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Abstract

This article examines the relationship between violence, (in)security, and the reproduction of ordinary life, focusing on the significance of mundane survival practices and their connection to the emergence of scenarios of collective action and politicization. Based on the experiences of women from the Colombian Caribbean region, this article explores how ordinary interactions aimed at satisfying individual and urgent needs end up having community-level consequences and amplifying women’s political subjectivity. These interactions, I argue, can be conceptualized as vital encounters – seemingly uneventful encounters with the potential of transcending the short-lived temporality in which they exist, becoming crucial spatial-temporal instances for collective security-making. Conceptually, vital encounters contribute to a nuanced understanding of the manifold dimensions of (in)security that collide and converge in contexts with different manifestations of chronic violence. As such, vital encounters engender a sense of security that transcends crisis-centric paradigms, which tend to gravitate towards a warlike logic that sees security as the neutralization of a military enemy or the protection from armed violence.

Keywords

Security violence gender ordinary life war Colombia

Introduction

Helena¹ had to leave soon. She had spent the whole afternoon in a meeting with other women, and now she had to return home. Despite her haste, she wanted to be as detailed as possible: ‘There is a lot of violence against women in our territory. Many women have nothing to feed their children. Men and boys beat their wives. [. . .] I am exhausted, and that’s why I’ve dedicated my life to this’ (Interview 1). It was going to get dark soon, but we could still feel the burning heat of Marialabaja, a small village in northern Colombia that lies along the mountainous region known as Montes de María.

Helena says, as she waits for the bus that will take her back home:

I go where they [the women] are, I try to do what I can, talking about life with my neighbor, and between chats, we end up talking about the violence against women. Then I talk to the prosecutor, to the guy that works at the EPS [Entidad Prestadora de Salud].² I mean, I do whatever I have to do. (Interview 1)

Like many women in Montes de María, Helena has devoted many years of her life to the improvement of women’s livelihoods. When she was 20 years old, she joined a grass-roots organization in her village. From that moment on, acting on her own or with others, her life has been a constant struggle against war, dispossession, and lack of material means, all of which have affected the lives of those living in Montes de María for decades.

Suddenly, while Helena was saying this, an older woman known as ‘Ms. Renata’ interrupted her:

Hey, you’re going to miss the bus, and besides, what are you saying, huh? Listen, you’re talking too much; your husband is going to leave you without money or hit you later as he did before. We all know how he is.

A young woman in the room answers: ‘Ms. Renata, we are talking about violence against women, and you come up with that? No, please don’t’ (Field diary, 28 May 2019).

‘If he puts a hand on me, you’ll see what I’ll do to him. Stop talking nonsense’, Helena says. After this exchange, Helena grabs her stuff, says goodbye, and leaves to catch the bus.

Helena and Ms Renata live in small villages surrounding the municipality of Marialabaja in Montes de María, where war and its legacies have shaped the ordinary life of civilians by establishing a social order in which difference is annihilated, resistance is silenced, and vulnerability is perpetuated (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica [CNMH], 2015; Ojeda et al., 2021). After 60 years of internal armed conflict, the meanings of violence have become deeply ingrained in this region’s collective imagination through numerous massacres, selective homicides, forced displacements, and acts of extreme cruelty perpetrated against women and dissident bodies. These actions, in one way or another, constitute the locus of (in)security not only in Montes de María, but also in other conflict-affected regions of Colombia (Verdad Abierta, 2010).

Yet the conversation between Helena and Ms Renata alludes to a more complex understanding of how security and (in)securities intertwine within the ordinary lives of women. When Ms Renata cautions Helena that her husband is going to hit her because she is ‘talking too much’, she is alluding to a ubiquitous sense of danger and an ever-present threat: the assumption that women should remain silent, that ‘talking too much’ always leads to retaliation, that raising their voices will put them in danger. We can find in Ms Renata’s words the threat of economic scarcity (Helena’s husband will leave her ‘without money’), the risk of experiencing domestic violence (‘[he will] hit you later as he did before’), and even the possibility of shame (shame of being exposed to others, shame of one’s vulnerable condition). Remarkably, when Helena emphasizes that she has ‘dedicated her life to this’, she is highlighting her daily commitment to grappling with these various forms of (in)security.

Helena, like most women from Montes de María, has lived in a context where armed conflict has entangled with other durable inequalities and crises, often less seen and overlooked from most national and territorial agendas on security, such as economic autonomy or domestic violence. In this article, I consider the possibilities of thinking security and (in)security beyond what Wibben (2011) calls a crisis-based ethics. Envisioning violence and (in)security through the logic of crisis, Wibben argues, involves the view that ‘certain crises constitute a fundamental break from normality and, as such, are separable from everyday life’ (Wibben, 2011: 12). Drawing on the work of feminist scholars for whom mainstream narratives on security usually ‘neglect the multifaceted ways that women experience insecurity in their daily lives’ (Berry and Lake, 2021: 469), this article is an attempt to understand security from the epistemological rhythm of the ordinary. It is from the ‘descent into ordinary’, as Das (2007) calls it, that we can witness the unfolding of events in the realm of everyday life, and, most importantly, recognize the mundane as a stage where the remarkable remains concealed (Back, 2020).

