Rendering the absent visible: victimhood and the irreconcilability of violence

Abstract

Contemporary justice‐making processes often focus on reconciliation or legal retribution, but not on the complexity of victimhood beyond individual subjectivity or refusals of state propositions for social repair. In Colombia, where drug cartels and state‐sponsored violence had terrorized the population for over fifty years, it was not forgiveness and acceptance that punctuated the turn of the twenty‐first century, but the refusal to reconcile with the state's duplicity regarding the disappearance and death of thousands. This essay illustrates how irreconciliation as an affective sentiment is taking shape in Colombia through forms of reattribution that take the form of victim visibilizations. In analysing the strategic use of victim visibilizations as a refusal of state accountability, their expansion of the notion of victimhood, and their politics of irreconciliation, I show how even with the state's remorse‐driven discourses, the public's understanding that political, judicial, and social accountability was not possible and pushed them to chart new strategies for disclosure and healing.

Ethical Endeavours

“…Th e authors contest the imagined linearity of reconciliation (as a process that enables the transition from violent past to peaceful futures) and show how irreconciliation is not simply a response to the past, but also a way of dealing with past-related absences of productive futures. A second group of articles -using examples from Northern Ireland ( Josephides 2022), Canada (Niezen 2022), Sri Lanka (Buthpitiya 2022), Colombia (Clarke 2022) and the United Kingdom (Mookherjee 2022b) -focuses on cases in which historical injustices have been symbolically addressed, for instance through Truth and Reconciliation Commissions or popular attempts to make victims visible, but without or with insuffi cient structural changes. Lastly, all contributions highlight forms of continual protests against performative reconciliation, which in some cases -like in Argentina (Vaisman 2022) -have, over the course of time, actually led to positive structural changes.…”