Intimate war across borders

Terrifying encounters, recognition, and "the Colombian armed conflict" in Quito, Ecuador

Bibliographic Data

ID2260253
AuthorsAri Ackerman (0009-0009-2298-602X, Department of Anthropology University of Illinois Urbana‐Champaign Urbana Illinois USA, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume127
Issue1
Pages96-107
Publication date2025-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Anthropologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/aman.28043
OpenAlexW4405862461
LanguageEN
References cited48

Much anthropological scholarship on war-particularly "civil war"-focuses on violence perpetrated between organized political groups within the confines of a national space. In contrast, this article examines how "internal armed conflict" manifests across international borders, irrupting as interpersonal violence in spaces that are supposedly external to war. More specifically, I demonstrate how "the Colombian armed conflict" unfolds between refugees and their persecutors in Quito, Ecuador, through fleeting encounters based upon processes of life-threatening recognition. These everyday encounters constitute "intimate war," a relational condition of world-making involving terrifying social attachments-threatening verbal and physical gestures and cues-between "strangers," or people who are not necessarily familiar with each other. In this context, refugees enact strategies of evasion to avoid detection by their persecutors, such as bus hopping, visually scanning their surroundings, and avoiding other Colombians. Terrifying encounters across borders, and refugees' strategies to avoid them, unsettle normative assumptions about the desirability of recognition, where and how war happens, and what constitutes escape

Armed conflict · Criminology · Ethnology · Geography · Political science · Sociology · Conflict, Peace, and Violence in Colombia · Gender Studies · History · Law · Peacebuilding and International Security · Political Conflict and Governance · Psychology

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