With Kimberly Theidon, Henry J. Leir Professor in International Humanitarian Studies, Tufts University Fletcher School of Global Affairs

Speaker's abstract:

In 2016 the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) signed Peace Accords that marked the official end of the longest armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere.  More than fifty years of war had left 200,000 people dead, 150,000 disappeared, 6 million internally displaced, and 8.6 million registered victims. In addition to the human casualties of war, the environment itself was one component of a “wounded warscape,” with landmines, deforestation, bombed oil pipelines and toxic chemicals leaching into the soil and waterways.  Clearly armed conflict can contribute to an environment that is toxic to human health and well-being, but to leave the argument there is to reduce more-than-human entities to mere resources that exist to satisfy human needs and desires, and to measure their destruction as unfortunate but collateral damage. In this project I aim to move beyond this instrumentalized concern for the more-than-human to consider the interspecies entanglements that make life possible in the best and the worst of times.  From toxic chemicals to land mines, from rivers tinged with blood to vengeful mountain gods, there are multiple environments and actors that play a role in post-war reconstruction and coexistence. To capture these assemblages, I focus on the Atrato River, Colombia’s longest and most-polluted waterway.  On this river, lifeways and waterways converge; as the Atrato winds through the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities of Urabá, the river gives and is life. 

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Copies of Theidon's most recent book, Legacies of War
Violence, Ecologies, and Kin, from which the talk draws on, will be available for sale at the event.

A light lunch to be served.  RSVP for in-person or Zoom at the maroon "Register" button in the event listing or at tinyurl.com/TheidonRSVP

Co-sponsored by the Environmental Studies program and the BC Organization for Latin American Affairs (OLAA).