Women, Polyphonies and Transitional Justice in Colombia: Afrocentric Narratives of Violence(s) in the Armed Conflict

Abstract

Through a feminist and intersectional reading of the “post-conflict”/post-agreement context, this study analyses: i) the violence against women as an instrumental and displayed power in war contexts; ii) the impact of violences against afrodescendant women during the armed conflict, drawn from Official Victims’ Registries as well as from their own narratives; iii) the multiple overlapped violences that afrodescendant women suffer, as part of a continuum, understanding war as the setting where the violences are embodied and become more lethal publicly; iv) the transitional justice as contested arena, specially with the signing of the Peace Agreements. For that purpose, the work focuses in the narratives of afrodescendant women as political and active subjects in the transitional justice process, in order to provide truth, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition to victims. In this regard, it reads through the victim qua victim, assuming a constructivist approach to understand this category –as well as we try to overcome essentialist and patronizing perspectives. Finally, this research proposes the resignification of agency ability of these women to redefine and dispute over the State’s control of justice, truth, reparation, and memory processes