Based on a collaborative research process with grass-roots organizations in Montes de María, this article employs two vignettes to delve into the life-sustaining dynamics that arise from women’s encounters, both among themselves and with institutions. These encounters, which I call vital encounters, provide a spatial-temporal scenario for women to make, remake, and reproduce their ordinary lives. The term vital encounters refers to ordinary interactions that link the satisfaction of material needs to the construction and development of women’s collective and political subjectivities. Drawing upon feminists’ attempts to demilitarize and de-warriorize security studies (Aroussi, 2020; Berry and Lake, 2021; Cockburn, 2007; Nyman, 2021; Tickner, 2004), these encounters invite us to contemplate security not as an isolated concept or a top-down process but as the result of ordinary struggles that unfold in the pursuit of more livable modes of existence.

After briefly discussing the context of Montes de María, I consider the relevance of vital encounters for rethinking the concept of security and its relation to the reproduction of ordinary life. After that, I analyze two stories that illustrate how these vital encounters unfold in women’s everyday lives. Through these stories, I discuss the concept of vital encounters as a privileged site for grasping the importance of social exchanges and relationships between equal or disparate actors in the process of living and reproducing ordinary life, as well as for considering how this process shapes our understanding of security and (in)security.

Vital encounters, feminist security and ordinary life

In contexts marked by multiple (in)securities, individuals employ different repertoires of action to survive and achieve lives they regard as worthy and dignified. These repertoires of action can occur on a large scale – through revolutionary movements, massive demonstrations, or high-impact litigation – or on a smaller scale – through casual conversations, informal gatherings, or routine bureaucratic encounters. How can we make sense of this more transient and less visible scale? Bayat tackles this question by proposing that, in order to ‘survive and improve their lives’ (Bayat, 2013: 46), subaltern individuals engage in what he calls ‘quiet encroachment’; that is, ‘the noncollective but prolonged actions of dispersed individuals and families to acquire the basic necessities’ (Bayat, 2013: 35). These actions, he argues, give rise to a ‘quiet and gradual grassroots activism’ that contests ‘many fundamental aspects of state prerogatives’ (Bayat, 2013: 46). Similarly, in her study about post-conflict women’s political participation in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Berry (2018) emphasizes the importance of everyday actions, far from the formal mobilization arenas, to understand women’s political transformation in contexts of transition to peace.

These conceptualizations echo a key insight of feminist meditations on security, which emphasize the ways in which (in)security and people’s responses to it often occur through mundane experiences and everyday actions. Challenging hegemonic approaches to the study of security, which often revolve around spectacular deployments of violence and protection, feminist security studies turn to ordinary life to capture the practices and phenomena at the cracks of celebrated peace negotiations and warlike rhetoric. In her recent book Twelve Feminist Lessons of War, Cynthia Enloe eloquently captures the problem with traditional accounts on security: ‘Most descriptions of war blot out complex gender dynamics: war is so bloody that gender doesn’t matter. Or wartime strategic calculations are portrayed as so bloodless that gender politics are irrelevant’ (Enloe, 2023: 17). A feminist lens, then, allows us to expand on the meanings of security by bringing into the spotlight ordinary practices that are crucial for the sustenance of communities (Sheperd, 2013a; Sjoberg, 2018; Wibben, 2011). At the same time, this lens uncovers types of (in)security that cannot be fully explained by traditional approaches, such as material deprivation, institutional violence, or domestic violence (Sheperd, 2013b). Therefore, a focus on ordinary life provides an epistemic standpoint from which we can see security as deeply connected to how ordinary people envision and attempt to achieve a more dignified life.

Although feminist thought has illuminated the significance of everyday life and its intrinsic connection to security (Salcedo López, 2022; Sjoberg, 2018; Wibben, 2020), there is still an uncharted territory in understanding how mundane encounters and interactions can contribute to achieving security. In other words, the field of feminist security studies needs to continue exploring the importance of micro-relational processes where acts of care, survival, and reproduction of material livability take center stage. The theorization around vital encounters is an attempt to contribute to this research agenda. Vital encounters emerge as seemingly fleeting and uneventful interactions aimed at satisfying individual and immediate needs. However, these interactions end up having consequences at the community level and amplifying individuals’ political subjectivity, which becomes a crucial element for the emergence of civilian and collective forms of security. Vital encounters follow the idea that political engagement derives from routine and individual actions that ultimately have durable and collective effects. In that sense, vital encounters are stages of what both Bayet and Berry have called the ‘politics of practice’; that is, ‘the idea that ordinary activities of the subaltern can be political, even if they look different than most Western understandings of contentious politics’ (Berry, 2018: 10).

