Secession or Sense of Belonging? Marginalization in the Context of Transnationality

Abstract

How does a state’s marginalization of borderland communities influence their sense of belonging? We argue that, in unstable regions in the Global South, such marginalization reinforces people’s sense of belonging to a transnational community. As we demonstrate, two causal mechanisms account for this process: the marginalization enhances (i) the border’s “disguising” quality that muddies diverse forms of insecurity and (ii) the border’s “facilitating” quality that permits certain actors and activities to cross borders while stopping others. Consolidation of people’s sense of belonging to a transnational community has implications for the state, as losing part of its citizenry to this transnational community undermines its own authority and the state–society relationship. Drawing on the case of the Colombian–Venezuelan borderlands, we substantiate our argument through evidence collected during in-depth fieldwork, including interviews and focus groups with peasants and other residents from remote borderland regions as well as with state and civil society stakeholders. We contribute to scholarship on identity and sense of belonging by theorizing its link to marginalization in the context of international borders. We further contribute empirically by documenting little-known cross-border practices and activities of residents of the shared border region of the Colombian department of Cesar and the Venezuelan state of Zulia.

Quelle est l'influence de la marginalisation des communautés des régions limitrophes par l’État sur leur sentiment d'appartenance ? Nous affirmons que, dans les régions instables des pays du Sud, une telle marginalisation renforce le sentiment d'appartenance personnel à une communauté transnationale. Comme nous le démontrons, deux mécanismes causaux rendent compte de ce processus : la marginalisation renforce (i) la qualité « dissimulatrice » de la frontière qui rend différentes formes d'insécurité plus confuses; et (ii) la qualité « facilitatrice » de la frontière qui permet à certains acteurs et activités de traverser les frontières tout en en arrêtant d'autres. La consolidation du sentiment d'appartenance personnel à une communauté transnationale s'accompagne d'implications pour l’État, car la perte d'une partie de ses citoyens au bénéfice de cette communauté transnationale nuit à son autorité et à la relation entre État et société. Nous fondant sur le cas des régions limitrophes colombiennes-vénézuéliennes, nous étayons notre argument à l'aide d’éléments probants recueillis lors d'un travail de terrain approfondi, notamment des entretiens et des groupes de discussion avec des paysans et d'autres résidents de régions limitrophes éloignées, ainsi qu'avec des parties prenantes de l’État et de la société civile. Nous contribuons à la recherche sur l'identité et le sentiment d'appartenance en théorisant son lien avec la marginalisation dans le contexte des frontières internationales. Par ailleurs, nous apportons une contribution empirique en documentant les pratiques et activités transfrontalières méconnues des résidents de la région frontalière partagée du département colombien Cesar et de l’État vénézuélien de Zulia.

¿Cómo influye la marginación de las comunidades fronterizas por parte de un Estado sobre el sentido de pertenencia de las mismas? Argumentamos que, en regiones inestables del Sur Global, esta marginación refuerza el sentido de pertenencia de las personas a una comunidad transnacional. Demostramos que existen dos mecanismos causales, los cuales son los causantes de este proceso: en primer lugar, la marginación acentúa la cualidad «disfrazadora» de la frontera, la cual enturbia diversas formas de inseguridad y, en segundo lugar, la marginación acentúa la cualidad «facilitadora» de la frontera, la cual permite que ciertos agentes y actividades crucen las fronteras mientras detienen a otros. La consolidación del sentido de pertenencia a una comunidad transnacional por parte de las personas tiene implicaciones para el Estado, ya que la pérdida de parte de su ciudadanía a manos de esta comunidad transnacional menoscaba tanto su propia autoridad como la relación Estado-sociedad. Partimos de la base del caso de la frontera colombiano-venezolana, el cual nos permite fundamentar nuestra hipótesis a través de las evidencias recogidas durante un trabajo de campo en profundidad. Este trabajo de campo incluye entrevistas y grupos focales con campesinos y otros residentes de regiones fronterizas remotas, así como con agentes del Estado y de la sociedad civil. Este artículo realiza una contribución al trabajo académico en materia de identidad y sentido de pertenencia, ya que teoriza sobre el vínculo de ambas con la marginación en el contexto de las fronteras internacionales. Además, el artículo realiza una contribución empírica ya que documenta prácticas y actividades transfronterizas poco conocidas por parte de los residentes de la región fronteriza compartida del departamento colombiano del Cesar y el Estado Zulia en Venezuela.

Introduction

“It is my turn today, and it will be yours tomorrow!”¹ This is how a peasant from Codazzi, a small town in northern Colombia near the Venezuelan border, described his community’s relationship with people on the other border side.² He referred to how people on both sides experienced hardship due to state neglect, which contributed to a strong social bond and mutual understanding among Colombian and Venezuelan borderland residents. Colombians would help Venezuelans one day, and the next day, the roles would reverse, with Venezuelans offering assistance. This sense of belonging to a transnational community is surprising: a large Andean mountain range, the Serranía de Perijá, separates Colombia and Venezuela in this region. Both central governments see this region as existing at the “edges” of their respective territories, not at the center of a distinct form of belonging. This is evident in the seven-year border closure (2015–2022), initiated by Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, that disregarded the importance of cross-border relationships for borderland communities (Erazo 2022).

In unstable regions across the world, especially in the Global South, states often marginalize international border regions by providing fewer governance functions, building less infrastructure, and locating fewer state institutions (e.g., judicial authorities, police, health, or education services) near borders than elsewhere. Examples range from Colombia in Latin America and Myanmar in Asia to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda in Africa (Brenner 2019; Idler 2019; Scorgie 2021). Marginalization not only occurs at borders, i.e., the states’ geographic margins. Its geographic effects tend to be a localized projection of the state’s effects (Wacquant 2008). According to McGill et al. (2023, 5), marginalization is “a socially rooted process through which people become unable to transform their capabilities into meaningful input into societal decision-making processes.” It typically goes unnoticed unless those residing in marginalized regions demand secession or greater autonomy, often by taking up arms (Jenne, Saideman, and Lowe 2007; Weller 2009). Such events are, however, extreme cases (Dieckhoff 2017, 139–60). The scholarly focus on violent struggle overlooks the importance of studying nonevents—the absence of rebellion or of demands for secession or autonomy (Johansen 2007; Gledhill and Bright 2019).

