Human (im)mobility nexus: experiences of civil resistance against forced displacement and deracination in the Colombian Pacific region (2018-2024)

• Grant number: 24/22815-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: May 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - International Politics
• Principal Investigator: Elias David Morales Martinez
• Grantee: Raquel Araújo de Jesus
• Supervisor: Yvonne Su
• Host Institution: Centro de Engenharia, Modelagem e Ciências Sociais Aplicadas (CECS). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Santo André , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: York University, Canada
• Associated to the scholarship: 23/06868-4 - Immobility as a sign of resistance: the "self-confinement" of ethnic communities in the Colombian Pacific (2018-2024), BP.PD

Abstract

Colombia has one of the oldest internal armed conflicts in the world. Nowadays, the country officially registers more than nine million victims, although it's population figures around fifty million people. These numbers turn Colombia in a scene of one of the worst humanitarian crisis in the West Hemisphere. Among these victims, more than eight million people were internally displaced, forced to flee their homes and livelihoods to survive. Since the Peace Agreement, stablished in 2016 between the Colombian government and the illegal armed group called "Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia" (FARC-EP), there is an escalation of the armed conflict in regions historically marginalized by the State, such as the Colombian Pacific, due to new territorial disputes perpetrated by others remaining illegal armed groups. Considering that this geographic region is inhabited mostly by ethnic communities, the Colombian war is affecting disproportionally Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples, who has stablished a vital bond with their ancestral territory. Faced with a scenario of uprooting, or deracination, these groupsadvance multiples ways of civil resistance to defend their lives and territories. In this way, this research project seeks to investigate how these communities manage to maintain territorial control besides the upsurge of violences and human rights violations. It argues that what makes civil resistance possible are two main factors, social cohesion and social organization, and that these are constructed through practices of cultural and identity strengthening. To develop this analysis, the present research mobilizes and articulates theoretical literature on crisis migration,civil resistance, ethnic politics and decolonial and Afrodiasporic knowledges, as well as primary and secondary data virtually collected and systematized on a database between 2018 and 2024 years.