The significance behind vital encounters lies not only in the fact that seemingly unremarkable interactions enclose a political force but also in the way these interactions, often aimed at satisfying urgent needs, ultimately motivate individuals to become actively involved in community projects and political causes. As I will show, individual actions and seemingly uneventful encounters have the potential of transcending their immediate circumstances and the short-lived temporality in which they exist, becoming crucial spatial-temporal instances for collective security-making. Vital encounters often arise during moments of urgent material need, where individuals seek to secure access to essential goods and services. At first glance, these instances may appear unremarkable, driven solely by individual necessity and devoid of a communal motivation. However, vital encounters have consequences that distinguish them from other ordinary encounters and interactions. It is when these seemingly routine interactions lead to an individual’s transformation in their political subjectivity that they become vital encounters, turning individual acts into actions with collective and communal significance. These encounters thus extend beyond individual concerns to enable ordinary individuals to collaboratively engage in community initiatives aimed at enhancing collective well-being. Consequently, vital encounters give rise to collective processes of security-making anchored in both the material satisfaction of basic needs and the emergence of political vitality within communities affected by violence.

I focus on encounters as sites of unexpected – and often contested – occurrences. By doing so, I hope to call attention to the extent to which ordinary and fortuitous interactions open up new avenues for understanding the meanings surrounding the notion of security. Echoing Anna Tsing, I argue that vital encounters reveal that ‘survival always involves others’ and is ‘necessarily subject to the indeterminacy of self-and-other transformations’ (Tsing, 2015, quoted in Quintana, 2022: 67). As the empirical section of this article shows, women’s experiences and survival practices hint at different notions of what it means to be (in)secure – notions that are necessarily connected to the production and reproduction of ordinary life and to everyday scenarios where political life unfolds. In that regard, the concept of vital encounters links security to the conditions under which ordinary life is possible, even in contexts of war and social fragility. This perspective embraces a more layered understanding of security, one that emphasizes the daily livelihood practices that women undertake to improve their life and material conditions as well as the collective consequences of those practices. In particular, I contend that narratives on security should consider the actions by which ordinary life is made, remade, and reproduced; what Brenner and Laslett describe as ‘the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, and responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life on a daily basis and intergenerationally’ (Brenner and Laslett, 1991: 314).

This article emphasizes ordinary life as it is a political and methodological vehicle for the critical examination of processes in which survival practices and the emergence of political subjectivities are deeply intertwined. As Berman and Ojeda argue, the register of the ordinary is composed of both the ‘everyday rhythms’ and ‘singular moments of disruption’ (Berman-Arevalo and Ojeda, 2020: 2), suggesting that thinking of the ordinary does not imply rejecting the spectacular, but rather understanding the extent to which these two registers are part of the same temporality.

Informed by feminist perspectives on the gendered dynamics of the reproduction of ordinary life, the idea of vital encounters shows that the series of strategies, practices, and exchanges women deploy to satisfy their material needs involve forms of community labor and an everyday refashioning of their political subjectivities. This article’s starting point is the notion that the reproduction of ordinary life does not take place exclusively within domestic and private domains – it is a process that encompasses the whole range of exchanges, relationships, and social interactions involved in ‘creating or reproducing society as a whole’ (Bhattacharya, 2017: 2). Since the reproduction of the material conditions for life is undeniably crisscrossed by political concerns (Federici, 2012), the theorization around vital encounters explores how ordinary life is reproduced when women seek to obtain the material conditions needed to live and survive; for example, by fighting to guarantee access to essential services (Bhattacharya, 2017; Hall, 2020; Meehan and Strauss, 2015). I am interested, then, in analyzing moments when these processes open up a space for a new political horizon at the heart of a community. Ultimately, vital encounters are instances to describe life-making exchanges that reveal the political dimension of ordinary life. Vital encounters reveal the extent to which materiality and politics are interdependent, for life becomes possible only after individuals collectivize a series of worries and necessities that are thought to be personal, or after contesting what they think is unjust. Analytically speaking, vital encounters offer a lens through which we can link the individual and collective layers of security-making efforts as well as the significance of such efforts for people’s immediate livelihood needs and communities’ long-term reconstruction processes. In consequence, security is understood here as an idea deeply rooted in the relational actions carried out by ordinary people in order to construct and reconstruct a worthy, meaningful life in the midst of violence, conflict, or crisis.

Multiple (in)securities in Montes de María

The exchange between Helena and Ms Renata occurred in 2019, 14 years after the controversial and in many ways inconclusive demobilization of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC)³ (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), the country’s largest paramilitary group, and three years after the signing of a pivotal peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP) (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). Although the transitional justice process concerning the AUC centered on demobilization and disarmament, the 2016 Peace Agreement is widely recognized as a pioneering effort. It stands as one of the first agreements globally to incorporate reforms aimed at addressing the root causes of armed conflict, including issues such as dispossession, discrimination, structural racism, and land distribution. This latter perspective on security acknowledges the multifaceted socio-economic, cultural, and political dimensions that underlie violence. Although it may not comprehensively capture the intricate layers of insecurity in Colombia (Velez-Torres et al., 2021), it represents a significant effort in the process of de-warriorizing armed conflict and linking it to the everyday concerns of war-torn communities.

