How to Hide a State: Asset Economy, War, and the Ruination of Public Infrastructures in Colombia, 1970s-Present

Julián Gómez-Delgado, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

As in other parts of the world, Colombia's public infrastructure underwent a profound transformation through privatization beginning in the 1970s, and citizens responded with dissent. Beyond the intense contestation during episodes of rioting, however, lay a historical change that reconceptualized the meanings of democratization, the experience of economic citizenship, and the state's materiality. If the ‘social state’ of the 1930s to the 1970s was characterized by a political moment of democratic delegation and making the state visible to its citizens, thereby allowing democratic oversight, the changes that followed—with a rising promise that came with assetization—and the idea that Colombians would become a society of shareholders and owners of credit cards and cellphones—altered the state-form in significant ways. For example, it shifted the state’s goal to optimizing social utility in an ‘efficient' way, with a ‘public’ that was no longer formed or evolving as before but defined in advance by technical expertise, war-making, and market-driven interests. The aim of this article is to trace the process that led to the transformation whereby access to these public goods in Colombia, particularly credit and telecommunications, which were formerly crucial sites of interaction and contestation, was no longer dependent on the state-citizen link. In other words, this article examines the complex, interconnected processes of austerity and privatization that have transformed the Colombian state and the provision of goods and services through public infrastructure to this day. Inspired by dialogues in political economy, economic geography, and historical sociology, this article examines how the state was hidden to avoid political contestation as public infrastructures were transformed from the 1970s onwards through three interconnected processes: financialization, war, and ruination, or the reconstitution of the state's materiality. Taken together, these processes offer new ways of understanding privatization and offer a critique of capitalism for ongoing processes of commodification.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 55. Warfare, Welfare States, and State-Corporation Relations