I use liminality as an empirical and theoretical lens to understand a feeling that I first observed (and felt) during the two fieldworks conducted in the Northeastern region of Colombia in 2019 and 2022. As put forward in the introduction, this feeling is mostly referred to as zozobra by the farianas, and it exposes the political, spatial, temporal and embodied uncertainties that they feel in the transition to civilian society. I contend that this feeling of in-betweenness is generally expelled from the analyses and policies on DDR, largely focused on the economic and technical aspects of this process. This has consequently contributed to a dichotomised view on reincorporation: in order to become ‘civilians’, women ex-combatants must embody civility and re-align with normalcy (Dietrich 2017), including their relationship to space. I argue instead that the ‘transition’ is more characterised by multiple embodied ruptures and spatio-temporal sensations of ‘in-betweenness’ that need to be analysed to make sense of reincorporation as a long-term political endeavour (Estrada-Fuentes 2018).

To explore this feeling of in-betweenness, I use two main concepts that later operationalise in the three types of liminality – political, spatio-temporal and embodied – by exploring the different emotions that characterised farianas’ narratives about their transitions. Those two concepts are liminality and borderlands.

Liminality in Transitional Settings

Coming from the Latin ‘limen’ – threshold –, it has been used in psychology to describe this ‘process of transitioning across boundaries and borders’: it literally means ‘the threshold separating one space from another’ (Larson 2013, 1032). It can be seen as ‘a transitory and precarious phase’ between seemingly ‘stable states’ and denoting a ‘social non-space in which transformation is experienced and achieved’ (Skjoldager-Nielsen and Edelman 2014, 33). It is from this starting point that some authors have applied the concept of liminality to international politics and transitional contexts (see, for example, Karl 2014; Mälksoo 2012, 2018).

Liminality ‘points to in-between situations and conditions where established structures are dislocated’ – as will be explored in the section about the three forms of liminal space – but also, it is ‘a vital moment of creativity, a potential platform for renewing the societal make-up’ (Mälksoo 2012, 481) – as the section on gendered contestations shows.

The embodied and emotional sensation of being between two worlds is a strong feeling in reincorporation. Adopting liminality as an analytical lens gives the opportunity ‘to address the concrete practices of those in transition without depoliticizing their particular historical experiences’ (Mälksoo 2018, 146). In the case of women ex-guerrilleras’ reincorporation, it also allows us to see that they are ‘liminal subjects’ (146): at the same time, they feel ‘in-between’ two worlds – the guerrilla and the civil society – but they also challenge the gendered structures of the ‘new order’ they are transitioning to. Liminality therefore materialises in different dimensions: the ETCRs become practically waiting zones, between disarmament and (a promised and future) ‘peace’ and, women themselves experience a sense of embodied contradiction, where their ‘insurgent’ identity is reconfigured, while also stigmatised. Many contradictions emerge from this ‘transformation of the bodies according to the inhabited territories before, during and after the insurgent experience’ (Vanegas Espejo 2017, 11). In this transformation – representing here the reincorporation process – borders of identity, emotions, embodiment and spatio-temporality move, reconfigure themselves, and create new subjectivities. In that, the concept of borderlands by Anzaldúa (1987) was retaken by scholars such as Nieto-Valdivieso (2020) to express the creation of an embodied situatedness that merges two worlds, seemingly irreconcilable.

Borderlands

According to Anzaldúa (1987, 2011), this position at the borderlands creates a new subjectivity, a way of knowing and being that is born from this particular liminal point, rendering tangible in her framework in the notion of the mestiza. By doing so, Anzaldúa makes a very useful synthesis between postcolonial and poststructuralist contributions for analysing identity relations and subjective positions that are, precisely, deviant of the norm. Through the analysis of the position in borderlands and its creation of new subjectivities, the mestiza, Anzaldúa (2011, 3) proposes a way of studying the ‘rapprochement of two frames of reference’, which are often incompatible. If Anzaldúa refers to it in a specific context for a geo-situated and hybrid embodied position of the mestiza at the intersection of two cultures, this theoretical proposal is relevant to understand that ‘concepts or ideas’ cannot be held within ‘rigid limits’ (3): the production of the self is inexorably a synthesis of encounters.

As such, analysing the narratives of Colombian women ex-combatants who surrendered arms in the 1990s, Nieto-Valdivieso (2020) takes up Anzaldúa (1987) concept of frontera/borderlands to show the complexities of being in bodies at the convergence of several worlds; several ways of being and, knowing. Applied to the reincorporation process of women ex-combatants, Nieto-Valdivieso (2020) theorises these multiple crossings from three boundaries, which I retake and operationalise with the narratives of the farianas:

[…] political as they become members of insurgent organisations fighting the state, the socio-economic and political order; geographical as to become guerrillas they must leave their homes to join the guerrilla ranks in the mountains or live a clandestine life as members of urban cells; and embodied, because becoming a guerrilla entails the transformation of their female civilian bodies into warrior bodies.

(93)

Therefore, this situation of liminality leads to a series of contradictions that emerge precisely from this feeling of being at the frontera of multiple identities; this synthesis between the two worlds. The same body is crossed by identities framed under ‘victim’ and others, framed through the image of the ‘perpetrator’ and eventhe ‘terrorist’. The same embodied position is, per se, a liminal space, that ‘become the site of manifold political contestations’ (Narozhna 2021, 234).

This particular mestiza subjectivity leads Anzaldúa (2011) to further theorise about the contradictions that arise from this ‘oppositional position’, which is highly relevant for the case of farianas’ reincorporation. It allows for the theorising of this particular in-between-worlds position that makes hybridity possible, which is the result of a situation a la frontera; a position that is inscribed at the crossroad of victim/perpetrator identities in the case of the reincorporation (Weber 2021a). Assuming this complex position is an opportunity to think beyond binarities that have characterised scholarship and practice in Peace and Conflicts Studies (Idler 2019, 280): it is the in-between that allows subjects to emerge, overcoming the oppressed/oppressor dialectic condition. The farianas find themselves in this oppositional position, which is both a challenge and a political possibility for their post-peace agreement militancy. Those binary constructs – civil/military or victim/perpetrator – are far from the reality experienced by each individual who has been, at some point, a perpetrator of violence: suffering is often part of women’s narratives, and it may have occurred before or during their involvement in the armed group, but also after (Weber 2021b).

The next section presents the empirical observations and the narratives put forward by the farianas concerning three forms of liminality: political, spatio-temporal, and corporeal.

