Born of War in Colombia addresses why people born of conflict-related sexual violence remain unseen within transitional justice agendas. In Colombia, there are generations of children born of conflict-related sexual violence across the country. Whispers of their presence have traveled outside their communities. They also exist within the country’s domestic reparations program, which entitles them to reparations. Drawing on an immersive feminist ethnography with a community that endured a paramilitary confinement, the book reveals how a past-oriented and harm-centered model of transitional justice has converged with a restricted notion of gendered victimhood and the patriarchal politics of reproduction to render the bodies and experiences of people born of conflict-related sexual violence unintelligible to those seeking to understand and address the consequences of war in Colombia.

Tatiana Sanchez Parra is a Marie Sklodowksa-Curie Actions Fellow in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh.

"Tatiana Sanchez Parra untangles the layers of power that render persons born of war in Colombia as simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible at a moment of history that witnesses an unprecedented level of recognition of their victim status. Engaging in an ethnography of whispers, silences, and the unspoken, the author transcends the limitations and concealments of transitional justice in Colombia, directing the reader towards a more transformative approach, and advances research, policy, and theories of what it means to be exiled to the interstices of victim and perpetrator."— Erin Baines, associate professor, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, the University of British Columbia

"In this detailed, carefully crafted ethnography, Sanchez Parra offers insights into the possibilities of transformative justice for children born of conflict-related sexual violence, as well as for their mothers who were forced to assume reproductive labor in the aftermath of rape. It lays out an understanding of past violence and its reproductive legacies, while also enumerating steps toward transformative justice measures for these children and their mothers. Sanchez Parra demonstrates the ways in which gendered expectations of care contribute to hegemonic maternal scripts that too frequently blame women for the sexual and reproductive violence they have survived."— Kimberly Theidon, MPH, PhD, Henry J. Leir professor in international humanitarian studies at Tufts University