Immobility as a sign of resistance: the "self-confinement" of ethnic communities in the Colombian Pacific (2018-2024)

• Grant number: 23/06868-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: January 01, 2024
• Status: Discontinued
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - International Politics
• Principal Investigator: Elias David Morales Martinez
• Grantee: Raquel Araújo de Jesus
• Host Institution: Centro de Engenharia, Modelagem e Ciências Sociais Aplicadas (CECS). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Santo André , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 24/22815-0 - Human (im)mobility nexus: experiences of civil resistance against forced displacement and deracination in the Colombian Pacific region (2018-2024), BE.EP.PD

Abstract

Colombia is still the scene of one of the worst humanitarian crises in the West. With a population of around fifty million people, the country currently has more than nine million victims of the armed conflict, who have been officially recognized and registered by its government. Among them, more than eight million people had to leave their homes and livelihoods in search of protection. Thereafter, Colombia has the largest number of internally displaced people in the world. In recent years, the Colombian war has been expressed more intensely in the Pacific region, disproportionately affecting the ethnic communities that have ancestrally lived there and developed their cultural ways of life. Faced with this scenario of uprooting, ethnic groups advance processes of civil resistance, aiming to strengthen their identity and guarantee the maintenance of territorial control. Given that, for indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, the territory is the living space without which it is not possible to live in its entirety. In view of this, through the contributions fostered by the line of thought of "crisis migrations" and by the "Epistemologies of the South", the present research aims to analyze the nexus between human mobility and immobility in Colombia, based on the experiences of civil resistance of the ethnic communities of the Pacific region between the years 2018 and 2024. For that, it makes use of praxeography, as a methodological tool, aiming to apprehend such practices of collective resistance conformed with the support of ethnic-territorial organizations in the region. As a result, the research develops the concept of "self-confinement", problematizing binomials that are central to the field of migration studies, as well as "co-laborating" for a better understanding and greater visibility of the problem in the country.