McCune Room, HSSB 6020
Tathagatan Ravindran | University of Guadalajara
Regimes of Security as Hegemonic Formations: Ideological Sedimentations and the Limits of Social Change in Colombia
Colombia stands out as a country in which the issue of security has been central to the agendas of the political establishment. The consideration of security and repressive strategies to achieve it as the priorities of state policy displaced attention from deeply entrenched racial and class inequalities, thereby reinforcing neoliberal hegemony. However, in racialized and stigmatized urban peripheries, most of which were predominantly inhabited by Black people, large sections of youth rejected the neoliberal fantasies of upward mobility by participation in gangs. Yet, this constituted a dispersed manifestation of anti-hegemony as the neighborhoods were divided and torn by gang rivalries, leading to extremely high levels of premature death among the younger generation. Social movements that challenged neoliberal hegemony were fragmented and confined to some sectors. The insurrection in 2021 was a crucial moment, when counterhegemonic forces converged in an unprecedented fashion, bringing together actors as diverse as experienced social movement leaders and ex-gang members. This process culminated in the election of the first leftist government in the country´s history. Nevertheless, though the political processes unleashed by the insurrection and a left government in office made a significant dent in neoliberal hegemony, some sedimented ideas that formed part of the ideological configuration of Colombian neoliberalism persists and co-exists with the new counterhegemonic praxis. The most significant of them is the continued emphasis on crime and illegality. For example, the country’s extreme wealth disparities is attributed in many left circles to “illegal” and “unethical” actions such as political corruption and the usurpation of land by large landowners backed by criminal paramilitary groups. This paper discusses the implications of the persisting security-oriented elements in the discourse of the Colombian left government and its support base. It reveals that despite its short-term strategic benefits, the continued use of such frames undermines the possibilties of constructing a durable counterhegemonic political project as it displaces the focus from entrenched racial and class inequalities.
Tathagatan Ravindran is an anthropologist with research specializations in race and ethnicity, political anthropology, social movements, anti-racist education, and activist research methods. He is currently the Director of Epistemic Justice and Laboratory of Data at the Baobab Center for Innovation in Ethno-racial, Gender, and Environmental Justice in Colombia and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) in the University of Guadalajara. He has done extensive research in Bolivia and Colombia. His book entitled The Social Life of Indianism: Politics and Indigeneity in 21st Century Bolivia was published by the University of Texas Press. His research has been funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation and National Science Foundation.
Roosbelinda Cárdenas | City University of New York
Sin Miedo: Autonomous Securities and the Refusal of Colonial Security Logics
This presentation draws on insights from Sin Miedo: Autonomous Securities Across the Global South, a three-day international workshop convened to examine collective strategies of protection emerging from communities confronting militarization, extractivism, and racialized state violence. Participants from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia described practices that challenge dominant security paradigms—what we term alter-securities. These practices refuse the colonial and racial capitalist logics that define who and what is worth protecting, instead centering reciprocity, care, and the defense of collective life. From Indigenous territorial guards and feminist anti-violence collectives to urban mutual aid networks and environmental alliances, these movements articulate security without the state and autonomy without isolation. Reading these grounded practices alongside Black urban traditions of fugitivity and refusal invites a rethinking of security as a relational, life-affirming practice and of the city itself as a contested site where alternative futures of safety and belonging are being forged.
Roosbelinda Cárdenas González is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research examines how histories of postcolonial racial formations shape contemporary struggles over citizenship, national belonging, and social justice in Latin America. A politically engaged scholar, Dr. Cárdenas produces research intended to inform and advance movements for social change. Her work has appeared in Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad: Revista Latinoamericana, Social Studies of Science, and The Journal of Peasant Studies, as well as in public venues such as NACLA, MERIP, and The Nation. Her 2024 book, Raising Two Fists: Struggles for Black Citizenship in Multicultural Colombia, is based on more than two decades of ethnographic research on Black antiracist organizing in Colombia.
Mohamad Jarada | UC Santa Barbara
The Pig and Its Force: An Anthropology of Enmity
This paper explores the use of the pig as a sign of enmity and terror against Islamic communal life. As a generalized practice, the use of the pig as a weapon that desecrates Islamic holy sites occurs throughout the globe: in India, Germany, South Korea, and in numerous other polities. The talk critically interrogates the pig’s availability as a sign of enmity and terror and situates its use by anonymous civilians within a continuous chain of counterinsurgent warfare. Why the pig's body? And how can we understand the desire and force that inheres in the pig as a sign of enmity against Islamic communal life?
Mohamad Marwan Jarada is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines the modern modes of power that constitute liberalism, its normative force, and its contemporary and historical iterations in the United States. He is working on a manuscript titled Counterinsurgent Force: An Anthropology of Enmity that examines how and why Islamic communities in the United States solicit law enforcement agencies and construct security systems for the protection of their institutions and the practices of their ethical tradition.
Jaime Alves | UC Santa Barbara
Imperial Dis/continuum: Mercenaries, Terror Surplus and the Localness of Black Geopolitics
The assassination of Haitian President Jovenal Moses on July 7, 2021, revealed an intricate international enterprise, with the participation of mercenaries from at least four countries (the US, Colombia, Haiti, and Venezuela). The Pentagon trained the Colombian nationals implicated in the murder as members of the Army Force in its war on drugs, which has particularly victimized black and indigenous populations. At least two of them had previously been accused of kidnapping and killing youth from marginalized urban areas and later presenting them as presumed guerrilla members who died in combat. How may we draw connections between the enduring violability of Black bodies in Colombia and imperial violence elsewhere? Although this article is focused on Colombia, by placing the killing of Haitian President Moses in relation to enduring forms of antiblack violence in that South American country, the order of empire is set in sharp relief. It is argued that in the post/colony, violence is overdetermined by antiblackness as its 'centripetal force drags other bodies (youth killed in the US war on drugs in Colombia, victims of Colombian-exported mercenaries elsewhere) into the global plantation’s spaces of death. Empire is this transnational political milieu. Mercenarism is the technology of its enforcement. Black geopolitics is the insurgent, all-encompassing, locally grounded response to it.
Jaime Alves, Associate Professor and Vice Chair. Professor Alves is an Anthropologist, freelance journalist, and activist-scholar whose research focuses on policing, abolition, and urban coloniality in Latin America. He has authored The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and is finishing an ethnography on the poetics of black fugitivity in a Colombian city. His journalistic writings have appeared in alternative news outlets in the US, Brazil, and Colombia.