Abstract
This paper explores children’s and youth’s understandings of Colombian citizenship. Drawing from ethnographic work in the Museo Casa de la Memoria in Medellín, where I accompanied 15 school visits with young museum workers and over three hundred school-aged children, this paper proposes that citizenship appears to be a double-bind and disputable categorization. Citizenship was defined as a failed formal project and lived as relational and bounded by the shared violence historically suffered by vulnerable communities. To the post-accord generation, being Colombian is about learning of the collective suffering, and their perceived civic responsibility is to collective memory and peacebuilding.
Introduction
This article focuses on Colombia, a country facing protracted violence and undergoing a post-conflict transition and explores children’s and youth’s experiences with formal and cultural citizenship. Citizenship seems to be a double-bind and disputable categorization where the failures of formal citizenship are denounced; instead, everyday practices of peacebuilding and resistance are highlighted as true citizenship, though children are never fully seen as legitimate participants. By signaling how, in a context where “an overarching sense of political identity may be even more difficult to achieve” (Leonard, 2007: p. 488), youth and children recognize that the structural violence of the war is impossible to abate. Instead, by inhabiting spaces for memorialization, they discuss the meanings of being Colombian when some actors provoke, and others must resist and endure such violence. I describe how children and youth discuss their understandings and experiences of Colombian citizenship and national identity vis-à-vis other marginalized communities in the Museo Casa de la Memoria (MCM) in Medellín. Through discussing the different meanings of being Colombian, children’s struggles to participate in the challenging and violent conditions of Colombian post-conflict shows that citizenship is understood not as an individual action in state life but as an interdependent and vulnerable participation in networks of relationality with other marginalized communities.
This paper is based on a broader project focused on children’s and youth’s participation in collective memory initiatives in Antioquia, Colombia, which I carried out in 2019 for 7 months. I took primarily an ethnographic approach, and my methods included in-depth, semi-structured, and unstructured interviews with 14 young museum workers; participant observation during the school visits with over 300 students from the Medellín region; and participant observation during the weekly self-care workshops for the mediating team. To comply with the Institutional Review Board and protect my participants’ identities, all the names of the children and youth visiting and working in the museum are pseudonyms. Though the school administrators and the museum management organized the school visits, adults often took a secondary role, and the conversations were mainly held between the visiting students and the young museum workers. These visits sought to teach young visitors about the causes, consequences, and wounds of the victims of the armed conflict. Unexpectedly, I realized that during these encounters, conversations were also about how the war shaped their understandings of being Colombian. These conversations transcended discussions about national identity, citizenship as a mere individualized legal status, and entering the realm of traditional politics. Instead, the relational comprehensions of national identities were discussed in terms of the shared vulnerability and suffering implicit in being a victim1 due to living in a country where the duration of the war meant that everyone had experienced it in one way or another.
This article begins with a brief contextualization of the MCM and its educational role in memorializing the Colombian armed conflict with its visitors as part of the efforts to repair and recognize victims on behalf of the Colombian government. I then offer a brief discussion of the existing literature on children’s citizenship as both a legal praxis and a cultural and lived experience building from perspectives from childhood studies within feminist and postcolonial frameworks. The discussion is divided into three sections: first, I discuss children’s and youth’s views on formal citizenship as a failed liberal project bounded by an atemporal yet historical violence that serves a corrupt political elite. Rather, the children and youth identified as truly being Colombian with the experiences of marginalized and victimized communities. These “truer” notions of national identity embedded in cultural citizenship are explored in the second section, where children and youth discuss the resistance and resilience of the victims of the armed conflict as the main characteristics of national identity. Thirdly, I present children’s and youth’s exercise of “lived citizenship” tied to ethics of responsibility and their participation in collective memory. This article weaves together critical discussions about children’s and youth’s citizenship, reflecting their complex experiences as the post-accord generation.
