ABSTRACT
This chapter moves around the development of a new humanitarian and human rights problem that emerged in Colombia in the 1990s involving the internally displaced population. The argument here follows the itineraries of this new problem area from an ethnographical register that has allowed researchers to understand the tensions and frictions that articulate both suffering strangers and caring communities around this issue. One of the questions approached in this study involves que problem of what is to be human, what are the basic conditions needed to be counted or reckoned as one. We need to interrogate this situation in order to approach the problem of what exactly happens when these conditions are not “there” and what this means with respect to practices of humanitarian and human rights operations meant to alleviate fragmented and wounded displaced subjects. This chapter maps out recent trends in humanitarian practices that might problematize human rights narratives by looking at the emergence of new spaces of social abandonment created by a neoliberal humanitarian government. One of the most striking and challenging residues left behind by those forms of governance are the ones currently reworked out in complex and creative ways by self-named “non-combatant peasant population” of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, in Colombia, where the peasant community has declared the rupture with the Colombian State and the humanitarian action of the UN. Is it possible to think of a post-humanitarian regime where the IDPs are once again repolitized and exist at the margins of the humanitarian world?