On In-Betweenness: War-Peace, Spaces and Bodies

In-betweenness arose as something felt, narrated and observed during the two fieldworks. It was not, at the beginning of my research, meant to be a core concept. Slowly, it appears that liminal spaces – geographical and embodied – were central to understanding and contesting the binary imposed by the technical frameworks of reincorporation. This section engages with farianas’ narratives of liminality: it tries to make sense of what is often conflated under the label of ‘transition’, regarding ‘peace’ and ‘civility’ as the highest values to achieve. To do so, I analyse three mutually constitutive forms of in-betweenness in the reincorporation of the farianas: (1) the war-peace continuum of the northeastern region; (2) the ETCRs as liminal spaces and; (3) the embodied liminalities and how the figure of ex-combatant means inhabiting borderlands.

Northeast of Colombia: In-Between War and Peace

Transiting the road that leads to La Gabarra is an emotional shock. Extreme poverty mixes with the omnipresence of oil, coca, and palm oil. It is the land of neoliberal contradictions – it is unbearable. On the road, some houses only have green plastic as walls. There is a feeling that something is absent – but at the same time, heavily present – from the visual field: the ‘abundance’ of globalised capitalism. This tension hides the action of multiple guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and groups associated with drug trafficking. Smuggling is commonplace; it is the generalised economy. You do not ‘see’ coca; but it is everywhere. You feel it. You feel the pressure of trafficking and its connection to the power of guns. The walls of almost every house have graffiti that reads ‘Farc-ep, Front 33 present’ or ‘ELN − 55 years’. Even the police stations are tagged. Bodies are marked, tired, resisting. And this ‘absence/presence’ is heavy, especially when contrasted with the daily resistance of the catatumberas and catatumberos.²⁵

In August 2022, for the first time in history, a President of Colombia visited El Tarra, a small municipality of the Catatumbo region, highly affected by State abandonment and armed violence (Semana 2022). Despite the hope instilled by Gustavo Petro’s election and his visit to this region, its political context is volatile and uncertain. Insecurity remains high with a triple humanitarian crisis: massive migrations and population forced displacement, armed conflict and the global pandemic that has affected both rural and urban areas (Evans and Anctil Avoine 2021). In this triple context of crisis, the 2016 peace deal hardly materialises in the everyday experience of the population, and multiple forms of structural violence persist. Very little data is available on the extent of the current armed conflict in the region, but organisational reports have documented massive human rights violations, including forced recruitment of children, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, killings of activists and migrants, and the use of landmines, among others (HRW 2019, 2020; Zulver and Idler 2020). In this way, it is still impossible to describe the current political situation as ‘post-conflict’, but rather, as ‘post-peace agreements’ with only one of the many armed groups.

The northeast of Colombia is, therefore, an under-researched region, with few studies conducted in this territory regarding previous DDR processes (see Lelièvre Aussel, Moreno Echavarría, and Ortiz Pérez 2004; Anctil Avoine 2017, 2022b). Continuous militarisation and difficult access to the territory are two main reasons for that. This sub-section wishes to engage with this historical silence and explores a first liminal space, the political one, showing the northeastern region as one in tensions between ‘war’ and ‘peace’. For that, I present the two territories where the ETCRs are situated, Caño Indio, Catatumbo and Filipinas, Arauca, the two main regions where my fieldworks were conducted.²⁶

Caño Indio, Catatumbo

Catatumbo is situated in the department of Norte de Santander and bordered to the east by Venezuela; indeed, many migrants have crossed the border via unofficial trails through this region or, officially, through the San Cristobal passage in Cúcuta. The roads to transit the Catatumbo region are very precarious, and access remains difficult, even to Tibú, which is one of the towns through which it is possible to enter the Catatumbo area. The trucks that load the fruit production for the palm oil are mixed with the pimpina, the young people on motorcycles that transport illegal oil, and the ‘presence-absence²⁷’ of the State military officials.

The region of Catatumbo is one of the main areas of coca culture. While the majority of the country’s departments have seen a decrease in the hectares of coca cultivation, UNODC (2020) points out that Norte de Santander has presented constant growth since 2010 and especially since 2019. María, a female ex-guerrillera, confirms that in the Catatumbo region, ‘the majority of the territory is already practically coca²⁸’ and all the peasants who are expecting government’s support with the coca substitution program, are disappointed and left to their own means and resources. As a result, in this bordering region with Venezuela, the ‘“conflict” did not end with the signing of the 2016 Peace Accords’ (Zulver and Idler 2020, 1134).

The ETCR El Negro Eliécer Gaitán in Caño Indio was chosen as a cantonment site for the reincorporation process because it has been historically and geographically linked to the 33 Front [33 Frente] of the Farc-ep and because it was a sphere of influence of the ex-guerrilla. It is located between the municipalities of Tibú and La Gabarra. The community²⁹ of Caño Indio is currently composed of approximately 53 families, which have hardly ever received attention from the State (San Jorge 2018). As of the end of February 2023, 54 ex-combatants, the majority from Front 33, were officially registered in the ETCR of Caño Indio (ARN 2023): some live there, and others move back and forth between cities (such as Cúcuta, Tibú, etc.) and the reincorporation zone. At the time of my first research fieldwork in Caño Indio, in September and October 2019, there were approximately 70 ex-combatants in the ETCR. For example, some farianas from Caño Indio were living in the ETCR at the time of our first interviews in 2019, but are now dispersed in the Catatumbo region, partly in search of better economic conditions or for security reasons.

The continuous presence of armed groups – and even threats from Farc-ep dissident fighters who have not laid down the weapons in 2016 or have rearmed – is a major factor of insecurities in the Catatumbo. In several interviews, both in 2019 and 2022, women mentioned the increasing and worrying forms of insecurities – ‘a tough war, not about ideology, but only money’ – that affects the Catatumbo region. As several scholars have argued (Hedström 2022), militarisation has particular effects on women’s lives. In the post-peace agreement setting, the lines have become blurred between the different armed groups. Specifically, women ex-combatants have been threatened by armed groups for their work on gender. Even some of them would explain how some of their former comrades have rearmed and now oppose their gender activism.³⁰ On top of that, the ‘transitional landscape’ is marked by uncertainty, which adds up to the feeling of zozobra – anxiety – that I will address in the next section: one of the major problems of the region is land property, and many farianas expressed the fear that the ETCR would ‘disappear’ or be expropriated.³¹ Even if this fear has not ‘materialised’ yet in terms of the location of the ETCR, the property where it is situated does not pertain to the ex-combatants, and Caño Indio is on the list of the reincorporation zones that would possibly be relocated (ARN 2021).