Against this backdrop, in this article, we investigate state marginalization of borderland communities and how this marginalization influences borderland residents’ sense of community. As we argue, when states on both sides of an international border in unstable regions in the Global South marginalize their borderlands’ residents and there is no obvious alternative identity source around which a group can rally (e.g., for self-determination or secession), such marginalization can reinforce these people’s sense of belonging to a transnational community. We define transnational community as a group of residents from both sides of an international border with social, commercial, and cultural cross-border ties. These transnational borderland communities’ experiences differ from those of heartland residents. When marginalized by the central state, people become alienated from it, and their sense of belonging to the citizenry weakens. This can contribute to removing a part of the state’s citizenry, which undermines the state’s authority and the state–society relationship. Such marginalization further enables conflict actors or organized criminals to establish illicit cross-border authority by filling the power vacuum left by the state. They may also operate in collusion with, or under the connivance of, state officials who are present but not serving the public interest.³ Two causal mechanisms account for this process: the marginalization enhances the border’s (i) “disguising” quality that muddies diverse forms of insecurity (Idler 2019, 285–93), and its (ii) “facilitating” quality that permits certain actors and activities to cross borders while stopping others (Idler 2019, 253–71).

We present findings from our in-depth fieldwork in the shared borderlands of Colombia’s Cesar department and Venezuela’s Zulia state.⁴ This includes interviews and focus groups with peasants and other residents of these remote borderlands, and with state and civil society stakeholders. Applying process tracing, we demonstrate the causal mechanisms linking state marginalization with borderland residents’ sense of belonging to a transnational community. Through this study, we contribute to scholarship on identity and on the concept of “sense of belonging” by theorizing its link to marginalization in the context of international borders. We contribute empirically to border studies, political science, and sociological literature on state–society relations by documenting little-known cross-border practices by residents of the Colombian–Venezuelan borderlands.

We first introduce our theory on state marginalization and people’s sense of belonging, including the mechanisms “border as disguise” and “border as facilitator.” The methodology section explains the utility of choosing a “least-likely” case for our case study and the empirical strategy. Building on the two mechanisms and a third analysis section that draws out the tensions and complexities that exist around various forms of belonging in borderlands, we trace how state marginalization in this cross-border region contributes to the residents’ sense of belonging to a transnational community. We also discuss its impact on the state–society relationship. We end by suggesting further avenues of research into similar phenomena in other regions, and on the interdependencies between state relations and community relations across the border.

Borderlands, Sense of Belonging, and Marginalization

A Borderland Lens

To analytically capture transnational borderland dynamics, we start from people’s everyday experiences and interactions at the local and regional levels. As Korf and Raeymaekers (2013, 4) contend, “borderland dynamics [have to be considered] not just as outcomes of diffusing statehood or globalization, but also as actual political units that generate their own actions and outcomes.” This perspective reveals how, in borderlands, political and cultural systems overlap (Goodhand 2008, 230). It also shows how flows of goods, people, and ideas interconnect even when separated by borders to create one spatial unit of analysis that covers both sides (Baud and van Schendel 1997, 216; van Schendel 2005, 44). Borderlands contrast with heartlands: spaces where political and economic state centers’ influence supersedes the border effect (van Schendel 2005, 49). Borderlands’ size depends on how far cross-border transactions reach into areas distant from the borderline (Morehouse, Pavlakovich-Kochi, and Wastl-Walter 2004, 30; Vorrath 2010, 86). A borderland lens accounts for these dynamics, thus revealing how borderland residents’ marginalization is typically linked to the state’s focus on heartlands.

Identity and Sense of Belonging

We distinguish between “identity” and “sense of belonging” in the context of border communities since the terms’ implications for these communities’ relations with the state and with residents across the border differ. Identity is the collection of attributes, beliefs, desires, and principles that define people as individuals (Tajfel 1981), and that distinguishes a group of individuals from another group. When a group perceives its identity to clash with that of the state, it may demand secession, self-determination, or other forms of opting out to address economic, political, or structural grievances separately (Costa-Font and Tremosa-Balcells 2008, 2464; Toft 2012). Identity groups exist within state territories and across borders. Even though identity groups across borders are transnational, such as the Naga residing in India and Myanmar (Baruah 2020), factors like ethnicity or religion define their identity rather than transnationality.

When examining transnationality, a sense of belonging rather than identity is a more useful concept. A sense of belonging refers to the feeling or perception that one is a valued member of a social group or environment (Hagerty et al. 1992). It can overlap or nest as national, regional, local, and transnational (Meinhof and Galasiński 2005). A sense of belonging does not exclude identities: one may feel a sense of belonging to a group yet have economic and political grievances that not everyone in that group shares. In this case, economic or political identities do not constitute markers of group difference, and so the concept of “sense of belonging” can be especially useful when applied to heterogenous populations.

Broadly speaking, scholars study identity and sense of belonging at borders in two ways. First, they focus on identity clashes on each border side, as is sometimes the case in interstate conflict (Rousseau and Garcia-Retamero 2007; Wimmer 2019). Second, they study secession, in which a group with a strong sense of belonging to its own territory seeks to break away from the nation-state (Walter 2006; Toft 2012). Scholars cite ethnic identities as causes of secession and separatism, often reinforced by state marginalization of such ethnic minorities (Walter 2006, 2012; Johnson and Toft 2014; Toft 2014). We elucidate a third, overlooked, way to study a sense of belonging in international border regions: Transnationality itself sometimes provides people residing near borders with a sense of belonging. Previous studies show how identities extend across borders due to ethnic, religious, economic, or social cross-border ties (Henrikson 2000; Finn, Opatowski, and Momani 2018). However, we know little about the role of transnationality itself and of the state’s influence in such a sense of belonging, especially when it marginalizes borderland residents.

