UCLA

This paper probes the role of birders as agents of re-territorialization in post-conflict Colombia. The 2016 signing of the peace accord between the Colombian government and the FARC ended the longest-running civil conflict in the western hemisphere, and marked the beginning of the state’s territorial re-integration project. An unlikely group has been in the initial wave of this territorial re-taking: birders. Due to Colombia’s position as a hotbed of avian biodiversity, the relative inaccessibility to large swathes of its territory, and the unique drive to add species to their personal lists, birders have been aggressive first-responders to this territorial re-opening. While questions of re-territorialization often conjure Weberian images of the state, this paper explores the line between the state as the fundamental actor in re-territorialization and the non-state actors that do the work of territorialization for the state. It does so by focusing on birders as agents of state articulation through the ‘prosaic geographies of stateness’ (Painter 2006).