Filipinas, Arauca

The department of Arauca is located in the region of Orinoco (Orinoquía). A border area with Venezuela, Arauca officially became a department with the new constitution of 1991. A territory of internal colonisation where the Colombian State has played only a minimal role in terms of population integration and sovereignty, it is sparsely populated and is still characterised by weak political and administrative unity, high rates of corruption and a weak institutional presence. Historically, leftist guerrillas have been very present in the department of Arauca, to the point of penetrating several political bodies (Gutiérrez Lemus 2010; Marín Carvajal 2014). Moreover, the guerrillas still occupy an important political place in the geopolitics of the department of Arauca. During fieldwork, a public official affirmed the ongoing coercive power of these groups in the department.³² This is corroborated by a report from HRW (2020): ‘the guerrillas are the police’. Furthermore, the 2016 peace agreement led to a reconfiguration of political actors and forces while there was a massive influx of migrant people from Venezuela (Zulver and Idler 2020). The report published by HRW (2020) highlights profound impacts on daily life: militarisation on both sides of the border, administration of justice by armed groups, forced recruitment, forced displacement disproportionately affecting children, sexual violence and human trafficking, forced labour, and a drastic increase in killings. Since March 2021, the border situation in the department of Arauca and the Venezuelan state of Apure has worsened considerably. Armed confrontations have intensified between the Venezuelan armed forces and Colombian armed groups. These clashes cost the lives of several Venezuelan soldiers and forced the displacement of over 5,000 people (Indepaz 2021; Pardo 2021).

The ETCR Martín Villa is located in the small village of Filipinas, Arauca. Access is easier than to Caño Indio, and the road offers better conditions than those in the Catatumbo. However, as in Caño Indio, militarisation is a defining feature of the post-peace agreement landscapes: in 2019, there were three military roadblocks from Arauca (capital) to Filipinas, and the army’s checks of identity documents were more vigorous than in Catatumbo at the time of the fieldwork. Recent informal conversation with farianas shows that uncertainty and fear are still present at the beginning of 2022: at the moment of the second fieldwork, most of them were sharing feelings of insecurities when thinking about going out of the ETCR. In March 2022, even if the Havana peace deal was supposed to offer guarantees of security in the remote territories, the political tensions around the first round of elections and the armed strike by the ELN did not make it possible for me to go back to Arauca.

As of February 2023, 165 ex-combatants were registered in Filipinas, three times as many as in Caño Indio. At the time of the fieldwork, the ETCR had its own daycare centre, cafeteria, and a small store where it was possible to buy some basic foodstuffs as well as a cantina, where beer could be purchased, which the committee of ex-combatants with disabilities ran. This ETCR is one of the few that was able to define the situation of the land: the ex-combatants have been able to buy the land where they initially settled down after disarmament (ARN 2021). This, in the long run, might result in a more positive relationship with the land in this ETCR than in Caño Indio.

To sum up, this political liminality manifests itself as the blurring lines between war and peace: the feeling is, in both regions, that peace has not materialised yet due to militarisation and the reconfiguration of armed groups and violence. This further impacts the reincorporation of ex-combatants and the work that the farianas aim to do in terms of gender and peace. This brings up the question of the relationship between space and time in this transitional context.

‘La zozobra’: ETCR as Liminal Spaces

Everyday life in the ETCRs remains quite difficult, although it varies from one ETCR to another. The measures of time and space are different. Embodied and territorial spaces are at the centre of a particular concept of confinement. I was discussing this with two other researchers who were doing the fieldwork with me; there is a passage from the selva to the camp to… where, in fact? There is no real ‘aftermath’; it is political and economic uncertainty. Women are brave to be able to still have hope, and to continue to engage in militancy.³³

This second sub-section engages with the spatio-temporal liminality of the ETCRs, responding to the necessity of studying the interlinkage of temporality and spatiality in war/peace territories (Idler 2019). The ETCRs, after the peace agreement, became spaces of ‘transition’ and ‘waiting’ for ‘peace’ in a region where war still makes its presence heavily felt, as shown in the last subsection.

The ETCRs were set up slowly, with many unplanned costs and events. They are settlement spaces created specifically for the Farc-ep reincorporation process, and they are generally located in remote areas and near small, sparsely populated villages (Capone 2018). Initially, the ETCRs were intended to be temporary spaces for the early reincorporation period from 2017 to July 2019, when the reincorporation entered the ‘long-term phase’. Planned to last 6 months, they are still in place as of February 2024, though in different forms than originally thought.

Most of the participants in my research emphasised that the ETCRs largely depend on the efforts that ex-guerrilla members have put into them.³⁴ Furthermore, it is impossible not to notice the precarious conditions of most of the ETCR infrastructures. Yet, initially, their main function was to promote collective reincorporation and, thus, to ensure both economic survival and political participation, which the fieldwork results are very far from corroborating.³⁵ Given the poor progress in the implementation of the peace process, the Colombian government had to extend the funding of the ETCR, which they renamed the Former Territorial Spaces of Capacitation and Reintegration [Antiguos Espacios Territoriales de Capacitación y Reincorporación (AETCR)] in September 2019. However, this name change did not have an impact on the everyday life of ex-combatants, as many have denounced the difficult conditions of these territorial spaces.³⁶

In 2021, most ETCRs have rather become ‘permanent’. Despite this permanent nature, precarity is evident in terms of material conditions and infrastructure. One of the main problems is one of the root causes of the armed conflict: the endemic lack of access to land to create the material conditions for survival, which directly affects both the productive and reproductive spheres – particularly impacting women and feminised bodies, as it has been widely denounced by Latin American feminists (Rodríguez Castro 2021). One gendered consequence of these precarious conditions has been that many women combatants have had to follow their male comrades in remote areas,³⁷ far from the ETCR and the collective, which directly impacts them in two ways: they are usually re-assigned to traditional roles (private sphere, motherhood, etc.), and they are spatially isolated from the collective, consequently impacting their political militancy. For example, some women actively involved in gender activism with whom I had discussed in 2019 expressed feelings of despair about their situation when I revisited them in 2022. One of them told me: ‘Look at me now, I am stuck in motherhood’, in reference to the significant shifts in her political location as she was confined both in the private sphere and separated (in geographical and symbolic terms) from the political collective. These spatial and material conditions are, therefore, a major impediment to one of the main principles of the peace agreement, which is a community-based and collective process of reincorporation.

In the ETCRs, the palpable emotion is the zozobra: these places have become liminal spaces, where there is a ‘process of suspension’ and everyone ‘waits’; the expectation of the possibility of ‘happiness’ that peace and reincorporation represent. The testimony of Johana is revealing of this expectation for a better future:

I don’t have my own house. I need to buy a house that is mine, even if this means drinking boiled water. But no, one has nothing; it looks like one just came to the world. One is here, and it is like coming to the world for the first time; we don’t have anything. We are living in the same shacks that the government gave us. They promised us houses, and they haven’t even given us a brick to start building them.³⁸

The feeling of expectation persists, and it remains diffuse since it depends on anxiety associated with the loss of collective references without concrete projects of subsistence. The return ‘to normal’ – the normal being assumed to be ‘civilian life’ – becomes a ‘perpetual waiting’ (Stavrevska 2021). The wait is constant; the transition becomes indefinite. It is not peace; it is not war. It is not happiness or unhappiness. It is in-betweenness. This ‘perpetual waiting’ is linked to different aspects: in the case of Johana, this feeling is manifested in never really getting ‘her’ home and fearing the consequences of returning to where her family lives. For other women ex-guerrilleras, it can also be related to material or economic impediments, which in turn makes them feel that the only place they can ‘wait’ for a ‘better future’ is within the ETCR. As Weber (2023) argues in the case of other ETCRs, this is also linked to the numerous problems of implementing the collective reincorporation, where ex-combatants have been waiting for the productive projects much longer than expected – and some are still waiting.

