‘Pedagogies of cruelty’ and the patriarchal order of the nation-state.

This article, published in Postcolonial Studies, deals with what has been described as ‘one of the worst episodes of mass atrocity in the Western Hemisphere in recent decades’ (Human Rights Watch 2015), which took place in Colombia in 2002-2010 under the rule of Álvaro Uribe: the Falsos Positivos, a subset of extrajudicial killings carried out by state armed forces in exchange for monetary bonuses, holidays and/or promotions and whose victims were more than 3,000 poor and mostly male people. I draw from Rita Segato’s work (Segato 2016; Segato 2018) to address this event from a perspective that re-centres patriarchy and ‘coloniality’ (Quijano 2000). Firstly, I argue that the very possibility of their occurrence, staging, symbolic function, scale, and the nearly-zero empathy they generated in the general population is the result of a historical implementation of ‘pedagogies of cruelty’ (Segato 2018) that in the context of Colombia —where never-ending multi-modal violence has raged for decades on end and has emerged with singular ferocity— have successfully trained the urban classes into what I will denote as ‘selective desensitisation’. Secondly, that as an extreme enactment of the ‘mandate of masculinity’ (Segato 2016), these crimes constitute an event that allows for the reinforcement of the patriarchal order that underlies the modern-colonial nation-state. Apart from providing an explanatory framework for an extraordinary example of lack of empathy for certain victims in the context of Colombia, I aim at expanding Segato’s concept of ‘pedagogies of cruelty’ so as to demonstrate its immense analytical potential in the current global political landscape.