The Gray Zone

Some sociologists who study the state-formation process designate places where an ineffective state can’t exercise the monopoly of force as gray zones—territories where private networks of power and coercion supplant the functions of state institutions. The war in Colombia has taken place mainly in these spaces. The concept of gray zone also aludes to all the ambiguities that characterize the power dynamics in these places, which complicate traditional interpretations. In politics, as in photography, absolute blacks and whites are unusual.

For several several years, I periodically visited visited Jardines de de Sucumbíos, a territory in southwestern Colombia close to the border with Ecuador. This awesome landscape, where the Andes plunges into the Amazon, is inhabited by marginalized indigenous, Afro-Colombian and peasant communities. Social organization has enabled these communities to resist a life marked by routine violence perpetrated by all the armed actors in the Colombian conflict.