Insurgent motherhood? Contesting “peace” narratives in farianas’ political reincorporation in Colombia

This paper speaks to the segment about “Women in politics” in Latin America and investigates motherhood as a contested site for the political reincorporation of women ex-guerrilleras from the Farc-ep – the farianas. In their return to ‘civilian’ society after signing the peace agreement with Santos’ government, mass media and some scholars have called attention to the ‘baby-boom’ (see Houghton 2017) that allegedly characterized their new ‘peaceful’ and ‘civilian’ identity. As such, motherhood is conceptualized – in the media and within the framework of Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) processes more broadly – as the embodiment of civilian virtues in opposition to the idea of the insurgent women associated with guerrilla warfare (Dietrich 2017). This idea relates to the widespread assumptions linking motherhood to peace and peaceful politics. Farianas’ bodies are presented as genuinely embodying ‘civility’ when they fit into the mother’s narrative, returning to the economies of care (Estrada-Fuentes 2017). In contrast, their armed militancy is portrayed as deviant, and when they engage in politics, they are labeled as “terrorists” or accused of having recruited children and supporting forced abortions – the antithesis of “giving life.” Motherhood has, therefore, become a contested site of how women access or not formal politics, but also how they can continue their political militancy in formal and informal terms (Anctil Avoine 2023). In this piece, I contend that these narratives about motherhood as the embodiment of civility and the related idea of the ‘baby-boom’ is counterproductive to peacebuilding and women ex-combatants’ post-war political militancy because it does not capture the textures of their experience of (non)motherhood. Ultimately, I argue that unpacking the baby-boom myth related to post-war motherhood of the farianas fosters alternative visions of reincorporation and peace, as affective, embodied, and militant (Anctil Avoine 2022). To do so, I draw on two extensive ethnographic fieldworks in the northeast of Colombia (2019 and 2022) and 30 testimonies of women ex-militants from the Farc-ep, in which we have discussed the political scope of insurgent motherhood.