“Becoming” citizens in the colombian post-conflict
The MCM is the result of the joint efforts of local victims’ organizations underrepresented in the 2005 Justice and Peace Law2, which sought to create a sanctuary for the memories and experiences of the victims of the armed conflict. Inaugurated in 2012, the casa element of the museum relates to its mission to house “open and plural dialogues, with critical and reflexive views, that aid the understanding and overcoming of the Colombian armed conflict and the diverse violences3 found in Medellín, Antioquia, and Colombia” (Memoria, nd). However, children under 14 were not allowed into the museum as there was a fear that the exhibitions could be traumatizing. When the museum decided to create a mediating team made up exclusively of young college students in 2015, the mediators pushed to eliminate the age restriction, and children and youth became part of the museum’s objective of “participatory construction of memories.” It was then that the objective of civically engaging children and youth through peace education originated, bolstering the idea that children were ideal citizens who would help end the protracted violence. At this time, school visits were established to educate future generations and not repeat past mistakes.
All school visits are mediated by young museum workers (aged between 16 and 26) who guide the visitors and aim to “humanize the conflict,” focusing on the victims and their stories, not on data and statistics. Some of the most experienced mediators had been at the MCM for over 4 years, while others worked at the museum for one or 2 years until they graduated from university and were no longer eligible. The permanent exhibit comprises multimodal and interactive devices that invite visitors to learn from victims’ testimonies and artistic representations of the ongoing Colombian armed conflict.
Considered one of the longest ongoing civil wars, the origins and reasons for the Colombian armed conflict are the cause of continued debate4. Despite the discrepancies regarding the start of the war, its study has traditionally focused on three aspects: land control and reform, the dynamics and flow of the violence, and the reconfiguration of new actors motivated by past atrocities and drug trafficking. However, according to Daniel Pécaut (2000), the logic of terror imposed by the armed groups upon civilians, the prolongation of the conflict, and its degradation rendered violence aphasic (145). Gutiérrez Sanín et al. (2005) also argue that the Colombian armed conflict is an “unnamable” war due to the unspeakable atrocities, its political roots, and the causal weight of the global illegal economies, furthering the academic obsession among Colombian and international academics for decades.
Nevertheless, the MCM resisted describing the Colombian armed conflict through Manichean explanations, as most combatants come from rural, poor, and racialized backgrounds. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – Army of the People (FARC-EP founded in 1964), the National Liberation Army (ELN founded in 1965), and the April 19th M-19 (founded in 1974) are some examples of a long list of guerrilla groups that have participated in the war. By the 1980s, a new set of circumstances rearranged the dynamics of the armed conflict. First, drug trafficking networks established by the cartels in the 1970s were consolidated. Second, the guerrillas had already institutionalized kidnappings, assassinations of the so-called oligarchy, and the destruction of mega-infrastructure projects to finance the war effort. And thirdly, to retaliate against guerrilla groups and their influence, landowners, drug cartels, stock farmers, and emerald barons created private armies (sometimes with the assistance of the Colombian armed forces) that coalesced into several paramilitary forces. By the end of the 1980s, Colombia was embroiled in a period of violence, uncertainty, and fear, and particularly, rural communities were caught in the crossfire between socialist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, and the Colombian armed forces. The historically weak Colombian state declared war against the drug cartels with the aid of the United States. Simultaneously, prominent judges, political candidates, union leaders, and human rights activists were assassinated.
During the 1990s, drug cartels were dismantled, and the drug trafficking structures were the new locus of dispute between multiple actors. Despite the United States’ influence, coca cultivation in Colombia rapidly expanded, becoming the world’s primary producer. Consequently, the guerrillas’ and paramilitaries’ economic structures became dependent on drug trafficking networks. As Arnson and Whitfield (2005) explain, the abundance of the economic resources of cocaine trafficking “meant that the armed actors had the capacity to arm and sustain indefinitely substantially larger numbers of fighters” (242). After years of civil conflict, the war in Colombia had morphed from partisanship struggles to struggles for social and land reform to the struggle for control of the territories linked to the extraction of drugs. The Colombian armed conflict, thus, is a multi-player, multi-tiered dispute where the three main armed actors —the leftist guerrillas, the extreme-right wing paramilitaries, and the Colombian Armed Forces— dispute over control of the territories between other participants, such as the BACRIM (bandas criminales - criminal networks formed by demobilized paramilitaries and guerrillas) and drug trafficking armies that have also entered the scene. This constant influx of actors increases the sentiment of uncertainty in the population.
