I am a Ph.D. candidate studying the Colombian National Police encounter with the State's Duty to remember. Studying how an official institution encounters an official duty is a critical move to demystify the State, usually depicted as a cohesive bureaucratic organization outside society, and to show how the modern State is a complicated mixture of culturally distinct worlds with contentious relationships. My work is looking at the National Police Institutional Historical Memory initiative, a novel and polemic approximation to redress in Colombia that may change the way memory work is conducted by transitional justice institutions in the future. I pay attention to how memory entrepreneurs in the Colombian National Police think about memory politics and how their memory labors reaffirm and, at the same time, challenge their understanding of themselves as public servants. I also look at the arguments the police push into the public sphere and how they were conceived and produced. Finally, I also consider how self-appreciation and self-conservation mediate the relationship memory entrepreneurs inside the police have had with the Colombian violent past and reflect on how the lack of bureaucratic autonomy in the profound intellectual work of looking at the past poses a danger to positive cultural and institutional change in the police.

Thematic interests: peacebuilding, memory politics, identity, politics of representation, expertise, the State, ideology, democracy, social movements, digital humanities