Despite efforts to achieve peace, life in peripheral regions, where the war was most intense, continues to be marked by multiple forms of (in)security. This (in)security is caused not only by the emergence of new rebel groups (Verdad Abierta, 2022), but also by the different forms of violence and precariousness that have shaped the way people live, die, and survive in the most marginalized regions of Colombia (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición [hereafter Comisión de la Verdad], 2022a).

Montes de María is a territory where multiple (in)securities have coexisted for decades (Lederach, 2023; Ojeda et al., 2021). This area, located between the departments of Bolívar and Sucre,⁴ is composed of 15 villages and cities nested around the mountainous topography of the Colombian Caribbean. Montes de María, a predominantly agrarian region, finds its economic sustenance rooted in agriculture, livestock, fishing, and handicrafts. Having been for decades caught in the crossfire between paramilitary groups, guerrillas, and state-armed forces, Montes de María is a symbol of what violence has meant in Colombia, especially for Afro-Colombian, indigenous, and impoverished communities. This region bears the weight of a hunting legacy – one marked by the specter of forced displacements, gender-based and racial violence, entire villages massacred, and the relentless terror that granted dominion to various armed actors within the region (CNMH, 2011, 2017).

The survivors’ accounts of the ‘masacre del Salado’ – a massacre perpetrated by paramilitary groups in February 2000 and remembered as one of the cruelest spectacles of violence in Colombia – are witness to the levels of cruelty that the people in Montes de María had to endure during the most gruesome years of armed conflict:

[The paramilitary combatants] sang after each killing. You could see how much they relished killing. There was a young kid who would even say, ‘But I haven’t killed anyone, let me kill someone.’ [. . .] Whenever they were going to kill someone, they would say, ‘I’ll kill him,’ while another would reply, ‘No, let me kill him.’ They would fight over who would do the killing as if the victim were a trophy [. . .] An 18-year-old pregnant teenager was impaled. [. . .] Several women were raped. People could hear the screams coming from a ranch near El Salado.⁵ (CNMH, 2009: 123)

These accounts were collected by Colombia’s Center for Historical Memory (Centro de Memoria Histórica) as part of its institutional mandate to preserve victims’ accounts of the armed conflict. They are testimony to the reasons why Montes de María has become one of the most visible symbols of the Colombian armed conflict. The history of atrocities, the scenes of the unspeakable, the accounts of those who had to live through episodes of violence: all of this has made it impossible not to see this region hiding along the Caribbean mountains.

As in other regions of Colombia, and as is usual in war, gendered violence was a common practice employed by armed groups. Through these acts of violence, they sought to assert dominance over women’s bodies and delineate the boundaries between what was permissible and what was forbidden. Numerous reports from both civilian organizations (Cerón Cáceres, 2021) and state institutions (CNMH, 2017) have documented these gender-based wartime practices, encompassing sexual violence, domestic servitude, and torture for those who dared to defy the conventional notion of what constitutes a ‘good woman’. Despite several attempts to attain a lasting peace,⁶ the war still looms large in the region. A legacy of violence lingers, as criminal groups have gained territorial and political control in the region. This is evident in the ongoing threats faced by citizens and the targeted killings of human rights defenders. According to the Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Paz (Indepaz), more than 150 social leaders and human rights defenders and around 40 former combatants were killed in 2021.

This violence alludes to what Fujii has called extra-lethal violence – those ‘physical acts committed face-to-face that transgress shared norms and beliefs about appropriate treatment of the living as well as the dead’ (Fujii, 2013: 411). These spectacular episodes of violence tend to pervade the public imaginary of (in)security in regions like Montes de María. This type of violence, however, has coexisted with lesser-known, yet equally insidious, harms and threats – economic deprivation, dispossession, hunger, institutional disdain. Often omitted from the conventional narrative of Colombia’s armed conflict, these other forms of violence have not only perpetuated the war, but have also transcended its boundaries. In early 2019, during a symposium on gender violence in the Colombian Caribbean, hosted by a national human rights organization, a woman in the audience stood in the middle of the auditorium to share her experience:

Many families in Montes de María don’t have anything to eat [. . .] Here, women[’s] rights are a joke because every day we see the violence against women from husbands, brothers, relatives, while the state institutions do nothing at all. People from different parts of the country travel to our region to do workshops, saying a bunch of things about the peace agreement. However, we are still in misery, and women continue to experience violence every day, even in their own houses. (Event recording, 23 March 2019)