Paradoxically, the longevity of the Colombian armed conflict also entails Colombia’s vast experience with peace processes. Since the peace process between President Virgilio Barco (1986–1990) and the M19 guerrilla in 1990, Colombia has over 30 years of experience designing strategies and institutions for “post-conflict.” However, the lack of institutional continuation and commitment to peace processes between successive regimes and the competition for control of resources among illegal groups might explain why we have yet to succeed (Pizarro 2017). The most recent peace process between former president Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018) and FARC-EP saw the official end of the longest
More than a praxis: literature on children’s citizenship
Childhood studies scholars invested in children’s political status have discussed children’s citizenship in contexts such as Europe and North America (James, 2011; Lister, 2007) vis-à-vis the rights of other marginalized communities. Central to these theorizations around children’s citizenship and rights lies the cultural politics of childhood, questioning how concepts of citizenship unfold for children and young people in society. Cockburn (2005) elaborates on the idea of children as “becomings” rather than “beings” to explain how societal views of children ground them as pre-political and part of the historical process that resulted in the cultural politics of childhood. As James (2011) explains, the continued reliance on the determinism of the developmental paradigm led to children’s citizenship status to reflect societal constructions of childhood linked to their (lack of) capabilities to exercise full citizenship. This is why different theorists proposed discussing children’s political belonging as a semi-citizenship (Cohen, 2005), partial-citizenship (Roche, 1999), and social involvement (Jans, 2004), where adult’s power over children continues to be legitimized.
However, contemporary citizenship theory expands citizenship beyond the constraints of legal rights and sees it as a social process where groups can reclaim, expand, or lose their rights. Drawing from feminist scholarship on citizenship, Lister (2007) explains that citizenship includes the individual’s legal rights and relationship with the state —otherwise known as formal citizenship— as well as the cultural norms and responsibilities towards one’s community. This allows us to recognize the idea of “lived citizenship” as the value that citizenship has for a community and how it is shaped by cultural, material, and social circumstances. Furthermore, these horizontal views on citizenship criticize previous theorizations that solely focused on its legal ramifications for children as it proved to be insufficient for “the analysis of children’s citizenship or for their political claims-making”
Postcolonial scholars have also critiqued theorizations of children’s citizenship that focus on formal and legalistic perspectives. One of the critiques stems from the overly individualistic approach that citizenship has taken regarding the vertical relationship between the individual and the political apparatus. In addition, Global South scholars have also commented on the centrality that the concept of agency has taken within the study of childhood as it amplifies the antidevelopment discourse at the expense of the erasure of structural violence and communitarian belonging. An example is Moosa-Mitha’s, (2005) difference-centered approach, which takes a pluralist stand and is situated within the politics of solidarity, stemming from communitarian and intersectional subjectivities. She explains that by seeing children as “differently equal” members of society, we are not only broadening the possibilities of citizenship itself but are forced to question what we define as political. Balagopalan (2019) also questions liberal constructions of citizenship as universalizing and ahistorical, theorizing children’s citizenship through the lens of relationality. As she explains, “In postcolonial contexts, the ability to exercise one’s entitlements as a citizen gets differentially worked out” (p. 2), as the violent creation of the nation-state meant that colonial subjects were never fully recognized. In these contexts, political apparatuses differentiated between secular networks of governance for those in power and a different set of practices of direct domination and subordination for the colonized.
This paper builds on these critiques and centers on children’s and young people’s experiences and opinions regarding their citizenship within the context of a collective memory museum in 2019, foregrounding conversations that have been less prominent in the academy. It not only discusses the exercise of citizenship that cements children’s present existence (as beings and not becomings) concerning their formal citizenship, but it also grounds discussions on citizenship as a matter of exercising a political existence. It is a commentary on former formulations about citizenship in contexts that take for granted the existence of political institutions in seemingly unproblematic democratic contexts. The rise of extreme right-wing politics and disinformation globally, currently eroding democratic institutions, should incite new analysis about children’s citizenship in the West. In Colombia, however, the presence of direct violent threats to these institutions questions how children are participating and experiencing what it means to be part of a national community.