This feeling of waiting is strikingly different from what the farianas would experience in wartime. During the war, there was a clear telos: the seizure of power through revolutionary armed struggle. In the return to civilian life, the feeling of usefulness is diffuse and more complex for the ex-combatants. The farianas often refer to the zozobra as the dominant emotion where they ‘try to move forward, without knowing where they are going’.³⁹ Somewhat synonymous with anxiety, zozobra is a particular emotion in the narratives of women ex-combatants in that it refers to uncertainty, as if the self could not find the space for action and tranquillity in the post-peace agreement. Given that the guerrilla generally assumed all basic needs, zozobra is born from the re-imposition of a capitalist and privatised model that provokes a feeling of being in-between; without emotional, economic, and political certainties. This reprivatisation of affects – the returning to a sedentary, private life, generally following the model of the nuclear family – imposes a special form of liminality for women: they are faced with a borderland identity, where they are reimposed functional roles that align with motherhood, traditional relationships, and care work. In that sense, the feeling of being in-between two worlds is stronger for women and feminised bodies: their experience of ‘civilian life’ contrasts more vividly with the gender regimes (Dietrich 2017) of the guerrilla group, which is something that is rarely assessed in the DDR programs. The expectations on feminised bodies become more constraining as they might be confronted with more traditional roles than those they were used to in the guerrilla, provoking this sensation of having to ‘relearn’ several behaviours that do not fit with their political history of militancy.

Zozobra is also the emotion that binds the relationship between the body and the territory in the liminal spaces that are the ETCRs, and that reflects a broader sense of insecurity in the face of the uncertainty of the post-peace agreement. The testimony of Nelly shows this relation between space, temporality and embodiment in the ‘waiting’:

It is a very difficult peace to find, and one makes a sacrifice to find this inner peace,⁴⁰ but sometimes […] one also explodes with anger, hatred, and resentment. […] Is life difficult in this new phase that I am living? It’s very hard, very hard, to face it, but you have to face it anyway, you have to get through it, you have to face this life and go through it with all the thousands of difficulties. It’s fighting and fighting. And trying to move forward and, in the end, you resign yourself. Just staying here and waiting for time to pass and surviving. And that’s what you’re dedicated to. Fighting and fighting, just to survive. That’s what you dedicate yourself to in the end. It’s so, so much, that the body does not give anymore.⁴¹

In this narration, Nelly shows how the feeling of ‘inner peace’ is uneasy to fulfil in this ‘new phase’ of reincorporation. Her feelings about being in the civilian world are attached to emotions like anger, hate, resentment, and difficult material conditions. When she tentatively tries to think about ‘moving forward’ or progressing in her transition, she feels she has to ‘resign’ and ‘wait for time to pass’ as if she cannot find the purpose anymore. In her story, this feeling of being lost in the time, space and emotionality of transition is in stark contrast with how she narrates her time in the guerrilla. During our conversations, she acknowledged that she had numerous ‘nervous alterations because of military operations and bombings’, but she also felt she had a clear cause: ‘to fight all one’s life, to seek change; the change of this criminal system’.⁴² Hence, the transition becomes the site of redefining life’s purpose, but the sensation of constant ‘waiting’ for something to happen makes Nelly feel she is only ‘surviving’.

Karina, an ex-combatant from Caño Indio, in an interview with Martin Laiton (2020), sums up the feeling of the anxiety linked to this waiting: ‘We were not used to being immobile. We are brought here, in a context between four walls, where we don’t know what to do. The sun comes up, the sun goes down, and it’s all the same’ (n.p.). The passage to civilian life after dedicating so many years to the armed struggle and in a community with strong embodied-affective ties gives the sensation ‘of being left in front of life as if it were a blank sheet of paper’ (Vásquez Perdomo 2011, 19). In turn, this feeling of emptiness also depends on the difficulty in finding an autonomous and individual project in civilian life, reinforcing the feeling of endless waiting (Anctil Avoine and Boutron 2021). This is symptomatic of the failure to think about the individual reincorporation and the interplay between rural and urban dynamics of returning to civilian life within the initial collective reincorporation scheme of the peace agreement. So, as Nelly summarises, ‘the feeling it gives us is anxiety […] it’s mortifying ourselves, so we try to distract ourselves with several activities’⁴³ – daily activities in the house, taking care of the land or trying to engage politically, for example.

As such, in the reincorporation process, and especially because most of the women affirmed that they never received psychological treatment after they participated in the war, there is a particular temporality and spatiality to emotions (Chacón 2016). It appears that the feeling of zozobra – of anxiety – is attached to the sensation of being ‘neither outside nor inside’. It is in this liminal space that they need to navigate constantly in order to survive and ‘keep going’:

How can you measure emotionality in the ETCRs, where people leave, where houses are abandoned,⁴⁴ and where everything is neglected? People don’t want to go to [political] meetings […] So, we can bring the best productive project, and people will do it, but with distrust.⁴⁵

Anxiety is thus directly linked to the territory, partly because it is a completely different way of occupying space than the more nomadic life of the guerrilla, but also, because the future is so vaguely defined compared to how their daily activities were organised and disciplined during wartime. This uncertainty is exacerbated by the difficult access to land and the transitional landscape, mentioned in the anterior sub-section. As Leticia mentions, there is a constant threat of dispossession and expropriation by the State and other armed actors, and this fear has been occupying women’s minds since the beginning of the process of reincorporation: ‘They wanted to take us out and send us to a place where we can’t even grow corn […], but we had the support of the civilian population’.⁴⁶

Economic precarity and political uncertainty have led many people to desert the ETCR and find their way outside the transition zones. Some ex-combatants have decided to move to nearby cities, while others have formed New Areas of Reincorporation⁴⁷ [Nuevas áreas de reincorporación (NAR)]. The NARs are improvised zones formed with ex-combatants who have relocated outside the ETCRs without formal structures. It is estimated that there are approximately 93 NARs on the national territory (Estrada Álvarez 2020). NARs are informal settlements that have slowly taken form with the internal movement of the ex-combatants: they have arrived at specific sites and decided to instal themselves there and organise their own space. Little is known about those settlements, and how they are not yet ‘fixed’ on the territories, but they generally face even more precarious conditions than the ETCRs. Some authors have labelled them ‘forms of rural occupation of land for peacebuilding’ (Torres-Tovar and Pérez-Cardozo 2022, 93). However, the possibility of ‘building peace’ in those territories remains low because the NARs are not officially recognised by the national government; a clear definition does not bind them in the peace agreement, as is the case with the ETCRs (Marsiglia Escudero 2021). As such, in the NAR, anxiety is even more present. According to Camila, a woman ex-guerrillera that I met in Barrancabermeja, the NAR of San Francisco in this region is facing multiple problems: ‘the situation is just people adrift […] we are sitting, waiting […] it is a feeling of rage and desolation’.⁴⁸