A sense of belonging to a transnational community can arise because “borderlands create the conditions for a complex overlapping of forms of belonging, frames, and narratives. . . foster[ing] alternative identifications and polarizations which merge with complex regional identities and imaginaries” (Mattheis, Raineri, and Russo 2019, 84). Such a sense of belonging emerges through everyday practices and social interactions at the cross-border level rather than normative subscription to the state (Garcés-Mascareñas 2015, 130–1). These practices lead communities to cluster around certain behaviors (Mattheis, Raineri, and Russo 2019, 22). A transnational regionalism arises when people (trans)act across borders, producing regional spaces through iterating activities that affect people’s loyalty as well as their senses of belonging and of attachment (Vertovec 2003; Mattheis, Raineri, and Russo 2019). Eskelinena, Liikanen, and Oksa (1999, 22) suggest that understanding borderland dynamics requires analyzing how the border affects borderland residents’ lives. People whose livelihoods depend on the border (e.g., they engage in cross-border trade) or with family members on both border sides tend to have a stronger border experience (Martínez 1994, xviii; Donnan and Wilson 1994, 8; Baud and van Schendel 1997, 219). While the sense of belonging that emerges from these spaces’ transnationality depends on the borderline’s existence, the borderline’s condition as a social construct also presupposes it (Atzili 2006, 141).

When cross-border activities influence borderland residents more than activities inside a state, they may no longer feel part of a state-level “imagined community” (Anderson 2016). Many ways in which media contribute to people’s perception of being part of the nation’s imagined community do not reach borderland residents—because these media are not available in borderlands or their content is incompatible with their lives. Instead, their imagined collective social bond derives from cross-border interactions and common imaginaries on how the border shapes people’s lives (Baud and van Schendel 1997, 241–2). A differently imagined, transnational community arises that states may be unaware of. The sense of belonging to a transnational community derives from identifying with the geographical space in which social interactions occur. It provides the security and self-worth that encourage people to participate in these interactions and take collective action (Schiefer and van der Noll 2017, 588–9; Chan, To, and Chan 2006).

The transnational community exists because of the border, not despite it. Hence, transnational borderland communities differ from “imagined geographies,” defined by preconceived ideas on delimitations of geographies, including through state borders (Said 1978).⁵ Such imagined geographies portray borderland residents at the state’s edge, and those living on the other border side as the “others.” Yet transnational communities have the border at their core, thus forming a distinct geography, often overlooked by the state.

These dynamics do not necessarily imply autonomy from the state or a desire for secession, given cross-border activity’s economic benefits for both borderland residents and the state. Cross-border regionalisms are thus entangled with the state. People can feel they belong to both the state’s imagined community and a transnational borderland community, especially when they still long for the state in hope for a better future or reject the notion of nonstate actors ruling their lives (Ramírez 2011; Bocarejo 2015; Idler 2021). But the state marginalizing people and people resenting this marginalization erode their sense of belonging to the state’s imagined community and undermines the state–society relationship.

Marginalization and the Border Effect

The marginalization of borderlands does not refer only to suboptimal governance. Nor does it imply that these regions are not integral to nation- and state-building processes. For example, according to Serje (2011, 30–8), Colombia has promoted a national image and state practice that juxtaposes the country’s “civilized” nation with its “savage” frontiers. Rather than focusing on the complex strategic aims and ideologies of state interventions in borderlands, we analyze how state marginalization undermines borderland residents’ sense of belonging to the state.

The geographical and social marginalization of communities on both border sides bridges adjacent border regions marginal to their own states. Experiencing marginalization often creates a collective transnational identity, defined by the sense of belonging to the fringes and by being remote within the state (Mattheis, Raineri, and Russo 2019, 85). Such “transnationalism from below” is built upon border-spanning social connections in a process of relation-building that helps forge people’s plural identities and their sense of belonging (Tedeschi, Vorobeva, and Jauhiainen 2022, 2–4; Vertovec 2003).

Borderlands in vulnerable regions tend to be “sites where the state’s presence has somehow been limited and its monopoly of violence and political authority is finite, unraveling, or subjected to severe contestation” (Korf and Raeymaekers 2013, 7; see also Donnan and Wilson 1999). Deficient infrastructure to connect the periphery with the center excludes these spaces from national decision-making processes and the national economy (Clement 2004, 54). When state capacities are weak, borderlands’ transnationality and distance from centers translate into a “border effect”: the confluence of weak state governance, a low-risk/high-opportunity environment that makes illicit cross-border activities attractive, and the propensity for impunity due to the security and justice systems’ deficient coordination on each border side (Idler 2019). The border effect reinforces a group’s sense of belonging to a transnational community through two mechanisms: the “border as disguise” (Idler 2019, 285–93) and the “border as facilitator” (Idler 2019, 253–71).

The Border as Disguise

State marginalization of borderland residents contributes to their sense of belonging to a transnational community because the border disguises nuanced forms of insecurity. Power centers stigmatize borderlands as unruly and potentially dangerous spaces due to the borderlands’ distance from state centers and weak state governance, regardless of any spatially or temporally conditioned circumstances (Goodhand 2013, 247). They also presume borderlands’ irrelevance to power centers (Zartman 2010, 9–11), leading borderlands to be misunderstood and ignored as long as there is no threat to the state’s territorial integrity (e.g., via separatists).

The border’s disguising quality means that marginalization from outside is replicated from within: borderland residents often “self-marginalize” by internalizing and normalizing insecurity and borderlands’ stigma as unruly spaces and hence their “otherness” (Idler 2019, 287). The stigma is a relative effect of a core-periphery divide rather than a fixed effect of the border. Borderland residents do not see themselves as part of the national polity when the state marginalizes both the border’s geography and its people. This self-image creates the sense of a group that exists because of the border, with these transnational communities symbolizing how borders matter for their sense of belonging.

