Curating Military Victimhood: Humanitarian Counterinsurgency, Lawfare, and Accountability in Colombia

ABSTRACT This article examines how “military victimhood” was produced as a political technology in Colombia after the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC‐EP. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2017 and 2022, it traces how kidnapping, improvised explosive devices, and other forms of guerrilla violence were curated across military memory, education, intelligence, and advocacy into an authorized repertoire of victimization. I conceptualize this process as humanitarian counterinsurgency: the rearticulation of counterinsurgent governance through the languages of rights, care, and recognition while preserving a friend–enemy divide. Emblematic injuries suffered by some soldiers came to represent the Armed Forces as a collectively wounded institution. This enabled the military idiom of guerra jurídica (“legal warfare”) to recast investigations of abuses as persecution and extend suspicion toward judges, human‐rights advocates, critics, and soldiers with disseting views. Experiences of conscription, command failure, and institutional abandonment remained difficult to recognize because they redirected responsibility toward the military itself.