“What about the locals?” The politics of representation of the effects of the Colombian armed conflict on Ecuador.

During the last decades Ecuador has been affected by the expansion of the Colombian armed conflict across its northern border. Particularly, with the implementation of Plan Colombia in 2000, the bordering populations have been facing the effects of the violence, such as: forced displacement, incursion of state and non-state armed groups, fumigations and different forms of violence. The interest of this research is to identify how such effects are represented in the discourses of three kinds of actors that write about them: Ecuadorean and Colombian governments, NGOs and academics. By using Framing and Categorization as analytical tools, hegemonic and dominant discourses around the effects of Plan Colombia in Ecuador can be identified, as well as what is left out of such discourses. To this end, this paper is framed under two interrelated theoretical perspectives: the politics of representation and the Foucauldian approach to power/knowledge, which are relevant for understanding the power relations embedded in those linguistic representations.