The spatio-temporal liminality shows how the zozobra is felt through different gendered aspects: the reimposition of the clear division between the private and the public has different consequences on women and their collective reincorporation. It is marked by precarity, anxiety and waiting. This situation is coupled with identity transformations, which is discussed in the next sub-section on how the farianas find themselves in between two worlds, following Nieto-Valdivieso’s framework (2020), in terms of identity, emotion, body, and politics.

Embodied Liminalities: Inhabiting the Borderlands

In this process of transition that we are going through, I feel that I still haven’t come out of my shell properly. I mean, I feel nostalgic at times, not because of leaving the gun or for not being in the monte anymore… But for losing that unity with the people we have been with.⁴⁹

In this narration, Johana shows that the sensation of transition persists more than five years after her disarmament. Her testimony reveals that she is still not feeling totally out of her shell: her body is still in between the space associated with the weapon and the monte and this ‘new’ setting, where she has to ‘come out’ of this transition to embody a different life. Her shell is also associated with the ‘collective body’: emotionally, getting out of the shell means she loses the ‘unity’ with other comrades that she was experiencing in the guerrilla.

In this third sub-section, I delve into a form of in-betweenness that is corporeal: the body is another liminal space where women ex-guerrillera experience feelings of contradiction and changes in identities. This question leads to a feeling of being constantly ‘in-between worlds’: the passage from the ‘civilian’ to the military uniform; from embodying the ‘citizen’ to carrying a gun; from the ‘village’ to the ‘monte’ or ‘selva’ (mountain, jungle, savannah); from ‘visibility’ to ‘clandestinity’ for the urban militants. This blurring of the relationship to corporeality and territories has profound consequences in the moments of transition, either towards guerrilla warfare/clandestinity or towards the ‘civilian’. The same feeling of in-betweenness appears again during the return to civilian society. This liminality is captured in the work of Nieto-Valdivieso (2020), who retakes the idea of ‘borderlands’ by Anzaldúa (1987) to complexify the analysis of ‘returning’ to a ‘civilian’ mode of existence.

The embodied liminality has particular gendered consequences for women compared to their male comrades: as stated earlier, the gendered regimes in the guerrilla are very different than the ones in ‘civilian life’. Motherhood is one of the most important gendered sites of this feeling of liminality for women: the mass media have been disseminating the idea of a ‘baby-boom’ after the peace agreement, which would call upon the ‘new life’ of the farianas as peaceful civilians (Houghton 2017). Farianas themselves recognise that there have been a lot of births following the peace agreement and that this has awakened several contradictions between their political militancy and their identity as mothers.⁵⁰

To capture this embodied liminality, I argue that the figure of the combatant (Boutron 2024) should be brought back to the forefront in reincorporation. Dietrich (2014, 124) emphasised the need to maintain the category of compañera política in the return to civilian life that allows ‘women militants to legitimise their experience of armed struggle’ and to transfer capacities acquired during it. Following Vásquez Perdomo (2011, 23), an ex-guerrillera of the M-19, it is a matter of ‘refusing the imposition of an ex, militant and guerrillera, which fractured [her] identity’. In Dietrich’s (2017, 367) research findings, and similar to the figure of the mestiza proposed by Anzaldúa (2011), the compañera política becomes a ‘different category of women’, who break away from ‘idealized constructions of civilian femininity’. The ‘female combatant’ is indeed opposed to the vision of the female body as mainly dedicated to the reproduction of life, and, therefore, to its protection: in ‘the traditional symbolic order is that women are, above all, bodies’ (Rayas Velasco 2005, 10), and mostly, (potential) reproductive bodies.

The insurrecta contradicts this normalising vision. Rather, as argued by Carmen, this particular liminal position is at the heart of an identity struggle in the post-peace agreement:

They want us to deny what we were for many years […] when we know that what we were doing was right, an armed struggle […] an armed struggle that we considered necessary for changing the society […] it was not even for us, because we were in the precarious conditions of the war. […] we can’t deny what we were […] so we fight for it.⁵¹

So, on the contrary to what has been generally understood as becoming civilian, the insurgent identity is not erased; it is a space to pursue the militancy. As Deisy convincingly states, having been a guerrilla is a sense of honour that carries over into civilian life: ‘I feel very proud to have been what I was and what I am, because I owe a lot to the guerrilla because I learned a lot and I feel very proud’.⁵² Expected to regret, the female ex-guerrillera is not totally responding to the claim of civility.

During our conversations, the farianas mentioned many tensions unfolding from this liminal identity position. One of the two main terrains where it manifests is regarding sexual violence and the figure of the female combatant (insurgent woman). On the one hand, the farianas are shown as ‘victims of male guerrilleros’ (forced recruitment, forced abortion, for example). On the other hand, they are presented as ‘deviant’ female bodies, as if they were ‘accomplices of male rapists’.⁵³ In both cases, there is a process of revictimisation and stigmatisation, an important obstacle to their political militancy in the post-peace agreement (Anctil Avoine 2023; Dietrich 2017).

If for society – and mostly for the mass media generally – they are presented as victims of their male comrades, they also portray themselves as victims of State violence in the first place. For example, Camila maintains that ‘[their] only crime is to be in Colombia’⁵⁴ and Deisy notes that ‘the government is guilty of several murders’. For Deisy, it was the State, using public forces, that carried out the sexual violence: ‘When a guerrilla was caught by the army, the army would rape her, kill her, dismember her. […] That’s what the government is afraid of, that the people will really know the truth’. And she summarises what can be associated with the ‘oppositional position’ (Anzaldúa 2011) this way: ‘Many people say “ah, but why are you crying, if you’ve done something wrong”. And I say that somehow, we were perpetrators, but also victims, and that affects us’.⁵⁵ Female ex-guerrilleras embody this contradictory identity, between victims and perpetrators, a crossing that does not fit the usual categories of transitional justice (Dietrich 2009).