Discussion
Leviathan a la colombiana: Youth’s critique of formal understandings of citizenship
In Colombia, the armed conflict affects the promise of formal citizenship, especially denying it to marginalized groups such as campesinos/as, victims of the armed conflict, Afro-Colombians, Indigenous communities, LGBTQ+, and children. In the conversations between children and youth during the school visits to the museum, Colombia was discussed as a fragmented, dynamic society continually reconfiguring its national identity. On the one hand, the political elite was categorized as untrustworthy, and their ineptitude was deemed as one of the causes of the ongoing violence. As representatives of political power, they symbolized normative understandings of the rights protected by formal notions of citizenship. On the other, victims of the armed conflict were discussed as the true defenders of justice and peace
Colombia’s inescapable violence
Cata, one of the most experienced mediators who had been working at the MCM for almost 4 years, explained during one of the school visits to the museum with younger students: “Many, many, many years ago, I think you were not even a plan in your parents' minds, tons of years ago and until today, there have been people in Medellín and Colombia that have caused a lot of pain, so, so, much pain. (…) And not only individuals, but groups of people that have caused so much pain to campesinos, Indigenous folks, and even people living in cities like us”.
The mediators opened most of the school visits, especially with younger students between the ages of 8 and 12, with a historical account of the war and a discussion of the meanings of violence. It would take the narrative form of a folktale where the start of the conflict would become atemporal since “many, many, many years ago,” too long even to remember when, in a violent land, Colombians have constantly been inflicting each other pain. This perverse contextualization contradictorily characterized violence as both atemporal and historical. It severed it from its connections with drug trafficking, land ownership, and political clientelism and erased identified actors like the paramilitary, the guerrillas, or the armed forces. Rather, violence became the context where society was reproduced (Martin, 2000). Thus, being inherently violent arose in many conversations as a symbolic, relational element embedded in the shared Colombian imaginary. In other conversations, the participants emphasized that to be Colombian was to carry the weight of the pain of historical violence. Some mentioned that to think of Colombia in peace was a laughable, almost ridiculous utopia. As the mediator, José, argued during one of the mediation team’s self-care workshops held every Monday, to be Colombian was a wound that required “acetaminophen to endure the homeland pain.”
War was described as ubiquitous, and its recurrence was defined as a mythic temporality, “a frame of reference, within which the same violence has been here ‘forever’ and reproduces itself without end” (Pécaut, 2000: p. 140). Thus, violence was a constitutive element of Colombia as a nation-state. With neither start nor end, it is both atemporal and omnipresent. It is to be negotiated and managed as part of everyday life (Berents, 2018). In these conversations, violence was not a thing of the past nor something to overcome or eradicate, but a constant presence that one learns to recognize, resist, and live with
“We are a society that, I don’t know, many of us love violence, still to this day, and we continue to enforce it over and over again. We continue to put the same ones in power. We continue to elect the same people, those same ones that have always governed us. Colombia is tired. Colombia is so tired of all this violence. This racism. All this discrimination”.
As the young visitor’s words show, Colombia’s history cannot be severed from its inherently violent nature. In many of the conversations, the narrative of violence in Colombian identity was described as self-induced harm caused by civil society “keeping the same ones [the political elite] in power.” Hence, pervasive and omnipresent violence was always discussed in relation to “those in power.” In these conversations, the antagonists were not only the illegal armed groups but the political and economic elite. In the next section, I explain how the children and youth visiting the museum discussed the corrupt elite and how this sector represented Colombian citizenship’s failures when understood as formal status and dominance relationships.
Colombia as a private good owned by the corrupt elite
Children and youth had a second perspective on formal citizenship tied to the role of the political and economic elite as a key perpetrator in need of the continuation of violence
According to a group of students who were 14 to 16 years old, the political and economic elite who own the traditional media outlets in Colombia: “They do with us as they please. Just because they have the power and the means, they manipulate us, tell us lies, show us the information they think we need. But they don’t show the real problems, like the extrajudicial killings, the manipulation of witnesses, they don’t show us reality,” to which another student added, “Yes, they own the country. The true perpetrators are those who own this country. I think in this country, there are three or four families that control everything, who own every major company, and have politicians in their pockets.”
