What Sustains Life? Love and Care in the Face of Loss in Colombia

What sustains life in the face of loss? This question was born from our work on peace and justice in Colombia over 20 years. For a long time, our inquiries focused on violence and suffering. In this article, we ask how we might imagine living in a world of loss if we train our curiosity at what sustains life. Drawing from in-depth fieldwork in Colombia, we focus on practices of love and care as life-sustaining forces. We theorise love and care as offerings that people make, and which lend their lives purpose and meaning. A key contribution of our approach is that it does not exceptionalise the violence of armed conflict, understanding it instead in the context of the other forms of loss that unfold alongside it. This work aims to treat life itself with the theoretical and empirical weight that we lend to the study of (violent) death.