This paper examines how liberal discourses and moral sensibilities concerning the management of life turn into a war against life in the name of life itself. In particular it asks, under what conditions is the right to make killable, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised in relation to rural landscapes and populations in southern Colombia. This paper is interested in thinking-with and living-with those landscapes whose human and non-human populations find themselves the object of, as well as inadvertently confronted by and entangled with, emergent forms of death. It also poses questions about what modes of resilience, embedded in struggle rather than transcendence, may be emerging out of ‘wounded spaces’ that have been fractured by violence, and that are pitted with sites where life (in its largest sense) has been irretrievably torn.

Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Sede Bogotá - Facultad de Derecho, Ciencias Políticas y Sociales