For this group of students, the economic and political elite censored and prevented them from getting access to the truth of the actual experiences of the victims of the armed conflict. It is also evident that the elite’s attempts to censor information did not prevent the young students from discussing their own experiences with the political situation in Colombia and the conflict. Echoing what has been termed as politics of outrage and hope (Kelly, et al., 2019), the youth visiting the museum had grown weary of traditional institutions such as mass media, citizenship, the government, including the economic elite. They were also aware that for these elites to sustain the status quo, the armed conflict and its ramifications were a necessity, alongside the marginalization of youth: “What los colombianos need is more resources. The same resources they allocate to things that really don’t make sense to me. They should be invested in the ‘high’ neighborhoods, in the youth, the new folks who are making this new Colombia, who are making a difference. Because to be honest, older folks just say
According to Daisy, “older folks” and “rich folks” prevent young people like her from fully exercising their rights. Her words exemplify the coexistence of two experiences of Colombian childhood. One that reinforces the normative middle-class child that is developing, dependent, and protected by the resources that are never within her reach. And her own experience as a young, victimized, black Colombian woman who is seen as “worthless” by those in power. She signals how contrasting childhood experiences coexist within Colombia, forcing us to reconsider the cultural politics of childhood in which some children’s path to liberal citizenship diverges from others (James, 2011). Her assessment of what it means to be Colombian echoes Appell (2013) when she argues that the upholding of the normative child “further obfuscate[s] the inequalities among the adult liberal subjects’ children are expected to become” (30). For this young woman, the inequalities and injustices are obvious, and the desire by those in power to maintain the status quo and prevent youth like her from accessing the promised liberal citizenship is equally as straightforward.
The role of the elite as an antagonist that has historically wronged the people of Colombia, profited from the war, and needs the continuation of the conflict to maintain its power, completes the narrative of a fragmented country. This elite is also the one that has benefited from the legal entitlements historically conferred by formal citizenship. There are also los colombianos, those who, in the traditional sense, represent civil (adult) society and have directly suffered the consequences of the conflict. However, often, this group silences children and youth as they are marginalized due to their perceived inexperience with the armed conflict due to their age. This instrumentalization of citizenship allows for the political exclusion of children via social practices and the unequal distribution of resources and rights between persons as well as entire collectivities (Larkins, 2020). Youth are denouncing how those in power profit from the exploitation of los Colombianos and the disdain with which their local leaders fail to acknowledge them as sources of change. For the youth visiting and working in the museum, by comprehending and empathizing with the violent past, not only violence but resilience and resistance shape their understandings of Colombian identity. This innovative perspective on lived citizenship as resistance and resilience will be explored next.
Revolutionary understandings of lived citizenship
Although children and youth at the MCM discussed violence as atemporal and ubiquitous —both the means and the end held by the ones benefiting from the war— this is not to say that violence became routinized or banalized, as Martin (2000) suggested. Instead, within the pedagogic framework of the collective memory conversations, there was a constant preoccupation with recognizing and dealing with the ongoing violence from everyday spaces and resistances. I have mentioned that the pedagogical purpose of the school visits was to foster the recognition of the experiences of the victims of the armed conflict alongside the lessons on historical literacy and peace education. But I also noticed how, as the history of the conflict was discussed, the children and youth identified being Colombian with the historical opposition of the sectors of society who resisted the war. Thus, being Colombian overlapped with the history of resistance and resilience by the victims of the armed conflict. As the post-accord generation, children and youth identified as their democratic responsibility the need to learn about and from the past to subdue, and not break, the cycle of Colombia’s inescapable violence.