Despite the lack of sufficient data on the subject, domestic and intimate partner violence, in its different forms (economic, psychological, physical), is among the most prevalent in this region (Cerón Cáceres, 2021). In addition, according to official figures, the current average income in Montes de María is approximately 15,000 Colombian pesos (less than 4 US dollars) per day per household. Only 12% of households have access to basic services such as water, reliable sources of power, or basic sanitation facilities (Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo [PNUD], 2010: 6). On top of that, access to most public services, such as education and health care, is severely restricted (PNUD, 2010). Living in the shadow of intimate violence, being hungry, lacking access to quality health services – these are all conditions that reproduce the cycles that have sustained war and armed violence in Colombia (Comisión de la Verdad, 2022b).⁷

In her work about peacemaking efforts in Montes de María, Lederach suggests that labeling this region as predominantly ‘war-affected’ obscures ‘how histories of violence are entangled with histories of grassroots peacebuilding’ (Lederach, 2017: 590). The case of Montes de María begs for an understanding of (in)security that emphasizes not only the multiple and intersecting forms of violence that affect women’s lives, but also the practices they carry out to materialize an everyday sense of security. By focusing on women’s efforts to achieve dignified lives, as well as on the political and collective claims that emerge as a consequence of these efforts, this article proposes a vision of security and (in)security that recognizes the continuity between the many forms of violence affecting Montes de María and the ordinary practices that people assume in response.

Annotations on methods

The focus of this study is on women who have lived in the midst of the multiple (in)securities I have just described. Women like Ms Renata, whose story opened these pages, have become the public face of resistance in Colombia. In the times when all kinds of vital destruction have prevailed, women have played a crucial role in making life possible. The 2022 report published by Colombia’s Truth Commission (Comisión de la Verdad) explicitly acknowledges that women have ‘interrupted the cycles of violence and brought about significant changes by mobilizing against war and redefining security in non-military terms’ (Comisión de la Verdad, 2022a: 311). The stories discussed in this article offer a brief glimpse into the everyday processes that lead to these alternative concepts of security in the face of distinct forms of violence.

This article stems from a larger project on women’s responses to multiple sources of harm which involves a collaborative research process with grass-roots organizations in Montes de María, Colombia. Such collaboration began unofficially in 2018 when my work as a human rights lawyer led me to participate in project on reproductive justice and sex education in rural areas impacted by armed conflict. It was during this time that I first met activists and organizations from this region. Through these everyday interactions, I started paying attention to the essential yet fleeting interactions necessary to understand women’s struggles for life and security. After beginning graduate school, I made the decision to continue my research in Montes de María and collaborate with women and social organizations as an independent researcher. In this role, my focus shifted more towards the life-affirming practices that emerge from women’s daily activities, both within and outside the organizations they belong to.

Over the past four years, I have collaborated with women’s grass-roots groups and organizations from Montes de María on various initiatives. I have sold crafts and meals with them to support their productive projects, provided legal assistance for their organizations, and written op-eds together with them for local outlets, among other actions. Perhaps the most significant form of collaboration has been co-designing and facilitating workshops and focus groups centered on the legal and policy frameworks regarding sexual and reproductive rights, land ownership, gender-based violence, and environmental justice. The conversations provoked by these workshops often transcended mere legislative discussions and turned into informal dialogues where participants reflected on their own experiences, with personal life stories serving as the prism to make sense of broader social issues. These workshops instilled in me an interest for understanding women’s perceptions and practices of security through the lens of seemingly unremarkable moments. In a way, I have an affective linkage to these processes and interactions because they caused an impact on who I am both as a researcher and a person.

As part of this collaborative process, I have also conducted semi-structured interviews with 35 women who are involved in community activism in the region. Additionally, I have participated in three focus groups, consulted personal and public archives, and conducted participant observation in events, meetings, and women’s homes. The most valuable insights for this research, however, have come from unplanned moments and unexpected interactions with women. These include informal conversations during bus journeys, long talks at dinner time, or dialogues during our walks across mountains and streets. Based on the information gathered, I am currently reconstructing the life stories of five women who have adopted different strategies to resist and respond to the many threats present in Montes de Maria. This article draws largely on these life stories, with particular emphasis on two individuals: Julieta and Emilia. Life stories privilege women’s ‘own interpretations of their experiences and the social circumstances in which their story has unfolded, and the ways in which they continue to be active agents’ (Sosulski et al., 2010: 37). This methodological design prioritizes life stories that center on the everyday processes of building and rebuilding life rather than concentrating solely on the aspects that have dominated the public perception of armed conflict in Colombia. The narratives presented in this article do not aim to provide exhaustive biographical accounts of the lives of women in Montes de María. Instead, they represent partial, ongoing, and open narrations with the potential of shedding light on how women make sense of and confront multiple (in)securities.

Two stories of vital encounters

Julieta

Julieta has been making totumo handicrafts for 10 years. She collects totumo, a fruit native to the tropical regions of the Americas, from trees or buys it in the plaza. She then cooks it, dries it, and paints it. Several days a week, Julieta sells these handicrafts in her town. Sometimes she manages to sell a couple. Other days, she may sell as many as 10. Julieta sells totumo handicrafts because it is the cheapest way to earn some money each month. She also likes that the totumo can be adorned with a variety of designs. This is her way of providing for herself and her mother (Interview 2).