The Border as Facilitator

The border as facilitator is the filter mechanism that operates across international borders to permit some flows while blocking others (Morehouse, Pavlakovich-Kochi, and Wastl-Walter 2004, 24). While state agents are, theoretically, “fully in control right up to, but also not across, that red dotted line” (Zeller 2013, 194), people, history, landscapes, and daily life spill over state borders (Nugent and Asiwaju 1996, 1; Garcés-Mascareñas 2015). At the same time, a border is not a simple “barrier” that people “breach” to establish family, social, or economic relationships (Martin-Mazé 2017). Rather, it facilitates interactions such as commercial exchange that would not exist without the border (Habbas 2024); its closure can unsettle borderland residents socially and economically (Idler and Hochmüller 2020). Borders can be porous globally, in stable and unstable regions alike, and such porosity is particularly common in the Global South (Hochmüller and Idler 2024). So when formal border crossings are closed, people continue their transnational life informally by crossing porous borders.

Marginalization at borders can transform into a sense of belonging to a transnational group when people’s livelihoods depend on crossing the border. People in the Colombian border town of Cúcuta, for example, can travel as easily to Venezuelan San Cristóbal as to Colombian Bucaramanga to engage in trade, while also benefiting from price differences across the border that do not exist within Colombia. Due to its filter mechanism, the border also facilitates illicit cross-border activities such as smuggling and violent operations by armed nonstate actors such as criminals or rebels. Both Venezuelan criminals and Colombian rebels along the Colombia–Venezuela border, for example, killed people on one border side and escaped law enforcement across the border to the other (Idler 2019, 254–9). In the context of state marginalization, armed nonstate actors can create an environment that likewise fuels a sense of belonging to a transnational community, one whose daily practices are influenced by these actors’ transnational presence. For this to happen, the state does not necessarily have to be absent. Its presence in collusion or connivance with these actors (see, e.g., Arias 2017; Barnes 2017; Lessing 2021) likewise constitutes marginalization.

Research Design and Methodology

This study’s universe of cases consists of communities that manifest a sense of belonging to a transnational community.⁶ These communities are situated in cross-border regions, where members hail from at least two neighboring countries. Despite their cross-national ties, these communities do not seek greater autonomy or independence from their respective states. There are hundreds of such cases globally, including communities residing near the Kenya-Somalia border, the Burmese–Thai border, and the Russia-Ukraine border (Zayats et al. 2017; Chome 2021; Olivius and Hedström 2023).

We use a case study methodology drawing on a “least-likely” case to demonstrate the causal mechanisms at play (George and Bennett 2005, 121–2; 253; Rapport 2015; Koivu and Hinze 2017). As George and Bennett (2005, 116) note, “least-likely cases can strengthen support for theories that fit even cases where they should be weak.” The Cesar–Zulia borderlands across the Colombia–Venezuela border are a “least-likely” case because our theory assumes that borderland residents from both border sides closely interact with each other, yet, in this case, the difficult terrain hinders such interaction. Given this region’s topography, one would not expect state marginalization to have an impact across the border. The Serranía del Perijá, a northern branch of the Andes that marks the border, makes transit between the two sides harder than at other lower crossing points. The Cesar–Zulia borderlands feature less (il-)legal economic cross-border activity than other regions along the border where no mountains need to be crossed.⁷

In addition to featuring easier terrain for illegal crossing points, three other departments/states that adjoin the Colombia–Venezuela border have official terrestrial border crossings: La Guajira (Colombia)—Zulia (Venezuela), Norte de Santander (Colombia)—Táchira (Venezuela), and Arauca (Colombia)—Apure (Venezuela). Economic or social ties and insecurity in their respective home countries motivate Colombians and Venezuelans to move across the border. This cross-border region comprises a country with ongoing armed conflict (Colombia) and one with high rates of violence (Venezuela). In 2019, 53 percent of a total 185,074 documented Venezuela-Colombia border crossings by Colombians were via these terrestrial routes, while Venezuelans crossed the border via these routes 942,510 times (Migración Colombia 2019). Many of these crossings are by commuters who cross the border to work, shop, or study.

Data Collection and Analysis⁸

Data come from fifty interviews conducted in Colombian Cesar in 2019 and seventeen interviews conducted in Cesar and Venezuelan Zulia in 2012. We further draw on contextual data from over three hundred additional interviews conducted from 2011 to 2022 in the Colombian–Venezuelan borderlands, Caracas, and Bogotá. Interviewees included peasants, human rights defenders, international organization representatives, and humanitarian organization staff, all residing in these remote borderlands, and other relevant stakeholders. We also conducted eight online focus groups in November and December 2020 and February 2021 with thirty-one participants with significant professional and personal experience of the Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands. These focus groups comprised members of civil society organizations (fifteen people in four groups), international community representatives (nine people in two groups), and state representatives (e.g., local government officials and national agency employees) in Colombian departments that adjoin the Colombia–Venezuela border (seven people in two groups). We conducted the interviews and focus groups as well as the data analysis in Spanish, and translated any interview extracts cited in the text into English.

Utilizing NVivo, we coded the data collected according to analytical themes: the border as a concept, cross-border activity, interviewees’ feelings toward their “own” state and co-nationals, and the “other” state and its nationals, migration and migrants, and living in the other state. Comparative content analysis of the interviews revealed that interviewees on both border sides described the border’s impact similarly. We coded these references as subthemes of a sense of belonging to a transnational community. Research participants’ remarks fall under these subthemes as a sense of belonging to a transnational community in conversations that the authors witnessed through participant observation or in the context of interview questions unrelated to this study’s subject. Hence, we can eliminate the possibility of bias in emphasizing the sense of belonging by the responses obtained from interviewees.

Ancestral indigenous territories straddle the border, and common ethnic identity is likely to generate a shared sense of belonging. To ensure an ethnically differentiated analytical lens, we subsequently disaggregated references to indigenous and nonindigenous elements, such as shared social or cultural spaces. Using process tracing, we identified two causal mechanisms (“border as disguise” and “border as facilitator”) that show how marginalization reinforces the borderland residents’ sense of belonging to a transnational community and unpacked the complexities around it in our analysis. We then examined the impacts of this sense of belonging on the state and the state–society relationship.