Los colombianos: a story of resistance and resilience
Although violence was characterized as inescapable, it coexisted with awareness of a history of resilience and resistance by civil society. When the mediators asked the visitors who were a victim in Colombia, the students often mentioned displaced communities, campesinos, and human rights activists. The idea that todos somos víctimas (we are all victims) was also often mentioned by most children visiting the museum regardless of age or grade. This also meant the shared responsibility of recognizing and inhabiting the collective suffering: “I think that civil society is the main victim of the conflict. Because we all carry the grievances of the war. And that is my point, when we learn our families' or our neighborhoods’ history, they aren’t separate from the violent past. And ok, fine, I may not be a direct victim of the conflict, but by coming to the museum, I say pucha, I am not an isolated individual in Medellín, in Bogotá, in Colombia. I am a person who was born in this country, a country with all these difficulties that, fortunately, have not directly touched me. But just living here forces me to recognize your dignity and your humanity. Your suffering. This space we inhabit is not abstract, is not a name, is also the suffering we collectively inhabit.”
As Caro, a twenty-one-year-old law student who had been working at the museum for a year explained, the suffering caused by the atemporal violence also was interpreted as a shared place and national identity. The recognition of Colombia as inherently violent was not solely reduced to a curse or a “weight we have to carry”, but a critical interconnecting national trait that was shared and relational. Therefore, to be Colombian meant to inhabit a double bind in which the violence inflicted by the corrupt elite is inescapable, and it is in this precarity that resilience and opposition to violence become intrinsic to Colombian identity. In many conversations with the young mediators and some of the school visits, the recognition of the precarious conditions of so many vulnerable Colombians, such as campesinos or victims, was the first step into recognizing vulnerability and suffering as a shared and lived experience. This meant an acknowledgment that “everyone is implicated in the production of precarity” (Vögele, 2020: p. 583) when the youth grounded their sense of citizenship as an identity in the interdependency caused by the collective suffering:
They [the perpetrators] can take away everything from us. They can take away our homes, our jobs, and even our freedom. But our freedom of thought will always remain. There are many of us in Colombia who say NO MÁS [no more], we don’t want more violence, and that is what the human rights activists, the social leaders, and us here are learning from our past”.
This intervention by Tatiana, a philosophy student working as a mediator for 14 months, illustrates how the post-accord generation identifies with those who oppose and resist violence, such as social leaders. She also highlights the stark opposition between victims and the elite, making all victims the legitimate counterpart to the elite, serving both as a reference for the inclusion/exclusion linked inherently to notions of citizenship (Moosa-Mitha, 2005). It is in everyday resistance to violence, such as learning from the past and visiting the collective memory museum, where the children and youth also exemplify difference-centered approaches to citizenship and examine the specific socio-historical reality and experiences of oppression in which citizens are situated (Balagopalan, 2019; Leonard, 2007; Moosa-Mitha, 2005). Moreover, the children and youth visiting the museum reshaped the suffering caused by the armed conflict and transformed it from a disruptive tension into a biding force, one that is inhabited by the collective and allows for the reconstruction of harmed communities. This reshaping pushes the limits of the adultist scope of formal citizenship and allows children and youth, who were seen as “not-yet-citizens”, ignorant of the intricacies of the war, to politicize their plea for full citizenship. This was achieved by standing next to the agentic victims of the armed conflict and embracing their pain as a form of collective resistance:
“I am grateful to be part of those communities that have built neighborhoods from nothing, that have been displaced from their lands, that have had to leave their chickens, their cows, and seeing their strength, their will to rebuild territories, to have meetups, to build their houses: “ey vecina, what do you need to build your ranch? Come on, I’ll help you.” That's what identifies me [as Colombian], what gives me hope, what I like about being sensitive even when it is scary. Showing that one cares and crying for the other is scary because it can put one at risk. But we must remember that if many of us have that sensitivity, it is more difficult for them to erase us, to silence us. Because when there are many of us, we are more visible.”
