Membership in a Political Community
Membership in a Political Community
The misfortune of those who have been expelled from their homes and left without the recognition of the political community to which they belong is that—as is the case with the a patriots—they cannot enjoy any of their rights. We are not talking here about a certain instance in which a certain right was momentarily suspended, as is the case with soldiers who lose their right to life during a war or delinquents who lose their freedom as a result of a crime.
Faced with a loss of the freedoms of movement and of opinion—which are indisputable ex- pressions of human liberty—, the displaced are not recognized as members of the political commu- nity to which they nominally belong. Through this, more than the loss of any one specific right, they discover that they are deprived of the very right to have rights, and that they have ceased to belong to a common political space in which their opinions are meaningful and their actions affect others (Arendt 1987: 375).
The displaced person has been deprived of the freedom of movement (she must leave even when she doesn’t want to and cannot go where she chooses, but only where she is allowed to go) and also of the freedom of opinion, as opinions cannot be publicly expressed and debated since the public space has dissolved under the reign of a certain dominant, forcibly imposed truth. Before The displaced person has been deprived of the freedom of movement (she must leave even when she doesn’t want to and cannot go where she chooses, but only where she is allowed to go) and also of the freedom of opinion, as opinions cannot be publicly expressed and debated since the public space has dissolved under the reign of a certain dominant, forcibly imposed truth. Before
According to Arendt, the best way to discover whether a person has been radically deprived of his Human Rights—of his right to have rights—is to ask ourselves whether the possibility of being sentenced for having committed a crime could have a beneficial effect for him inasmuch as it would finally recognize him as a legal subject and thus incorporate him into the purview of the law. If the answer is yes—that is, if the crime assures the inclusion of a person into the everyday legal order—then we are facing a true pariah (Arendt 1987: 364-365).
Despite the fact that they possess a nominal nationality, displaced Colombians lack any effec- tive recognition The burden of proof of the condition of displacement—that is, to receive legal recognition as such—rests on the victim, who as we have already mentioned is completely vulner- able and has lost her voice and capacity for effective action. Without legal recognition of his or her condition, the displaced person cannot hope for any guarantee of his fundamental rights or benefit from the public policies designed to solve the problem of internal displacement and to protect the victims. Paradoxically, in the absence of legal recognition of his status as a displaced person, he cannot obtain effective legal recognition of his basic rights as a citizen—which are precisely the rights he lost in the process of displacement—meaning that he is left as a pariah. In contrast to Arendt’s idea of a debatable gain in terms of the recognition of rights and procedural guarantees
when the pariah commits a crime, 35 the practices of the criminalization of the displaced Colombians have been twisted and have taken on the form of a dirty war and of social cleansing.
An individual who simply lives, and whose national rights have been de facto denied, is only
a man faced with his utter nakedness as he discovers the loss of the political condition which al- lowed him to exist. From this point of view, the belief in Human Rights based on the supposed existence of a formal and abstract human reality is proven empty. The displaced person shows us that it is only in the construction of a political community that establishes effective recognition of her citizenship that respect for rights becomes possible.
That is the most important point of the efforts of the Peace Communities, as they are not just social spaces in which citizens reconstruct their lives from a personal and social perspective. Rather, they demonstrate how community structures make the struggle for political recognition possible. The social organization of the displaced in the Paravandó settlement defined the shape of their struggle in defense of their lives and their land from a political perspective that demanded the application of legal norms to grant them rights not just as displaced peoples, but also as full citizens.