A Transnational Community across the Colombia–Venezuela Border

Colombian–Venezuelan Cross-Border Ties

Colombia and Venezuela share a history of colonialism and independence struggles from Spain under Simón Bolívar’s leadership. In 1819 and subsequent years, they were united with neighboring countries as Gran Colombia. Even though the progress of nation and state in Colombia has been defined in counterpoint to the “frontier” regions’ supposed “barbarity” (Serje 2011, 18–28), these two countries’ current shared borderlands were key in securing independence and forging unity among Gran Colombia’s people. For example, the 1813 Battle of Cúcuta (capital of present-day department Norte de Santander that adjoins the Colombia–Venezuela border), supported by Venezuelan and Colombian generals, was a major victory in Bolívar’s campaign. Following the split into separate entities in 1831, relations between the countries have largely been cordial. Minor political disagreements over boundaries have not caused conflict among the populations (González Arana and Galeano David 2014).

In addition to these historical ties, migratory, cultural, and economic factors reinforce cross-border ties between Colombia and Venezuela. People have “networks of relations and interactions” across the border (Valero Martínez 2020, 129–30), with transnational flows of people and cultural practices ranging from popular music to social movements (Kennedy and Roudometof 2001, 8). Violence and the absence of economic opportunities in Colombia led many Colombians to migrate or flee to Venezuela during the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.⁹ Many people migrated within the Colombian–Venezuelan borderlands, fostering family and friendship ties. Thus, although cultural and ethnic cross-border ties are often associated with binational indigenous peoples, such as the Wayúu, Yukpa, and Bari (Arroyave 2020), that inhabit the Colombian–Venezuelan borderlands, such links also exist among nonindigenous populations. For example, one social leader maintained that Manaure municipality (northern Cesar) was shaped by its role as meeting point of settlers from Colombia, Venezuela, and the Guajira Peninsula (shared by Colombia and Venezuela), helping to create a shared sense of belonging that transcends national origin.¹⁰

The Border as Disguise: Marginalization and Disengagement from the State

Marginalization by Bogotá and Caracas reinforced borderland residents’ sense of belonging to a transnational community through the border’s disguising quality, comprising two elements. First, the central states ascribed “otherness” to international borderlands, and second, the borderland residents internalized this otherness.

In our interviews, borderland residents were frustrated that officials viewed the borderlands’ territoriality from a distant office in the capital city rather than as it is experienced by its inhabitants. Such perspectives would contribute to state officials’ belief that borderlands were different, unknown, and unruly, instead of allowing them to see the commonalities between heartland and borderland residents.¹¹ For borderland residents, marginalization derived from their exclusion from territorial development processes. As one interviewee said, “Colombia is very centralized so most resources are held in Bogotá and investments are made according to their logic and not according to territorial needs.”¹² As borderland residents explained, they received inadequate access to public services, infrastructure, and representation, and the armed forces protected large landholders, not peasant communities.¹³

The account of an official in the Procurator’s Cesar office exemplifies the state-promoted marginalizing narrative. They referred to three groups in the Serranía de Perijá: the indigenous Yukpa, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the National Liberation Army (ELN).¹⁴ This description fits the marginalizing state discourse of the region as a guerrilla zone, indigenous reserve, and national park: listing indigenous communities alongside insurgent groups serves to “other” them while furthermore erasing peasants’ existence in the Serranía de Perijá, promoting the idea that nonindigenous people are state enemies.¹⁵

The Colombian state’s paternalistic presence in the borderlands led people to feel like they were not “Colombian” or that they did not live in a solidarity state.¹⁶ People often refused to deal with those few state institutions present in the region.¹⁷ The deficient state presence generated conflicts between communities and state representatives, further exacerbated when the state appeared in military, not civilian, form.¹⁸ The policing operations’ militarization and police chiefs’ vertical accountability to the national rather than the local level prevented effective “community” policing that could better resolve everyday security challenges.¹⁹ Community members considered municipal governments to be weak executing agencies rather than decision-making bodies that represented their needs.²⁰ To them, mayors or governors were neither socially nor politically accountable. They were seen to form “political mafias” that pursued personal rather than the public's interests.²¹

In 2019, marginalization and the massive influx of Venezuelans into Colombia due to the socioeconomic downward spiral in Venezuela prompted some Cesar residents to blame Colombia’s government for encouraging Venezuelan migration to Colombia for politico-ideological reasons, thus creating a humanitarian crisis in the region.²² In their view, the government prioritized helping Venezuelans at the expense of marginalized Colombians.²³ They did not necessarily reject Venezuelans, but resented the apparent unwillingness to provide Colombians the support they felt they deserved.

The borderland residents internalized the state’s othering of them, facilitated by the border disguising nuances of insecurity near the border. As a humanitarian organization employee in Colombian Maicao stated: “Arms smuggling, drug trafficking, contraband, deaths, kidnapping [. . .], these things happen at almost all borders of the world.”²⁴ Such perspectives disguise that marginalizing borderland residents, rather than the locality of borderlands, often causes communities to disengage from the state and seek a sense of belonging elsewhere.

Certainly, international borderlands are not the only marginalized regions with low levels of perceived state legitimacy. Where an international border defines everyday life, however, people can distance themselves from a state perceived as indifferent or hostile through their sense of belonging to a transnational community. This allows them to exit the state’s influence without physically leaving its territory, an option not available to peripheral regions within a state’s borders. As a peasant from Cesar described, Colombia is “a state which, with its political mismanagement, insinuates that we do not fit into this country.”²⁵

Cross-border ties acquired importance in the context of marginalization as an absence of social interactions with the state’s physical or symbolic presence that would nurture a sense of belonging to it (Garcés-Mascareñas 2015). The disconnection from the state fueled people’s sense of belonging to a transnational community. At times, it led the state to lose adherents, given the absence of a mutually reinforcing state–society relationship characterized by the state caring for its citizens and citizens having a voice in how that relationship should look like.