Children and youth recognized the pain, injustices, and suffering of the armed conflict, and they also understood this vulnerability as “a vital condition for action” (Vögele, 2020: p. 584). Similarly to Butler’s arguments regarding the universality of vulnerability through our shared sociality (Vögele, 2020, referencing Butler, 2012), the children and youth visiting the museum recognized the precariousness of the dispossessed sectors of Colombian society as a binding force. The revolutionary potential of this new way of experiencing citizenship might not be theoretically new for postcolonial academics (Kleinman et al., 1997), but I see it as innovative regarding the participation of children in the political space, particularly in societies of protracted violence. The emphasis is not only on the otherizing of the historical enemy but on the reconstruction of the fragile social fabric within the recognition of historical pain. This double-binding comprehension of citizenship also allows for a “more fluid and pluralist approach to citizenship that is situated in a politics of solidarity, a transversal politics, where citizens occupying multiple subject positions such as class and race [and age] come together in solidarity to resist a common oppression” (Moosa-Mitha, 2005: p. 372). The potential of this revolutionary comprehension of citizenship lies in the recognition of the struggles that children perceive in the victims of the armed conflict, thus moving from an adultist to a childist comprehension of national belonging (Wall, 2013) based on relational identity with the historically marginalized. This notion of a non-sovereign self (Balagopalan, 2021; Kelz, 2016) tears from traditional understandings of protracted violence as stifling and reshapes them into a binding relationship with the precarious other. The emphasis is no longer on respecting individual autonomy, historically belonging to the adult, white, middle-class man (or the corrupt elite), but on solidarity with the othered collectivities, where everyone, including children, are competent, resilient, and active citizens. This comprehension of relational and lived citizenship also entails new responsibilities for children’s and youth’s political participation.
The responsibilities of the post-accord generation: Healing and democratizing through collective memory
As Violeta, the mediator who had most recently joined the museum, concluded a school visit with students between the ages of 15 and 18, she explained: “There are many circumstances in the country that we cannot change right now, that are not going to be [changed] overnight, but let's use everything that we are feeling, this [suffering] is necessary. We need to hurt. It is necessary to feel something for the other. Because if we remain indifferent, then what? Do we each remain individually, in this world, insensitive to the Other? Let's allow that sensitivity to make us also think about what we can do and what we can transform with small steps.”
Violeta’s intervention discloses the necessity to “suffer for the other” and characterizes “our hurt” as relational. It allows us to see that children’s citizenship is cemented on notions of interdependency echoing Balagopalan’s (2021) arguments regarding children’s embodied understandings of non-sovereign relationalities that allow them to “refuse, neoliberalism’s subjective and penalizing technologies” (p. 330).” Thus, for the children and youth visiting the MCM, suffering as a binding force disrupts individualizing approaches to citizenship, instead relying on relational vulnerability as a mundane step to disrupt the cycle of violence. Hence, the advantage of grounding citizenship on interdependency “is that children and adults are placed on a more clearly equal footing” (Wall, 2012: p. 92), and responsibility is no longer bound to “notions of capacity, capability and autonomy to be thought outside such framings” (Vögele, 2020: p. 580). It does not come as a surprise, then, that the children and youth visiting and working in the MCM expressed a sense of relational and collective responsibility with the most vulnerable since these same notions are the ones used by formal citizenship to keep them inhabiting depoliticized margins.
In these new conceptual configurations, citizenship is no longer “a status given and the final destination of childhood” (Jans, 2004) but the everyday practices of solidarity, mutual dependency, and precarity (Butler, 2015). Citizenship is redefined in relational terms, allowing us to address children’s “agency and acknowledge their presence as participating subjects in the multiple relationships in which they interact” (Moosa-Mitha, 2005: p. 369). And although there is some debate about whether children’s and youth’s political participation should be promoted through their involvement with “mundane engagements” or with formal public action (Kallio, 2012), distrust in the Colombian elite and its institutions draws the children and youth visiting the museum to the former. Specifically, their involvement as marginalized citizens in the MCM materialized through their participation in collective memory and learning from the experiences of collective suffering. Alberto, one of the younger mediators (aged 17), who had been at the museum for 2 years, explained it thus: “My part is to empower myself and thus build a national identity from these kinds of acts [acts of collective suffering]. But above all, is about questioning, about confronting things in our own history that we sometimes do not want to face. So, it is a battlefield, undoubtedly, collective memory is a battlefield, but it also is the foundation, or the main axis for the possibility of recognizing ourselves in the other, and in this territory that we share with each other.”