Thus, following Ahmed (2014) on the redirection of hateful affects towards certain bodies, it is possible to understand the embodiment of the ‘guerrillera’ as the materialisation of the tensions of transitional justice. The bodies of female ex-combatants become the sites where those tensions are redirected. But this oppositional position is also a condition of possibility in three manners: (1) it allows to see a continuum of structural and gendered violence before, during, and after their time in the armed group, reverting the idea that they are now experiencing ‘peace’; (2) it further exposes that experiences of intra-rank violence ‘co-existed with more positive experiences’ (Weber 2021a, 275) and, that it is central to consider the possibility of ‘dual experiences of agency and victimhood’ (277). This, in turn, (3) allows us to break the silence on these experiences and provides an opening for female ex-combatants’ political militancy. The following section explores how farianas are inhabiting this positionality of border by actively taking part of this transitional landscape.

Farianas’ Gendered Contestations

In Colombia, gender inequalities played a central role in women’s engagement in revolutionary struggles (Trisko Darden and Steflja 2020). This applies to other contexts, such as Nepal and Liberia, where women fighters felt empowering experiences in revolutionary struggles that came in contrast to what they experienced in their social milieu of origin (Steenbergen 2020). Thus, while forced recruitment has been and continues to be a reality (Higgs 2020), the dichotomised view of women as victims of armed groups or as empowered combatants does not hold: the complex issue of agency in war must be analysed within a continuum of violence, giving a particular place to the political context in which the decision to enlist is made. The reincorporation phase also depends on deconstructing these binarities about women’s militancy, making it possible to understand their diverse experiences.

To deconstruct those binaries, I argue that we should engage with the position of liminality through which the female (ex) combatants go through in this transition to civilian society. Therefore, this last section proposes to see this in-betweenness as a possibility for reincorporation by exploring examples of gendered contestations that occur in those territorial spaces.

Following Larson (2014), liminality offers the possibility to build bridges between the self and others. Experiencing liminality, therefore ‘encapsulates the transformation of subjectivity’ (Mälksoo 2018, 146) during the passage from one world to another one – which is the case of the interstice created by the reincorporation process. ‘Resisting binary opposition, liminality allows for the extended conceptualisation of a political subject’ (Mälksoo 2012, 483): in this transition to civilian life, farianas are actively defying binaries and reclaiming a space on their own, as sujetas políticas (Barrera Téllez 2017). Based on conversations with women and feminist movements as well as with ex-combatants from other disarmed insurgencies, the farianas have thought thoroughly about the kind of transition they wanted to take part (Anctil Avoine 2022b). And this view of transition and active political militancy is gathered in their strategy for reincorporation (Farc 2020) and materialises in many gendered contestations they engage in daily in the post-peace agreement setting. During the peace process of La Havana, they have tried to propose their own view on feminism – the ‘insurgent feminism’ (Anctil Avoine 2022b; Sandoval Acosta, Cardoza, and Correal Cabezas 2018). They have used the insurgent identity and their experience of war to remobilise differently in the post-peace agreement. Therefore, they embraced this liminality, taking a stance where their insurgent past is not only attached to negative affects or stereotypes of war, but also to experiences of joy, happiness, love, and friendship (Nieto-Valdivieso 2017).

In the northeastern region, ex-combatants have created different initiatives, with the territorial committees working on the gendered aspects of reincorporation. Nelly, for example, is working with the Commission for the Follow-up, Promotion and Verification of the Implementation of the Final Agreement [Comisión de Seguimiento, Impulso y Verificación a la Implementación del Acuerdo Final – (CSIVI)], especially monitoring the gender approach of the peace agreement. Together with other ex-combatants, she is also actively involved in a collective project, the production of Sacha Inchi.⁵⁶ It is one of the most important projects of the ETCR of Filipinas, including 11 women, and implemented by the Agricultural Cooperative for Peace with the support of Paso Colombia and the regional government of Arauca. Even though she reaffirms that ‘there is a lot of insecurity and uncertainty’ and that ‘it has been difficult to consolidate this process and peace’, she feels that this is a ‘part that is defined⁵⁷’ for her.

In Caño Indio, the farianas have been working on embodied memory from war through the writing of their memoirs and the fight against gender-based violence through productive projects. They have been thinking about constructing memory initiatives to contribute to the truth about the armed conflict, from their point of view as women ex-combatants, thus embracing this contested identity. They have been discussing the idea of building a ‘house of memory’, with the vocation of a museum oriented towards ‘the political, the memories of the cultural celebrations, the fariana music and the identities […]’ and above all, on ‘how the farianas organised their guerrilla life’ to ‘construct feminine referents’.⁵⁸

Most importantly, they have been working on a collective project called Puntadas por la Paz (Martin Laiton 2020). During my first fieldwork, I had the opportunity to accompany the women of Caño Indio – both farianas and the community – in the first brainstorming moments of this project with the British Council in collaboration with the ARN. It has later become a space of encounters for the farianas and the women from the community of Caño Indio, where they have started to tailor their own clothes, especially innovative skirts that reflects the diversity and colours of the Catatumbo region. The idea came because the farianas were having some tailoring machines from their time in war and they were looking for an idea that would be ‘weaving a new history with stitches’, according to Kathe, a woman ex-guerrillera based in Caño Indio. According to Kate, one of the women leading this project, Puntadas por la Paz is a way to build bridges with the community, empower women economically and contribute to contesting gender norms in the rural area, where violence is widespread. At the core of the project is therefore the idea of ‘generating economic autonomy to prevent gender-based violence, especially in regions like this one [Catatumbo] where gender-based violence is very prevalent’.⁵⁹

In the context of liminality that characterises the reincorporation process – this in-between peace/war, combatant/civilian identities – agency takes place in the ‘everyday’, and at a ‘small scale’ (Björkdahl, Hall, and Svensson 2019, 125), challenging the ideas of the war-peace oppositional landscapes. While it is important to remember that ‘everyday practices are undoubtedly chaotic, dynamic, and not always intentionally resistant’, it is possible to see in these embedded practices, not ‘trivial activities’, but possible sites of agency and gendered contestations (Narozhna 2022, 227).

Conclusions: Making Space for Peace Through Liminality?

¿Qué hijueputas es la paz para la gente?⁶⁰

Approaching eight years of their disarmament, farianas embody many identity boundaries at a crucial time of their reincorporation, the ‘long-term’ one. Following the empirical observations that zozobra was a recurring feeling farianas’ reincorporation process, this article has delved into this feeling of in-betweenness by showing that it is both a critical rupture leading to the sensation of groundlessness and a space for change and contestation.

Thus, I have argued for the necessity of engaging political, spatio-temporal and embodied forms of liminality in the reincorporation process. I have demonstrated first that liminality is political in the sense that farianas’ reincorporation occurs in a setting between war and peace, and that this particular location has several consequences on their process, most importantly related to land access and insecurities. Second, liminality is also spatio-temporal in the ETCR, where women ex-guerrilleras are confronted with feelings of zozobra and uncertainties that hinder their political reincorporation. Finally, I presented a third form of liminality, the embodied one, where the farianas are experiencing numerous identity changes in their passage from an armed struggle to the civilian society, where they feel torn between their past self as insurgent women and the ‘new’ life they were promised. As such, I have argued that the in-betweenness of the ETCR and the embodied figure of the women ex-combatant challenges ideas of ‘peaceful’ transitions, versus war context.