Community members that felt marginalized by the state typically worked to strengthen their social fabric across the border by fostering personal and commercial cross-border ties,²⁶ which increased their sense of belonging to the transnational community.²⁷ A lack of economic opportunities, for example, prompted people from Cesar to work in Zulia.²⁸ Once the economic situation deteriorated in Venezuela, this dynamic reversed. These similar experiences of marginalization created a stronger bond between both sides, a sense of belonging to a transnational community that manifested itself in mutual solidarity, as illustrated by the account of the peasant from Codazzi who opened this article:²⁹

When the Bolívar [Venezuelan currency] was still valuable, many people from Codazzi went for work to Venezuela. […] First, we went to Venezuela for work; now they come here, especially those Colombians who have been living in Venezuela for twenty to thirty years but have family here and so they come.

State marginalization further reinforced people’s sense of belonging to a transnational community, especially when alternative sources of authority, including armed actors, extended their influence across the border. While residents did not necessarily arm themselves as a result, these actors influenced them through culture and media. Borderland residents shared the same experience with people across the border who were likewise influenced this way, which fostered a sense of belonging to a transnational community. For example, it was common in Zulia for people to listen to radio stations run by Colombian guerrillas. These channels interspersed cultural and political affairs and music with propaganda. Hence, borderland residents and heartlanders heard different versions of information about political developments.³⁰ Borderland residents from across the border developed a joint understanding of political developments different from the one developed by fellow citizens from their respective heartlands.

A sense of belonging to a transnational community and to the state are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, in contexts with legal, state-promoted cross-border trade, this very practice can fuel both forms of belonging, enriching citizenship rather than reducing it. The context of state marginalization, however, erodes a sense of belonging to the state, especially if borderland residents lose hope in being recognized as part of the national citizenry and resent the state. We found that people typically opted out of the state–society relationship rather than maintain two overlapping senses of belonging. For example, people in Cesar mainly perceived the Colombian state as absent or untrustworthy,³¹ sentiments that hindered their sense of belonging to the state. Such circumstances deprive states of perceived legitimacy and of finances, as being detached from the state encourages citizens to evade taxes (Castañeda, Doyle, and Schwartz 2020).

In extreme cases, the borderland residents’ alienation from the state also turned into opposition to the state. “We are in a war against the state. The state has abandoned us!,” one peasant said in a community meeting in one of Colombia’s border areas.³² Such situations also occur in heartlands, yet in borderlands they may further fuel a sense of belonging to a transnational community or turn into demands for seccession.

The Border as Facilitator: Illicit Cross-Border Activity and Connecting People across the Border

The border shared by Colombia and Venezuela facilitated their borderland residents’ social and commercial exchange. This strengthened cross-border ties among people, especially in cities with economic hinterlands that transcended the border. The change in commercial patterns during the Colombia–Venezuela border closures in 2015/2016 and 2020 evidences these close trading ties. Hotels’, restaurants’, and shops’ income in Cúcuta reduced by 60 percent to 90 percent, given that over 80 percent of their regular clientele were Venezuelan (Valderrama 2020). The Colombian migration agency registered that 90 percent of people entering Norte de Santander daily in early 2020 (pre-COVID) made purchases and returned the same day (Valderrama 2020). According to one interviewee, Venezuela’s economic collapse in those same years became a trans-border regional crisis.³³ Within a day of mobilizations in La Guajira that blocked terrestrial routes from Venezuela, long queues for petrol developed in Valledupar, Colombia, not least due to the scarcity in Venezuela.³⁴

Cross-border economic ties influenced whether peasants could access productive land, employment, and trading opportunities not only during periods such as border closures but also more broadly.³⁵ As a subtle yet consequential form of marginalization, both Bogotá and Caracas generally blocked access for borderland residents in their own country, for example, through failing to establish infrastructure that would connect peasants in the borderlands with land and markets in the heartlands. To ensure their livelihoods, people crossed the border to find productive land. One interviewee described “peasants from San José de Oriente that went to work at the Venezuelan border; these are Venezuelan lands, but very productive lands.”³⁶ Peasants from Venezuela were among those lured by the productive opportunities of Cesar’s Marijuana boom in the 1970s and 1980s (Britto 2020).³⁷

In such contexts, marginalization reduced communities’ sense of belonging to the state and society while fostering a sense of belonging to a transnational community. According to one community leader: “Communities become closed off. They cannot open up to the rest of society because they are not able to. There are no roads to enter and exit.”³⁸ In Catatumbo, peasants organized to finance, build, and maintain road infrastructure.³⁹ We also observed a sense of belonging to a transnational community: people living across the border felt they belonged to a community engaged in cross-border livelihoods influenced by both sides.⁴⁰ We found portraits of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Colombian living rooms, and people listening to the neighboring state’s radio.⁴¹

As these examples demonstrate, weak state presence and the filter mechanism that made the few state institutions that were present stop at the borderline enabled alternative ways to influence people’s sense of belonging across the border. Largely blind to spaces at and beyond their border, state centers saw the border cutting relations and mobility. The sense of belonging to a transnational community thrived on this ignorance.

Borders are “mental expressions of territorial power,” which do not always match experiences on the ground (Idler 2014, 58). Accordingly, the border also facilitated connections between residents, as people on both sides saw themselves as being exposed to state-centric practices and strategies that did not account for their local needs. A peasant leader in Cesar’s Manaure municipality maintained that the Venezuelan army moved the border and that Venezuelans displaced his family in 1972 from Colombian land (with land titles registered in Cesar department), which is now Venezuelan.⁴² While the interviewee reported being harmed by the displacement, he did not reject Venezuelans. Rather, in his view, the border was never truly fixed. This and similar views may have resulted from Colombia’s state not properly establishing its own borders, and of Colombian presidents negotiating with Venezuelan officials for their own, rather than the country’s, benefit.⁴³

Insufficient economic opportunities, access to national markets, and road infrastructures to connect borderlands to heartlands explained legal economic cross-border ties, nurtured social cross-border ties,⁴⁴ and legitimized illicit cross-border activities in local people’s eyes, such as smuggling contraband, including household goods.⁴⁵ According to one interviewee, “contraband is a business everyone lives off, from the armed forces to criminal structures.”⁴⁶ Another interviewee maintained that 70 percent of the economy of Colombia’s Caribbean region, Magdalena, Cesar, La Guajira, and on the Venezuelan side of the border, was based on contraband.⁴⁷

