Participation as Confrontation: Resistance Within and Outside the Mesas de Participación Established for IDPs in Colombia

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Abstract

This article discusses resistance related to the mesas de participación—invited participatory spaces established for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Colombia. While the existing literature on participation has shown that such spaces can enhance stability and delegitimize dissent, this article foregrounds these spaces’ political ambivalence, pointing to the resistance they facilitate. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Bogotá between October 2017 and August 2018, the article argues that the mesas have paved the way for two kinds of resistance. First, they have engendered resistance around the meaning of participation itself. Second, IDPs have utilized opportunities conferred by the mesas to strengthen ‘confrontational collective action’ in the form of occupations and protests outside of these government-sponsored spaces. By highlighting the connections that exist between resistance happening within and outside institutional spaces, the article contributes both to a growing body of literature that has emphasized the agency of IDPs in Colombia and, more broadly, to the literature on forced migrants’ participation.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1327-1343
JournalJournal of Refugee Studies
Volume35
Issue number3
Early online date4 Mar 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sept 2022

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank all the people who participated in this study, whose identities have been anonymized by her, for sharing their stories of displacement and activism with her. She would also like to thank the Alta Consejeria para los Derechos de las Victimas la Paz y la Reconciliación for allowing her to observe the mesas discussed in this paper. She also thanks the two anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments. Finally, she is grateful for the comments provided on an early version of this paper by Dr Paolo Novak, Dr Hassan Ould Moctar, Dr Camilo Chiappe Bejar, Iris Lim, and Shona Lindsay MacLeod.

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