In Colombia, the three million forced migrants, or internally displaced persons (IDPs), are symptomatic of an armed conflict in which both the guerillas and the Colombian armed forces are guilty of human rights violations. Land seizures, forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions and threats are the most common ways that the various armed actors have forced civilians to flee strategic zones throughout the countryside. In 1994, the Colombian government officially recognized its internally displaced population, but the legal definition of who qualified as internally displaced and what services the state would provide remained vague. During the same period, there was an exponential increase in the number of international and local nongovernmental organizations working with the IDP population--a political intrusion that the state could not diplomatically refuse. My research compares how nongovernmental organizations and state agencies represent internal displacement and define Colombia's internally displaced population. I examine the instructional materials provided by state IDP agencies and nongovernmental organizations and how they promote their services to the public. What cannot be gleaned from the publications alone is how the representatives of NGOs must strategically balance their subjective positions about the internal armed conflict against their need to represent their clients with the uniformity that is implicitly demanded by the state and the local community. I argue that it is for this reason, the ability to carry on their work, that many NGOs mechanically produce representations of the internally displaced that mimic those produced at the state level and reinforce the stereotypes of displacement to the general public.

Competing or cooperative representations? State and NGO depictions of Colombia's internally displaced population.

Politics & Social Sciences

Jessica Marie Novak

Social Sciences

ProQuest, UMI Dissertation Pub

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Competing or cooperative representations? State and NGO depictions of Colombia's internally displaced population.