Near the Colombia–Venezuela border, violent nonstate groups controlled illicit cross-border activities, including indirectly when smugglers paid them “taxes” for the goods that crossed the border. According to one interviewee, the Colombian and Venezuelan states and violent nonstate groups had different spheres of influence in borderlands. These often resulted from tacit agreements between state and nonstate actors. For example, guerrillas or paramilitaries taxed smugglers on each border side, which sometimes led to double or triple taxation if state officials also intercepted the smugglers.⁴⁸ The border facilitated the armed nonstate actors’ and the corrupt state officials’ illicit operations. Guerrillas, paramilitaries, or criminals committed crimes on one border side and fled to the other because the authorities on either side rarely coordinated their activities or criminal prosecutions.⁴⁹ People’s sense of belonging to a transnational community made it easier for violent nonstate groups with cross-border operations to establish illicit authority (Idler 2019, 289–92), regardless of local identities. State actors could compete for authority only up to the border, whereas nonstate groups were able to court residents on both border sides. Thus, while violent nonstate groups in peripherial heartlands also provide governance functions (see, e.g., Mampilly 2011; Arjona 2016), they face fewer competitors in borderlands. Given that state marginalization catalyzes people’s sense of belonging to a transnational community, the state’s own actions contribute to empowering nonstate actors.

The illicit cross-border authority facilitated by the border’s filter mechanism contributed even further to a transnational—as distinct from a secessionist—sense of belonging. Borderland residents in Cesar’s La Paz municipality, for example, had close ties with Zulia residents despite being separated by the Serranía de Perijá.⁵⁰ This sense of belonging was fostered by armed actors’ illicit cross-border authority that borderland residents were coerced to respect or consented to voluntarily.⁵¹ In the 1970s, marijuana trafficking routes crossed the Serranía del Perijá, displacing contraband of clothes and other products.⁵² More recently, gasoline smuggling became a major cross-border activity that connected people from both border sides and thus fostered a sense of belonging to a transnational community. Many inhabitants from La Paz, for example, stored, sold, and transported smuggled gasoline from Venezuela to Colombia.⁵³

The illicit cross-border authority also bolstered the borderland residents’ sense of belonging to a transnational community in other contexts. The FARC, for example, addressed the “Colombian-Venezuelan people” in their pamphlets, distributed on both border sides (FARC-EP 2004). Borderland residents in Colombia and Venezuela were thus exposed to similar FARC practices and reached out to one another to discuss how to deal with the FARC.⁵⁴ In Zulia, the FARC recruited and controlled young Venezuelans by providing them with GPS-equipped phones or motorbikes.⁵⁵ Parents from both border sides exchanged their concerns around these practices.⁵⁶ These examples show how people interacted across the border closely in response to illicit cross-border authority and how cross-border relations catalyzed the community’s sense of belonging to a transnational polity that questions state-bound territoriality.

Without disregarding intraregional geographic and social class differences, even elite groups in Cesar felt marginalized by the central state and often helped violent nonstate groups that operated across the border. Following a rancher’s murder in January 2019, for example, the armed group Guardabosques formed. The group established roadblocks and imposed curfews, and elites campaigned for greater access to guns for civilians rather than enhanced police coverage.⁵⁷ Some cattle ranchers—the local economic elite—also supported paramilitary groups.⁵⁸ Certainly, elite groups and local and central governments have diverse relationships in marginalized regions of Colombia and Latin America (Pearce 2018). Likewise, marginalizing tendencies affect local state authorities in varying ways. In Cesar, for example, the local political elite colluded with the paramilitaries in the 1990s and 2000s (Ávila and Guerra Ariza 2012, 388; Revista Semana 2005). Given historically recurring cycles of contestation of the Colombian state’s authority and monopoly of violence, such dynamics affect the stability of borderlands and the state.

National boundaries maintain power, not least through signifying realms of sovereign power. In 2012, an interviewee claimed that only guerrillas and indigenous people crossed into Venezuela in the Serranía de Perijá, and that guerrillas controlled the border crossing.⁵⁹ Such control regulated the flow of fighters, weapons, and supplies,⁶⁰ and fostered territorial control that allowed guerrillas to strike deals with organized criminals.⁶¹ The border did not divide groups according to their national identity—both guerrillas and criminals were Colombian. Rather, it facilitated illicit cross-border interaction, encouraging armed groups to control territory and exploit people’s sense of belonging to a transnational community.

Civil society interviewees in 2019 confirmed the presence of ELN camps and of dissident or demobilized FARC members in Venezuela, the latter as indicated by two Zonas Veredales Transitorias de Normalización​ (Transitory Rural Zones for Normalization, where the FARC gathered after demobilizing) near the border.⁶² While the actors may have changed after the Colombian government signed the peace deal with the FARC in 2016, illicit cross-border activities and their control by entrenched interests continued as they had before. Another interviewee maintained that “there is harmonization of interests between the ELN, drug traffickers, and armed forces—they like the Venezuelan border—it’s a no-mans-land.”⁶³ Similarly, Venezuela’s marginalization of its border regions enabled armed groups, many of them Colombian (e.g., Los Rastrojos, ELN, or EPL—the Popular Liberation Army), to control Venezuelan territory. Colluding and corrupt local military units seemingly accompanied such control (InSight Crime 2019; Human Rights Watch 2020).

As in the discussion of the border’s disguising quality, the consolidation of a sense of belonging to a transnational community did not necessarily rule out a sense of belonging to the state. To some extent, the border’s role in facilitating economic exchange between Colombia and Venezuela encouraged people to self-organize, take collective action, and promote leadership among borderland residents. Where this occurred in the context of legal cross-border activities, it sometimes helped assert the borderland residents’ citizenship by giving them agency in the state–society relationship rather than questioning state authority. However, we only found evidence of such developments where the state engaged at least minimally, for example, in the border town of Cúcuta or the municipality of Tibú in Norte de Santander. Where marginalization prevailed, as in most of rural Cesar and rural Zulia, we hardly detected such an assertion.

