What kind of citizen is formed under President Alvaro Uribe’s democratic security policy? What political space is given to citizens? This Third World Quarterly article investigates the premises of citizenship when implemented under the double logic of democracy and security. The issue is analysed through the ideas of Ardent and Foucault, concluding that tensions between security and democracy in Columbia are resolved with a bias towards the security rather than the democracy side of the equation.
Drawing upon the thoughts of Arendt and Foucault, the author develops a theoretical analysis as the concept of citizenship and its relation to democracy and security. The line of argument follows along the lines of citizenship relating to the political capacity to claim rights, the ‘right to have rights’, and when people are deprived of deprived of this capacity their life is endangered. Arendt reasons that there are four causes for the loss of a political community: racism, a focus pre-eminently on bodily needs, the generalisation of obedience, and the bourgeois accumulation of capital.
The articles follows by a detailed outline and analysis of President Uribe’s electoral platform in which he envisioned a communitarian society with the nation is built on fraternal co-existence. The Defence and Democratic Security Policy (DDSP) has been based on such assumptions and reflecting the subsequent effects:
- Combining the political rationalities of the economy and security in such a way as to increase the discretionary power of the state and the army over the life of the citizen.
- Conflict is the cause of a lack of economic growth, as economic growth follows security.
- Securitisation by dispossession.
- Waging a war not merely against society but against the defenders of rights.
- Developing legislation which permitted negotiations with para-military groups hence promoting them as political entities.
Upholding Escobar’s argument that feeling one’s life at risk produces new places for enunciation, alternative logics and another kind of knowledge about nature, the economy and the world, the same logic to the current context of indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, workers, peasants, women and victims of conflict who are creating a political space to be heard. These groups’ strategy to build a new Colombia is summarised as followed:
- Say yes to life, no to free trade.
- Life plans aimed at strengthening their own power based on their own vision of the cosmos, history and territory.
- Humanitarian camps of life in which communities can seek refuge and special protection from para-military aggression.
- Projects of the Afro-Colombian communities to develop education, reduce force displacement and its impact as well as looking at alternative ways of development.
Despite reductions in crimes, kidnapping, and efforts to demobilise para-military groups and reduce the influence of the military, this article concludes that participating in democratic politics could still result in loss of life. Thus, the space for democratic politics is shrinking. The DDSP has seen the construction of a citizen less determined to assert his or her rights politically and rather more likely to ‘voluntary obedience’ in return for protection. The answer to the current political developments is reflected in the efforts of minority groups of the population to develop a political space for themselves and to build an otherwise Colombia.