But selling totumo handicrafts has also become a way to escape the narrowness and solitude of the domestic realm. It has given her a chance to walk the streets of her village on a daily basis, get to know other women, and develop a sense of collective belonging. In other words, her labor has been an excuse for encountering others. Because of the sale of handicrafts – earrings, rings, small pots – Julieta got to know other women in her village. Eventually, she started attending the weekly meetings that women’s grass-roots organizations held in Marialabaja, her hometown. One day, about eight years ago, one of the women to whom Julieta used to sell handicrafts invited her to a women’s rights training session organized by a grass-roots organization working on gender issues in the Caribbean region of Colombia. Julieta decided to attend this training session not only because she was interested in learning new things and meeting other women, but also because she saw it as an opportunity to sell more of her handicrafts (Interviews 2 and 3).

Today, Julieta continues transforming totumo into jewelry and accessories, walking around her village and talking with other women. However, now she does so as someone who belongs to a women’s rights network with an active social and political goal in the community. These networks, rather than being structured around large organizations and bureaucratized or hyper-standardized processes, are based on a day-to-day collaboration that involves creating informal chains of information and resources that women share with each other (Dávila Contreras et al., 2019: 38). Today, she proudly identifies as a human rights defender, collaborating closely with local organizations in order to ‘advance the cause of women’s rights in our region’. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, she attends informal, intimate gatherings on women’s rights convened by her compañeras (comrades) (Interview 2). These gatherings, often referred to as encuentros (encounters), are spaces where women converge to share their own experiences, finding solace and resonance in the voices of others.

‘How many of us here have never had to face violence in our homes or from our families?’ A middle-aged woman asks this rhetorically at one of these meetings (Field diary, 1 August 2022). Her question is framed within a discussion about violence against women and the actions they could take to fight against it in their municipalities. As this woman speaks, one can see other participants nodding in affirmation while an echo of whispers ripples through the room, confirming that everyone there knows the answer to the woman’s question – a question which collectivizes violent experiences that, for many, perhaps until that moment, felt deeply personal and private. ‘Sometimes it is very hard to share these feelings with other people’, says another woman. ‘These are things that one has kept for so long, [. . .] but here I feel I can speak’ (Field diary, 1 August 2022). This encounter, the mere act of sharing a common space where one can listen and be listened to, elevates ordinary interactions into interactions with political and liberating significance.

In the case of Julieta, it is common to see her talking to other women in these meetings, sharing some of her domestic experiences, talking about her divorce from a violent man, or the efforts she undertakes to take care of her mother. Every time she attends one of these encuentros, she carries with her the totumo handicrafts, offering them to those around her. ‘If you buy a pair of earrings or a necklace, I will give you a second pair for free. [. . .] The thing is, I have to pay for my utilities soon’ (Field diary, 1 August 2022). Julieta is not the only one in these women’s meetings who sees the meetings as an opportunity to improve her material conditions. In these gatherings, it is usual to see most women selling something – traditional dishes, desserts, earrings, necklaces – or looking for ways to make ends meet – borrowing money from other women, inquiring about possible job opportunities, or seeking guidance on how to cultivate crops in their backyards.

These encuentros enable women to question their understanding of violence through a collective meaning-making process. After one of the encuentros I attended, Julieta shared with me that it was ‘thanks to these women’ that she no longer allows anyone to ‘take advantage of her’ (Interview 4). In a context where the narrative of massacres and spectacular displays of violence dominate how violence is understood, encuentros allow violence to be recognized outside such patterns. At the same time, they provide an opportunity to link consciousness-raising interactions with the imperative of improving one’s material conditions of life.

These encuentros embody the very essence of vital encounters. On the one hand, they serve as interactional moments through which impoverished women can devise strategies to sustain their survival and economic autonomy, thereby ameliorating the material dimensions of their existence. On the other hand, these encuentros facilitate the communalization of seemingly personal afflictions, which ultimately unites women who share common experiences and grievances.

Emilia

‘With these people, I only have encontronazos’, says Emilia, a 42-year-old woman complaining about having to deal with the officials in the local health center of her village (Interview 5). ‘Encontronazo’ is a word that people in Colombia often use to describe a confrontation or an intense argument with someone else. An encontronazo indicates a failed, contentious encounter – an encounter fraught with conflict. For Emilia, this expression encapsulates her experiences when engaging with the public institutions in her local community.

