Franklin Martinez

I am a PhD student in Global Humanities, interested in how non-human species such as cattle are an effective and active part of the colonisation process. I am part of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, as well as the Swedish National Research School in Historical Studies.

I have a Bachelor's degree in Political Science and Government (Universidad del Norte, 2017) and a Master's degree in Global Environmental History (Uppsala University, 2020).

In my Master's dissertation, I coined the term Cowlonialism to define a regime of ideas and practices that was imposed in the region between Veracruz and Ciudad de México, in which cattle flattened the Earth, ate the crops of indigenous people, and occupied space that would then be given to the Spanish colonisers, particularly during the XVI century. I focused on 12 documents found in the Audiencia de México, in which indigenous people from Tlaxcala document the damages that cattle and other species are causing to their crops and houses. 

Previously, my work centered on the right to land by campesino communities in Colombia. This led me to write and think of what it means to be part of a territory, and the intersections that occur between race, class, and in the Colombian context, political violence. This led me to write about the history of land tenure in Magdalena, in Colombia, as well as what it means to do ethnographic research in areas that have been heavily diagnosed by international cooperation organisations.

Connected to this, I have also worked in subjects related to political violence, land issues, peace building, and the impacts of the political armed conflict in people with diverse gender and sexual identities. In this sense, I have researched and published on how the political armed conflict happened in the city of Barranquilla, Colombia, focusing on the logic behind the arrival of paramilitary and drug dealing structures to the city, and the ways in which they infiltrated the local and national government, as well as the security forces of the State. Also, I have worked directly in the implementation of the Peace Agreement between the ex FARC-EP guerrilla and the Colombian State, focusing on the violence suffered by LGBTIQ+ people. This work entailed working with the Truth Commission and the Special Judicial Court for Peace, writing on the ways that LGBTIQ+ people could receive reparations, how such process should happen, and researching the way in which the FARC-EP guerrilla imposed a heteronormative regime in their soldiers and in the places where they held social control.