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2022 | Book

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Post-conflict Colombia and the Global Circulation of Military Expertise

Author: Manuela Trindade Viana

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : Critical Security Studies in the Global South

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

By challenging more common analyses that point to the existence of a "post-conflict scenario" in Colombia and those that resist the narrative of "success", both of which operate within the logic of presence/absence of violence, this book proposes instead that we think of "post-conflict" in terms of the transformation of the rules on the use of violence. The analysis unfolds in two parts: the first explores the conditions of possibility of the Colombian “success story” and the web of criteria legitimizing the “success”, as well as the silencing mechanisms allowing for Colombia to circulate internationally as a formula to be replicated in other parts of the world; the second, focuses on the historicization of the mechanisms through which new rules are transmitted among the professionals of the public force, specifically the transformations of military schools and training centers in Colombia from times of “war” to “peace”. The author argues that key to this transformation is a unique discursive articulation around the “military professional” which slides from “citizen-soldier” to “expert-soldier”.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction
Abstract
In this opening chapter, I walk the reader through the traces allowing for us to identify a regional and even global circulation of Colombia as an example of successful police and military operations. I then discuss the puzzle emerging from the contrast between such “exemplary” position of Colombia and the equally important claim to the “problematic character” of this country. In other words, how was it possible that a country historically stigmatized as problematic came to be taken as a reference for solutions in the security domain? Having presented the analytical puzzle guiding the book, I introduce the readers to the main analytical tools structuring Part I and Part II: problematization and the transnational circuit of military savoirs, respectively.
Manuela Trindade Viana

The Colombian “Success Story” (or, What Is Allowed to Have Happened)

Frontmatter
Chapter 2. The Problem as a Condition for Success: The Construction of Colombia as a “Problematic Country”
Abstract
This chapter investigates the main processes by which Colombia came to be framed as a problematic country through the consolidation of a specific rendering of violence: the activities of “narcoguerrillas” – and, since 9/11, “narcoterrorists” – funded by drug trafficking. First, it shows how, by the late 1990s, the Colombian problem was crystallized by bringing together specific understandings of the “problem of violence”, the “problem of drugs”, and the “problem of the guerrillas” around the issue of public order. Furthermore, it reveals how these renderings intermeshed with the so-called supply-side approach to the war on drugs advanced by U.S. agencies, thus also defying portrayals of Colombia as a mere receptacle of interventionist policies. By doing so, the chapter argues that these processes not only converged towards a delinquential and depoliticizing approach regarding violence in Colombia, but, fundamentally, that such approach defined the horizons of possible solutions sustaining the country’s “success story”. Once the problematization calcified as an issue of public order deriving from the activity of narcoguerrillas and narcoterrorists with military capacities paid for by drug trafficking, it became natural to see police, military, and intelligence counternarcotic expertise as the main ingredient for conceiving solutions.
Manuela Trindade Viana
Chapter 3. The Success and Its Monsters: Disputing the Metrics, Dodging Criticism
Abstract
This chapter explores the emergence of Colombia as an object of analysis of governmental agencies, civil society organizations, and experts engaged in finding solutions to its problems. Specifically, the chapter shows how the dominant framing of disputes over accurate numeric representations, technical adjustments, and institutional/policy design worked to keep the terms of the “Colombian problem” undisputed. Then, turning to movements calling for alternative constructions of the problem of violence, it shows that extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and forced detentions of dissidents perpetuated by the counternarcotic apparatus itself fell outside the horizon of disputes over Colombia’s performance. Indeed, while denunciations of these practices were dismissed for lacking the proper metric accuracy, the practices themselves silenced most of those responsible for the denunciations. As such, the chapter argues not only that these extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances and forced detentions became both how silencing was realized and the object of silencing, but also that this double silencing made the Colombian success story possible. Neither about workers’ demands or state violence, it emerges from a discursive field focused on the state as solution-bearer and on a specific (metrified) form of dispute over policy impact.
Manuela Trindade Viana

The Transnational Making of the Military Professional in Latin America

Frontmatter
Chapter 4. “Technical, not Political”: The Military Professional as the Citizen-Soldier
Abstract
This chapter explores the conditions of emergence of the military professional in Latin America and Colombia, while raising questions on the civil-military boundary. It does so by inscribing military professionalization programs within discourses of modernization. Beginning with European and Latin American canonical texts, it reconstructs a regulative ideal of modernization in which the civil-military boundary is produced through the entanglement of civilization and professionalization in the organization of violence within a pacified social space, thereby calling for the military as a technical and apolitical professional. It then traces the late-nineteenth century circuit of military savoirs in Latin America that took France and Prussia as its main reference and the frictions of Colombia’s insertion within it, revealing the constitution of programs aimed at producing a Colombian “citizen-soldier”. Two arguments are then presented. First, the reification of the civil-military boundary advanced professionalization as the solution for the “problem of the (politicization of the) military”. Second, both the inescapable need to engage with politics and civil elites to preserve the technical and military character of the programs, and the citizen-soldier subject emerging from those programs, ultimately blurred those boundaries, revealing their breaching as a condition of their enactment.
Manuela Trindade Viana
Chapter 5. “All They Understand Is Force”: The Military Professional as the Expert-Soldier
Abstract
This chapter looks closely at the peace-war boundary to reflect on the effects of the historical transformations in the transnational circuit of military savoirs during the second half of the twentieth century.
Manuela Trindade Viana
Chapter 6. Conclusion
Abstract
The final chapter discusses the main contributions of the book, which are not exclusively related to Colombia. The first one is centered on the concept of “transnational circuit of military savoirs”, which allows to access the durable socializations among military professionals in the hemisphere, as well as the epistemological criteria underlying the valorization of specific military savoirs that organize and reorganize the uses of state violence in the region. Furthermore, the historicization of the hemispheric circuit of military savoirs reveals how the expertise on state violence was rearticulated throughout the decades among those professionals. In this sense, the findings emerging from the discussion about the repositioning of Colombia in that transnational circuit offer us forms of organizing state violence that came to be contemporarily valorized also in Latin America and, increasingly, in the world. The chapter concludes with the characterization of the form and the content of the “Colombian success” and discusses its implications.
Manuela Trindade Viana
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Post-conflict Colombia and the Global Circulation of Military Expertise
Author
Manuela Trindade Viana
Copyright Year
2022
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-96103-9
Print ISBN
978-3-030-96102-2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96103-9