Emulating what students mentioned in previous sections regarding the corrupt elite’s manipulation of mass media, misinformation, and not knowing what some communities had suffered during some of the most horrific events of the armed conflict was deemed by mediators and visitors as one of the main reasons why Colombian society remained ignorant. This ignorance was seen as a tool to sustain individualistic modes of living that prevented the collectivization of suffering. To counteract the elite’s need to misinform and censor some of the gruesome experiences of the armed conflict, “confronting our own history” by participating in collective memory was seen as one’s responsibility as a “good citizen.” As a young student mentioned during one of the visits:
The state is not the institutions, neither the president, nor the congress. No, it is me as a young person, as a leader, who has a responsibility, and that responsibility is that I am part of a country, and that country is not me alone; it is all of us, and I am part of this society, and this society is part of me.
For this young woman, her political participation was not related to her involvement with formal politics or her vote validating a corrupt system. Rather, her responsibility as a citizen stemmed from her commitment as a young leader active within her community. In Kallio’s (2012) terms, the student is asserting her political subjectivity through “politics of noise,” that which might not be as visible or intelligible as traditional political engagement but is more transgressive as it discloses the importance that she places on everyday relationships. She transfers political power from the traditional political institutions or the “state” into horizontal dimensions of relations (Larkins, 2020) and mundane spaces like the neighborhood and school, while simultaneously asserting her political presence and subjectivity. She defines her political belonging in terms of her lived reality of marginalization as a young woman, which shapes her understanding of citizenship in relation to other vulnerable members of society. Unlike the liberal subject who “makes other individuals responsible for their situation in society, the vulnerable, embodied subject understands her life in relation to others and the social condition that sustain them all, collectivizing responsibility” (Vögele, 2020: p. 583). This collectivization of responsibility does not come without a toll. The conversations on what it means to be Colombian between the post-accord generation often put an emotional, psychological, and physical burden on the young mediators. Nonetheless, as Cata explained to me as we were wrapping up an emotional school visit:
“I put a lot of effort into these [school visits] because I think this is where hope lies. Sometimes you have some days when you say, ‘damn, I don’t want to root for this country anymore’. But when you meet young people, young people like you, who listen to you, that's when you still feel that hope is alive”.
Conclusion
Children and youth in Colombia understand that citizenship is not universal. Rather, for the children and youth in the MCM, being Colombian is intertwined with the collective suffering of the victims of the armed conflict. These complex conversations between the post-accord generation showcase their resistance and defiance to their treatment as pre-political subjects whose political opinions and experiences are devalued by the adults they interact with. Echoing Wall (2012) the children and youth understand that “to gain representation as citizens is not just to have a voice or to join in the conversation” (p. 93), thus contesting autonomous ideas of citizenship. This article instead, builds on the critique of children and youth as depoliticized members of society, too “innocent” to question their political realities. Rather, it shows how children and youth in Colombia question and expand individualized notions of formal citizenship into relational understandings of the non-sovereign self that values vulnerability and suffering.
The children and youth visiting and working in the MCM propose an alternative entry point into their political realities by questioning the status quo and their violent past. Their political subjectivity is defined as “the suffering we (Colombians) collectively inhabit,” upholding vulnerability and subsequently, discarding neoliberal discourses of individual responsibility as they cope with the “unknown” reasons for the collective suffering. It is from this shared suffering that the post-accord generation acknowledges their collective responsibility to collective memory and peacebuilding. The goal is not “to become” the autonomous, liberal subject since those are considered responsible for the inequalities and unjust status quo. Instead, their understandings of what it means to be Colombian lies in “being” as vulnerable and resilient as the victims historically wronged by the elite. By focusing on the conversations of the post-accord generation and including their voices, opinions, and comprehensions of what it means to be Colombian, this paper sought to expand what citizenship stands for in the fragmented, complex, and volatile context of transition Colombia is facing. This new approach to citizenship broadens understandings of how children and youth exemplify lived citizenship. As such, the post-accord generation foregrounds a lived citizenship empowered by learning from the past, acknowledging the shared suffering, and centering their responsibility with everyday peacebuilding.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
