Is racism a colonial legacy? Or is it a consequence of the need to define the “people” within a democratic political system? Although these perspectives are not directly contradictory - indeed they share common tenets and have been combined in a number of historical analysis of race and racism - they point ultimately in different directions. From a postcolonial perspective, it may be reasonable to envision the future end of racism as the result of a process of structural decolonization. But if racism is seen as foundational to the operation of modern democracy, it must be expected that every expansion of democratic politics will imply an expansion of racism.



This project aims to explore the tension between postcolonial and biopolitical theories of racism and to reflect upon what they mean for our historical understanding of racism and the way strategies of antiracism are conceived. I intend to carry this out by testing the theories on a specific case that provides the analysis with often overlooked perspectives.

The case study chosen is the history of racism in postcolonial Colombia, with a specific focus on the borders of citizenship in the republic. Among other advantages, this case study provides empirical data often disregarded in both postcolonial and biopolitical studies.


The extraordinarily long civil war in Colombia is especially interesting to the analysis of racism as a mechanism for constituting a national population by the exclusion of internal enemies.