By the time Emilia discussed these contentious encounters, three years had passed since she had undergone permanent birth control surgery to prevent her from getting pregnant. ‘I had to fight for more than five years to receive that surgery’, she adds wearily, ‘five years in which I got pregnant again and had my third child.’ Emilia says that after the birth of her second child, she knew that she did not want to get pregnant again (Interview 5). She was looking for a permanent birth control option. However, she had to deal with the delays of the local health center. On top of that, the primary care physician at this facility judged her for her decision. This is how Emilia puts into words this whole ordeal:

With two children and the meager salary of my husband and mine, do you think I wanted to have more children? No way! [. . .] For a whole year, I insisted time and again that I needed to get this medical procedure done. They came up with excuse after excuse. First, they would say yes. Then, they would say no. Then, that I would have to go to Cartagena. Then, I got sent back. It was impossible. [. . .] And then I got pregnant, and I had to wait to give birth to my third son. After I recovered, I insisted again and again.

[. . .] And then, I started going to the local health center every day, arguing with everyone I met there. The doctor would tell me: ‘Why on earth would you want to do that to yourself? You’re only 33 years old. You still can give birth to more children,’ to which I would reply, ‘Don’t you understand that I really don’t want to?’ I would get so angry whenever he said such things that I yelled at him. Why are you like this? Why don’t you know that women ought to be treated with respect? [. . .] And I would lecture him on my rights as a woman because he didn’t know a word about women’s rights. Look, I’m going to confide something to you. I didn’t know much either, but I read and learned and asked those around who did know so that they would tell me what to say to him. Finally, my insistence paid off. After two years, that man agreed to do the surgery. [. . .] I remember that day clearly. I was sick of hearing his excuses. ‘Oh, you can’t get the surgery today,’ he said again. And I said back: ‘Hear me out. You know what? I had another child because of you. But the law protects my rights. I am not going to have a fourth child because of you again. Either you do the surgery, or I will file a formal report against you since you’re violating women’s rights.’ (Interview 5)

After this experience, several women began asking for Emilia’s help when dealing with local authorities:

One day, a woman asked me if I could accompany her daughter to the health center because the people working there didn’t want to give her the medicine she needed. Then word spread, and suddenly women started asking me if I could go with them to the health center because nurses and doctors already knew who I was. (Interview 5)

Emilia has even had to accompany girls and teenagers who have been victims of sexual violence to the health center. Since public health officials often do not believe what these girls say, ‘you have to fight for them’, she states (Interview 6).

‘Fighting’ for themselves and others is often the only way for women to access essential goods and services, such as medications or routine medical care. Essential needs are met thanks to the pressing rhythm of Emilia’s insistence. And this rhythm – the rhythm of an unrelenting demand, of a pugnacious complaint – is what defines a large part of women’s lives in Montes de María. Ordinary interactions between women and officials might lead to life-sustaining encounters when these interactions are marked by women’s struggle to live dignified lives. In Emilia’s case, a dignified life involves the recognition of her bodily autonomy and her moral agency to decide about her own reproductive health.

In a context of multiple (in)securities that are largely sustained by institutional neglect, the processes of insistence, complaint, and contention by which women satisfy their material needs become political and collective gestures that communicate a profound dissatisfaction with local institutions. Emilia’s case is telling because it shows that the act of reproducing everyday life is inseparable from the way that power and authority (generally wielded by public institutions but, in some cases, by private ones) manifest and make themselves legible in the region. Emilia’s personal experience – her years-long struggle to obtain access to a basic health service – led her to become a mediator who strives toward attaining justice and material equality for other women. This connection between what is understood as merely personal and what concerns others also underscores the link between material needs – access to health services – and political life – Emilia’s politics of insistence against health officials and her work for other women in her same situation.

Discussion and final remarks

By alluding to the artificiality of the distinction between the ordinary and the remarkable, Das (2007) suggests that it is precisely in the realm of the ordinary that an event’s true meaning can be known. In many ways, this article takes up Das’ call by exploring the everyday ways in which women in Montes de María, a Colombian region laden with various expressions of violence, both reproduce their material lives and expand their political subjectivities through mundane interactions with others. By looking at their material vulnerabilities and strategies for overcoming such precariousness, a novel meaning of security arises – a notion grounded in people’s daily practices of subsistence.

Women like Julieta and Emilia have had to face the armed violence that, for so many years, swept across Montes de María. Their lives have been marked by violence and impoverishing conditions that interlock, precede, exceed, and are accentuated by war. From lack of economic opportunities to domestic violence, from living in the midst of an armed conflict to suffering neglect and abuse from state institutions, the lives of these women have been defined by a fraught paradox: they are the public faces of wartime atrocities yet their struggle to satisfy their basic needs and their eveyday efforts to achieve a better life have remained invisible, mostly unnoticed by the public and the state. When Julieta, Emilia, and other women strive to attain better material conditions, such as some money for their family or better access to health care services, they carry out life-making practices. However, as I have tried to show in this article, in contexts such as Montes de María, where countless women have lost what they considered a dignified life, life-making practices become political acts.

