The right to the future and chrono-logics otherwise

Resisting governmentality’s temporal conduct

Abstract

This paper attends to differing praxes of futurity circulating in Colombia, both in dominant and subaltern forms. It first considers temporality as an apparatus of governmentality, raison d’état, and settler colonial logics of violence deployed in the service of late liberalism, capitalist endeavor, and the so-called “peace dividend.” In contrast, it elaborates two distinct rights claims that counter official state claims on the future: the principle of the right to a distinct vision of the future in Colombia’s black Pacific social movement; and the legal claim of the right of future generations in a historic 2018 lawsuit brought against the government by several youth from diverse regions across the country. These claims pose what I name as a “chrono-logics” otherwise – temporal alterities that refuse the logics of settler colonial temporality and insist on an ecology of relations that pursue the survival and flourishing of diverse lifeworlds and futures.