The idea of in-betweenness brings to light other paths to think about the reincorporation process and, most importantly, the gendered contestations of women in their everyday positionality and contribution to building a more ‘peaceful’ Colombia. Embracing this liminality has several practical consequences for rethinking reincorporation beyond (and through) its mainly technical and economic aspects. The analysis I proposed in this article about liminal embodied, spatial and political spaces opens the possibility of engaging in more complex ways with the political reincorporation – one of the most neglected aspects of DDR in Colombia and globally, as reiterated by the farianas themselves. It does so by proposing new categories for their political participation, that would account for their multiple identities and contradictory feelings arising from their political militancy – such as the category of insurgent women. It also brings to the front the necessity of connecting the embodied experience of reincorporation and its spatial dynamics, bringing up the question of urban/rural divide, the gendered aspect of returning to the ‘private’ sphere, the relationship to time, land and space, but also, the complex emotions that are attached to the sensation of being between collectivity and individuality. Ultimately, it proposes a critique of the embodied and normalising process upon which many reintegration programs are based in Colombia and globally.

In fact, through farianas’ transition narratives, this article has shown the analytical and empirical potential of liminality and borderlands as concepts to capture the complex feelings of in-betweenness in transiting from a highly disciplined military armed structure to a ‘normalised’ civilian society. This position of liminality opens paths to think about improving reincorporation processes to include different scales of embodied and spatial dynamics. For example, reincorporation processes could benefit from including emotions in fomenting spaces for political engagement: the article has shown that war knowledge, insurgent identities, and other experiences from the armed militancy and clandestinity can be mobilised for peace instead of being related to the past (see also Dietrich and Nieto-Valdivieso forthcoming; Simanca Herrera 2023). Additionally, this makes possible the practical and theoretical reflection about emotions and spatiality in transitional settings, with a particular emphasis on the rural-urban divide that still needs to be investigated in the Colombian case, as most of the farianas pointed out to the lack of strategy for the urban reincorporation in the 2016’s peace agreement. In the same vein, paying attention to liminal feelings, spaces, and politics can be key in the current attempts of the Colombian government to settle a peace negotiation with the ELN. Several discussions are taking place in this process about the gendered dimensions – their successes and failures – of the Farc-ep’s reincorporation process and how it can be improved with the ELN.

In the end, placing liminality at the core of this process is, first and foremost, accepting ambiguity in ‘re-embodying’ civilian values after being part of an insurgent struggle. In turn, this oppositional position of the farianas shows that it is crucial to complexify this so-called ‘transition’ where we still witness high levels of insecurities and violence. In this way, the figure of the female combatant shows the unproductivity of thinking about ‘peace’ through traditional binaries; their liminal position in the post-peace agreement demonstrated, on the contrary, the potentiality of engaging with the different scales of their embodied, geographical, political and, emotional reincorporation.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the farianas of the north-eastern region of Colombia who have agreed to dialogue with me during the research and who continue to do so. I am thankful to Agnese Pacciardi, Annika Björkdahl, Claske Dijkema and Markus Holdo for their insightful comments on improving and restructuring this article. I am also grateful to workshop participants at Swiss Peace (2023) and the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers (2022) for their comments on earlier versions of this paper as well as the two anonymous reviewers who provided constructive and encouraging comments on the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship under Grant number [CGV-151427]; the Vinnova/Marie Curie Seal of Excellence under Grant [2021-02012]; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council under Grant [756-2021-0617].

Notes

1. ‘Transiting to civilian life’ is a concept widely used in Colombia that can be roughly defined as the passage from a military setting – usually in non-State armed groups – to an unarmed scenario, where combatants are ‘reintegrated’ to the State institutions, including complying with the security sector (policy, State army, etc).

2. Capital of the Department of Santander, northeast Colombia.

3. Collective workshop, March 23, 2022 (Bucaramanga).

4. Interview conducted on March 24, 2022 (Bucaramanga).

5. Sonia left the armed guerrilla in 2008 and returned to civilian society by herself. We still know very little about cases of women like Sonia who were licenced, captured, or deserted from the guerrilla group outside of the formal peace agreement.

6. I adopt the term ‘reincorporation’ instead of reintegration given that the Farc-ep has explicitly said they refuse to ‘demobilize’ and that their process of returning to civilian society is different from the previous ones in Colombia. For further explanation of the multiple Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) processes in Colombia, see for example Carranza-Franco (2019), and Herrera and González (2013).

7. I adopt here an open-to-contestation and non-essentialist vision of the category of women (Butler 1990), which includes all the people that would self-identify as such.

8. I chose to keep the term farianas even though it is a debated terminology within and outside the political party of the Commons (Partido Comunes). I will use the term to refer globally to the women ex-militants (both urban and militant) from the Farc-ep, acknowledging the historical importance of the term in their struggle for the inclusion of women in the guerrilla group (Anctil Avoine 2022a). However, not all my participants would talk about themselves as farianas – some prefer comuneras, others las del común, while some have stopped feeling identified with those terms. See Devia López (2021) for a historicity of the term fariana.

9. The ETCRs are now called AETCRs, adding the term ‘antiguos’ (former ETCR) to make clear that they are now transforming into more or less permanent settlements. I will stick to ETCR because the farianas still use this term (or ‘el espacio’) and it was also the term used during both fieldworks.

10. Thanks to Agnese Pacciardi for putting words on this contribution.

11. Ethics approvals for the pre-fieldwork (#3314) and fieldwork (#3316) were obtained through the ethics board of the Université du Québec à Montréal. The Ethics Board in Sweden approved the fieldwork for the post-doctoral research (#2022–00,525–01).

12. This is an example of a collaborative virtual talk comparing farianas (Colombia) and Maoist (Nepal) reintegration here: https://www.facebook.com/Comuneras/videos/351388013552763.

13. There are debates around the word ‘militant’ in English that tend to refer to violent methods for political contestations and actions. However, I am not using this term solely in this meaning: I use it with two different purposes. First, the farianas themselves tend to talk about their political activism – armed and unarmed – as militancia, or militancy and their identity as militante or militant. Second, as I have argued elsewhere (Anctil Avoine 2023), I understand militancy as a continuum that refuses the binary dichotomy between armed/unarmed or violent/non-violent, given that each militant story shows the overlapping of these processes and categorisation. Moreover, to respond to the difficulties in political reincorporation, I have shown that it is unproductive to think about militancy as restricted to armed combat. Thanks to Claske Dijkema for pointing that out to me.

