Tracing Subjective Drives: A Narrative Approach to Study Youth’s Engagement with and Disengagement from Armed Groups in Colombia

Abstract

This contribution reports a narrative analysis of a life story interview of a youth disengaged from armed groups in Colombia. Aiming to understand his subjective drives of (dis)engagement, the analysis is based on an approach that expands the Listening Guide of Carol Gilligan with culturally oriented approaches. This led to a perspective that situates subjectivity in neither the inner realm of the personal nor in the outer one of the social context. Rather, it puts subjectivity in a person’s voice by simultaneously considering it as (1) a physiologically embodied process shaping and expressing the narrator’s experiences and (2) a performance responding to life and its sociocultural context. From this perspective, subjective drives of (dis)engagement are transformed into subjectified forces, belonging to the dynamic of a psychosocial zone (Andrews et al. 2004). Understanding engagement with and disengagement from armed groups from this perspective offers a novel contribution of how to deal with these children in their reinsertion process.