Offsetting slow violence: Conservation, displacement and (Im)mobility at the anti-subversive capital of Colombia

Scholars and communities have long argued that conservation-induced injustices worsen in armed conflict contexts, where historical warfare processes, state formation, and accumulation overlap with the imperatives of nature preservation. This paper contributes to these analyses by showing how the mutually reinforcing relationship between conservation and violence is spatialized through ordinary, often taken-for-granted, less dramatic forms of exclusion. Focusing on the Serranía de las Quinchas in Puerto Boyacá, Colombia, a region that played a critical role in the country’s armed conflict, I analyze how people’s everyday displacements and mobility regimes were transformed as a result of the entwined repertoires of conservation and violence. Ethnographic and archival research in this study describes the mobilities and space-making projects of campesinos colonos, and how they were gradually transformed with the emergence of development and scientific narratives related to deforestation anxiety and biodiversity loss, armed control, and present-day forms of environmental offsetting and neoliberal conservation schemes. The study highlights how mundane, gendered spatialities shifted with the territorialization of conservation’s slow violence. The literature on green grabbing often emphasizes dramatic, conservation-induced displacements; in Quinchas, however, the unjust spatial arrangements arising from conservation and violence are embedded in new, everyday mobilities that reshape local campesino life projects. This process is qualitatively distinct from the well-documented scenarios of fortress and militarized conservation. Specifically, women’s everyday mobilities have been restricted in favor of better conservation outcomes, environmental offsetting projects, and the mobility of non-human neighbors. This immobility starkly contrasts with the dynamic historical mobilities unique to campesino space-making projects. Amidst renewed debates and proposals around just and convivial conservation, this paper is cautious of the subtle, insidious risks posed by conservation’s seemingly benign temporalities, enclosures, and everyday geographies that scholars and conservation practitioners might overlook.