Transnational Belonging Despite Differences

Critics might question the existence of a sense of belonging to a transnational community at the Colombia–Venezuela border due to xenophobia, yet these phenomena are not mutually exclusive. Some studies reveal xenophobia and stigmatization in Venezuela toward Colombian migrants and refugees (Idler 2019, 274–5). Caracas fueled this sentiment by illegally deporting Colombian nationals (with families, friendships, and livelihoods in Venezuela) following a border skirmish in 2015 that left three Venezuelan soldiers injured. Xenophobia and the rejection of Venezuelans in Colombia grew subsequently as migration increased (Oxfam 2023). Bogotá adopted a positive, proactive stance toward the Venezuelans’ arrival. For example, it granted Temporary Protected Status for ten years for Venezuelan migrants in March 2021 (Gobierno de Colombia 2021). Yet some Colombian interviewees believed that Venezuelan migrants were “argumentative,” “lazy,” accustomed to living on state assistance, and committed crimes to survive.⁶⁴ A public ministry official in Valledupar claimed that security worsened after Venezuelans began to arrive and that Venezuelans rented babies to have more success when begging for money.⁶⁵ A common perception was that the influx of Venezuelan workers lowered incomes as Colombian businesses hired Venezuelans to undercut wages,⁶⁶ albeit for their own benefit rather than to support migrants.⁶⁷ According to one interviewee, unemployment, informal economies, and lack of border controls were connected.⁶⁸ According to another, “we are invaded by Venezuelans.”⁶⁹

Despite these sentiments, the sense of belonging to a transnational community still held for at least two reasons. First, xenophobic behavior was directed more against heartland Venezuelans than those whose lifestyle was marked by transnationality before the crisis (Knight and Tribin 2020). Second, although xenophobia and Venezuelans’ stigmatization may have existed elsewhere in Colombia, such sentiments came with positive views in the borderlands because of borderland residents’ everyday exposure to transnationality. Some interviewees emphasized the cyclical nature of migration, given that previously people would earn money in Venezuela.⁷⁰ Some acknowledged the need for solidarity, noting that many arrivals were Colombians returning with Venezuelan family members.⁷¹ Others observed the constant back-and-forth of Colombian and Venezuelan families.⁷² One interviewee emphasized that “everyone who arrives here is welcome.”⁷³ Additional interviewees recognized the arrival of Venezuelans and Colombians from Venezuela as a search for opportunities, met without suspicion or rejection.⁷⁴

Conclusion

We have shown how the Colombian and the Venezuelan states’ marginalization of their Cesar–Zulia borderlands and borderland residents reinforced the latter’s sense of belonging to a transnational community. We identified the border’s disguising and facilitating qualities as mechanisms that explain this phenomenon, as well as exposing a transnational belonging despite differences. The state’s othering of borderland residents as part of the border’s disguising quality alienated people from the central state and made them feel more connected to people on the other border side. The lack of connectivity of these borderlands with the heartlands made both licit and illicit cross-border trade more convenient. This difference facilitated cross-border movements, including those of violent nonstate groups.

The sense of belonging to a transnational community has implications for the state and the state–society relationship. While secession or interstate border disputes can reduce a state’s territoriality, a sense of belonging to a transnational community is reflected in the state’s deficient empirical legitimacy among borderland residents. In unstable and conflict-affected borderlands, this lack of legitimacy allows violent nonstate groups to gain the local population’s confidence and consolidate their illicit cross-border authority. As Idler (2019, 266) notes, “illicit cross-border authority can yield a particularly strong version of shadow citizenship,” that is, a mutually reinforcing relationship between communities and a violent nonstate group, resulting in institutional pluralism that questions the notion of territoriality.

As historically rooted phenomena in Colombia, Venezuela, and elsewhere in the Global South, marginalization and the state’s “differentiated presence” (González 2014) are difficult to reverse in the short term. Policymakers and politicians may not pay attention to this, since these regions are often only sparsely populated. Most votes come from urban centers, so investing in borderlands may seem to bring few political or social returns. Yet in the long run, such an investment would not only benefit borderland residents but also the entire countries that share the border. States can counteract regionalist, secessionist, and transnational dynamics by moving toward reversing these tendencies via expanding governance functions and promoting an inclusive narrative of the polity in marginalized spaces. According to a peasant leader from Valledupar, this means “becoming more relevant to citizens” and working toward establishing “modes of living and governing that are truly shared across the country.”⁷⁵ A capable state should not conceptualize the devolution of power and responsibility as a threat but as a way to get buy-in by including people who otherwise feel marginalized.

While we illustrate the mechanisms at work across the Colombia–Venezuela border, insights from our theory can help inform future research on other unstable and conflict-affected borderlands. Diplomatic relations between Colombia and Venezuela have been strained, with both governments using border closures for political purposes. Follow-on studies should investigate whether this drove a wedge between Venezuelans and Colombians or whether it encouraged a heightened sense of solidarity among communities that suffered marginalization and exclusion within their respective states. Overall, such a research agenda helps shed light on a so far understudied phenomenon: that rather than removing parts of the territory, transnationality as lived through a sense of belonging to a transnational community erodes the state’s territoriality at its edges without it even noticing.

Funder Information

Funding for this research was made available by Global Affairs Canada as part of the CONPEACE (From Conflict Actors to Architects of Peace) Initiative (Project Number: PSOPs 18-042/P-006707) at the Global Security Programme, Pembroke College (University of Oxford), with AI as Principal Investigator. The study is also based upon work supported by the Minerva Research Initiative in partnership with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award number FA9550-22-1-0338 awarded to AI as Principal Investigator.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for helpful comments by members of Oxford’s Global Security Programme and its CONPEACE initiative, in particular Katerina Tkacova, Markus Hochmüller, and Jorge Delgado. We further thank participants and panelists for their feedback on earlier iterations of the research at the Association for Borderland Studies Conference 2020, Latin American Studies Association Conference 2021, and Conflict Research Society Conference 2022. We also would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of International Political Sociology for their helpful comments.

Footnotes

References