Building on the epistemological insights of feminist security studies, I have tried to illuminate the dialectic between life-making practices, community engagement, and ordinary security through the idea of vital encounters. In this article, I define vital encounters as mundane interactions initially aimed at satisfying immediate needs but with the potential of transcending the short-lived temporality in which they exist, becoming crucial instances for the emergence of political subjectivity and collective security-making processes. This two-sided nature of vital encounters unfolds in Julieta and Emilia’s accounts. Their efforts to meet their individual and urgent needs ultimately embody political clamors. Julieta has found an opportunity to develop her political subjectivity and demand better living conditions for herself and others through selling handicrafts, which became her main source of income for herself and her mother. For Emilia, her vital struggle for securing access to basic services incarnates a politics of insistence that entails disagreement and contention with others. These stories show that there is a relational connection between the aspiration to improve ordinary life and the commitment to live a political life. This connection is essential for understanding how ordinary life is reproduced in precarious contexts where different forms of (in)security dramatically entwine.

These accounts let us appreciate the extent to which Julieta and Emilia’s stories reveal a continuum between material life and political life, between practices of survival and practices of resistance. The stories also show that the reproduction of ordinary life is necessarily a relational process. It takes place through complex, ambivalent, and often conflicting interactions: encounters and disagreements, harmonious gatherings and bitter struggles (Butler, 2012). As the stories of Julieta and Emilia suggest, vital encounters exist in a ‘field of complex political struggle’ (Vaittinen et al., 2019: 4) that can ‘shape the political space in the midst of conflict’ (Vaittinen et al., 2019: 14).

These ideas may elicit a reflection on what it means to think security from the standpoint of what lies out of focus. Most of the time, vital encounters are events that happen in the shadows. Yet this does not imply that they are invisible, or at least not entirely so. On the one hand, they are political expressions that may not necessarily disrupt a given order and that may not be considered as an example of a common way to protest for better material conditions (Bayat, 2013). On the other hand, these events do mark a discontinuity, perhaps a modest one, in the ordinary lives of many women. This discontinuity is a glimpse of the possibility of a different future.

Theorizing Julieta’s and Emilia’s interactions as vital encounters may also provide a conceptual apparatus for rethinking some ideas about what it means to seek peace in contexts where multiple forms of (in)security overlap. By moving away from a militaristic understanding of security and considering it within the framework of the reproduction of ordinary life, we can see that peacebuilding projects are often designed from a perspective that only takes into account the register of war. Following the scholarship that has regarded ordinary life, livelihood opportunities, and care as integral parts of peacebuilding (Berents and McEvoy-Levy, 2015; Berry and Lake, 2021; Mac Ginty, 2004; Vaittinen et al., 2019) allows us to see how the stories of Julieta and Emilia challenge the temporal narrative that traditional security studies usually take for granted: the assumption that life after war is ‘remade’ or ‘rebuilt’ (Lemaitre, 2016). In contrast, Julieta and Emilia’s experiences teach us that life after war is instead an unremitting unfolding of efforts to ‘make life’, to build it from scratch, and to continue making it in the face of multiple forms of (in)security that pile up on each other.

Currently, Montes de María is one of the places where the future of peace in Colombia is at stake. For that reason, it is crucial to see the work done by women like Julieta and Emilia, who perform life-making actions in the midst of violence. Efforts to build a lasting peace, as is the aspiration of many, must necessarily involve recognizing the power embodied in ordinary scenarios of interaction and relationality, where women collectivize their problems, make them legible to others, and demand a life that breaks not only with armed violence but also with the multiple forms of impoverishment and dispossession that loom over the region. Peacemaking, I would say, is only possible if it is recognized that life-making goes first.

Finally, by theorizing what happens when security meets the everyday, new avenues for research open up. First, it is necessary to continue analyzing the relational dimension of security. Scholarship needs to keep paying attention to how security is understood, built, and transformed by ordinary citizens and through everyday interactions. Second, it is important to consider the ways in which the various crises of our time can undermine women-led efforts to achieve security. Future research could investigate, for instance, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the reappearance of armed violence on people’s relational strategies of survival. Third, political and scholarly efforts need to acknowledge and study the various ways in which ordinary life is reproduced through spaces that facilitate social participation, political activism, and participation in community and collective scenarios. Finally, the emphasis on vitality also opens interesting possibilities. Although I focused mostly on material and political dimensions of vitality, future research may inquire into the vital interactions that emerge between landscapes, individuals, and non-human entities.

Footnotes

I am deeply grateful to the editors of this special issue,Marie E Berry and Milli Lake,for their exceptional insight,generosity,and guidance throughout this process. I also want to express my gratitude to the team at the Women’s Rights After the War project,especially Soraya Zarook,for their support. Thank you to the two anonymous reviewers for their extraordinary feedback and to Santiago Ospina Celis,Angélica Cocomá,Sebastián Rojas Cabal,Nicolás Torres-Echeverry,and Diana Isabel Güiza-Gómez for their comments on previous drafts.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

María Ximena Dávila

María Ximena Dávila is a PhD student at the University of Texas,Austin. She is a lawyer and sociologist interested in the relationship between gender,violence,reproduction and welfare in Latin America. Her current work explores women’s responses to overlapping crises,with a focus on the gendered aspects of risk and care.

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