“The State has been that”. Violent Assemblage of the Local State in the North of Cauca [“O estado foi esse”. Ensamblagem violenta do Estado local no Norte del Cauca] [“El Estado viene siendo ese”. Ensamblaje violento del Estado local en el Norte del Cauca]

Abstract

The present analysis constitutes a look at the local (and localized) form that the State acquires when it materializes in a specific territory and the consequences of this for an understanding of the armed violence in this territory. We study the State as an assemblage that occurs at the level of local relations with other social actors, both legal and illegal, to show the violent dynamics that underlie it. For this, the paper is based on a fieldwork made under the approach of multilocal ethnography that was carried out for more than two years in the North of Cauca (southwestern Colombia), in the municipality of Caldono. We examine the way the concrete assemblage of the institutions and the forces of the State settled down with the territorial social actors (in particular, with the indigenous movement) and with armed actors (mainly farc dissidents and other organizations whose indeterminacy is part of their own way of operating), produces plural regimes of domination in the territory. The paper unfolds the precarity and limitations of the power of the really existing Colombian State. Those difficulties manifest when is observed how it seeks to penetrate territories with violent dynamics associated with the armed conflict. The conclusion we reach is that the precarity and limitations are perceived on the performance of the state’s incapacity to produce at a local level a bureaucratic organization ensuring the legitimacy of its actions. We suggest that this flaw takes place because of the graspable inadequacies of the use of violence legally ascribed. Therefore, in territories affected by violent conflicts as the North of Cauca, the State establishes a violent local assemblage with various social actors who perform different forms of domination. The violent assemblage provides a means for it to affirm the existence of its formal organization and to capitalize on the rhetorical effects of legitimacy stemming from such an assemblage © 2022, Revista Colombiana de Sociologia.All Rights Reserved.