14. I have chosen not to work with humanitarian agencies or governmental agencies for this project, but I have collaborated with them at the beginning of my research to access certain regions where safety was more complex. Mostly, it is part of the UN Verification Mission mandate to help in the implementation of activities related to peacebuilding in the ETCR.

15. Most of the women have chosen to appear with their war name or under a pseudonym to ensure anonymity. However, many of them have decided to make their identity public as a political statement. In endnotes, I refer to their name, the day we had the interview and the ETCR where they did their process of reincorporation. In the case of urban militants and key stakeholders, I refer to the city they live in.

16. You can see a map of the ETCR on the website of the ARN: https://www.reincorporacion.gov.co/es/sala-de-prensa/Paginas/Los-ETCR.aspx.

17. There are several difficulties in researching conflict-affected areas such as Arauca and Catatumbo. I have reflected on these ethical considerations and the power dynamics at play in a recent article (Anctil Avoine 2022a), where I engage with Tillmann-Healy’s (2003) concept of ‘friendship as methods’ to propose different ways of researching war and peace.

18. For a visual account of Colombia’s different regions, including the Northeast, you can access an interactive map here (CEV 2022): https://web.comisiondelaverdad.co/en-los-territorios/despliegue-territorial.

19. Movimiento 19 de Abril (M19) was a guerilla group with ‘an important urban social base […] at war with the Colombian government between 1974 and 1990’ (Boulanger-Martel 2022, 761).

20. Those are the officially registered victims of the armed conflict by the national government (RUV 2023).

21. Juan Manuel Santos was the president who signed the peace agreement with the Farc-ep. Duque succeeded his government as a president from 2018 to 2022.

22. Fieldwork notes, September 2019 and March 2022, Catatumbo.

23. Partido Comunista Clandestino Colombiano (PC3) – Clandestine Colombian Communist Party.

24. To have a full picture of the research, see Anctil Avoine (2022b).

25. Fieldwork notes, Catatumbo, September 1, 2019.

26. After the disarmament of the Farc-ep in 2017, 24 ETCRs were put in place throughout the country. In the Catatumbo region, Caño Indio was chosen as the ETCR of Norte de Santander, and Filipinas, the one to be settled in the Department of Arauca.

27. By ‘presence-absence’ of the State, I mean the coexistence of two contradictory engagements of the State. On the one hand, the heavy military presence of the State through law enforcement, the police, and the regular army, which translates into the militarisation of everyday life and; on the other hand, the absence of the State in terms of combating structural violence, which means the deprivation of human rights, the barriers to access basic needs such as health care, education, food security and the inaction in front of injustice, insecurity and violence.

28. Interview with María, November 11, 2019 (Caño Indio).

29. In Spanish, Caño Indio is a vereda, which means a very small and sparse settlement of people.

30. Fieldwork notes, March 19, 2022 (Caño Indio). See also the work of Zulver (2021).

31. A recent PhD dissertation by Vargas-Parra (2023) shows that land contestation occurred in different regions where the ETCRs are located. For example, some of the ETCRs were located in indigenous territories, and this has caused territorial conflicts, but it has also produced new territorial organisations and visions.

32. Fieldwork notes, September 9, 2019 (Arauca).

33. Fieldwork notes, September 12, 2019 (Filipinas).

34. Fieldwork notes, March 18, 2022 (Caño Indio).

35. Fieldwork observations, September and October 2019 (Caño Indio and Filipinas).

36. Many women interviewed emphasised this precarity and the difficult material conditions in the ETCR.

37. While some have left for cities, several women have followed their partners in remote areas, where they can find work in agriculture. However, this has meant that most women have been reassigned to care and domestic work.

38. Interview with Johana Ríos, March 18, 2022 (Caño Indio).

39. Fieldwork diary, September 19, 2019 (Caño Indio).

40. There is a latent question here as to what it means to see peace ‘happening’ in the territories that were once at war (and still are, in this case, experiencing high levels of insecurities). The women participating in the research mostly refer to ‘peace’ in two ways: a space of inner tranquillity where they can reconcile with their past traumas of war, and as a political state where insecurities are minimalized, structural violence is tackled through social justice. Thanks to Claske Djikema for pointing this out to me.

41. Interview with Nelly, September 12, 2019 (Filipinas).

42. Interview with Nelly, September 12, 2019 (Filipinas).

43. Interview with Nelly, September 12, 2019 (Filipinas).

44. For example, in Caño Indio, 598 members of the 33 Front disarmed in the transitional zone in 2017 in comparison to the now 54 people living in the ETCR.

45. Interview with Yiya, February 11, 2019 (Bogotá).

46. Interview with Leticia, November 11, 2019 (Filipinas).

47. It is estimated that there are currently 93 NARs on the national territory (Estrada Álvarez 2020). They are informal settlements that have slowly taken form with the internal movement of the ex-combatants: they have arrived at specific sites and decided to install there and organise their own space. We still know very little about those settlements, and how they are also not yet ‘fixed’ on the territories, but they are generally facing even more precarious conditions than the ETCRs. Some authors have labelled them ‘forms of rural occupation land for peacebuilding’ (Torres-Tovar & Pérez-Cardozo 2022, 93). However, the possibility of ‘building peace’ in those territories remains low because the NARs are not officially recognised by the government and are not bound by a clear definition in the peace agreement, as is the case with the ETCRs (Marsiglia Escudero 2021).

48. Interview with Camila, October 23, 2019 (Barrancabermeja).

49. Interview with Johana Ríos, March 18, 2022 (Caño Indio).

50. This has been mentioned in almost all my interviews in 2019 and 2022. The reflections about motherhood and the changes in gender regimes are slightly different between the two dates, given that the farianas had had time to reflect and experience motherhood and involvement in politics with more ‘distance’ from their passage from clandestinity to ‘civility’. I am in debt with Violeta and Antonia for the numerous conversations about being (or not) a mother in war and post-war. I further examine the question of motherhood and its relationship to peace and civility in my PhD dissertation, see Anctil Avoine (2022b).

51. Interview with Carmen, September 11, 2019 (Filipinas).

52. Interview with Deisy, August 12, 2019 (Bucaramanga).

53. Interview with Violeta, September 5, 2019 (Cúcuta).

54. Interview with Camila, October 23, 2019 (Barrancabermeja).

55. Interview with Deisy, August 12, 2019 (Bucaramanga).

56. Sacha Inchi is a plant that gives several types of products such as oil and nuts, rich in omega 3, or cosmetic products (UN Verification Mission in Colombia 2019).

57. Interview with Nelly, September 12, 2019 (Filipinas).

58. Interview with Violeta, September 5, 2019 (Bogotá).

59. Interview with Kate, March 18, 2022 (Caño Indio).

60. This could be translated to ‘What the fuck is peace for the people?’; interview with Yiya, gender advisor, February 11, 2019 (Bogotá).