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<p>How do people rebuild their lives, livelihoods, and community in the same location
where brutal conflict has occurred? My research in San Carlos, Colombia--a rural
community emerging from a decade of violence--investigates how conflict targets the
built and natural environments of people's lives. Roads, bridges, buildings, and land
have all been sites of violence, illustrating the blurred lines between military and
civilian space. The meanings of these locations change after war. Yet, for those
returning after a decade of internal displacement, these are exactly the building
blocks that must be used to remake home, livelihoods, and community. I use the concept
of forensic infrastructure to explore the materiality of memory and politics in war,
the immediate aftermath, and long-term reconstruction.</p><p>A forensic approach to
infrastructure involves understanding materials as text and tools in which politics
and memory are embedded and enacted. Forms of infrastructure serve as archives of
the past and stages for the practice and performance of awesome and everyday life.
As both material and metaphor for interdependence, infrastructure is the physical
embodiment of complex concepts such as development, modernity, progress, citizenship,
and stability. </p><p>Nowhere are these concepts more contested in Colombia than San
Carlos. Between 1998-2005, the FARC and ELN guerrillas, the Bloque Metro and Cacique
Nutibara paramilitaries, and the armed forces fought in San Carlos over control of
the country's largest hydroelectric complex and the Bogotá-Medellín highway connecting
Colombia's two biggest cities. Eighty percent of the population fled. Beginning
in 2005, however, after paramilitary demobilization and military victories over the
FARC, people started returning to their homes. Since 2010, San Carlos has been host
to innovative initiatives facilitating return. It is often portrayed in the national
media as a model for return, reconstruction, and reconciliation.</p><p>While internal
displacement has been a crisis in Colombia for decades, large-scale return is a new
phenomenon. Little has been written about return, especially based on sustained ethnographic
fieldwork. This dissertation, based on seven research trips between 2008-2015, including
fifteen months of fieldwork in San Carlos and Medellín in 2011-2012, sheds light on
the everyday experiences and difficulties of return--both for those who were displaced
and those who remained. Rebuilding the physical spaces of connection, containment,
and circulation necessary for community to function in San Carlos embodies a larger
struggle over the nature of development, progress, and reparation in Colombia. I
suggest return is possible in San Carlos because the fight was over mobility instead
of the land itself. The same model of return will be difficult to impossible to apply
in areas where monoculture agriculture or mining play a major role in conflict.</p>
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