Gwen Burnyeat

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer in Social Anthropology at University of Edinburgh

In the Colombian peace referendum, the 2016 accord with the FARC guerrilla, which sought to end fifty years of war, was rejected by 50.2% of voters. The referendum created new identity divides between ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ voters, product of political “narrative wars” which intersected with myriad pre-existing divisions: between left and right, urban and...

El acuerdo de paz colombiano con la guerrilla de las FARC buscó poner fin a cincuenta años de guerra y le valió al presidente Juan Manuel Santos el Premio Nobel de Paz. Sin embargo, la sociedad colombiana rechazó el acuerdo en un plebiscito polarizante, celebrado en medio de una emotiva campaña de desinformación. Gwen Burnyeat se unió a la Oficina...

The face of the government is the interface through which citizens come into contact with and perceive the government via representation and face‐to‐face encounters. This article focuses on Colombian government officials in charge of delivering ‘peace pedagogy’ to explain to society the peace negotiations with the FARC guerrillas, before and after...

Sociopolitical expectations and actions continue to be shaped by normative ideas about social contracts.

Colombia’s new Public Order Law is a cornerstone of Gustavo Petro’s ‘Total Peace’ policy. Gwen Burnyeat, Andrei Gómez-Suárez and Alejandro Posada Téllez analyse some of the questions raised by the law and the main challenges of its implementation.

The idea of the social contract resonates in many societies as a framework to con-ceptualise state-society relations, and as a normative ideal which strives to improve them. Policy-makers, development organisations, politicians, social scientists (including anthropologists), and our interlocutors all live with contractarian logics. While generation...

https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/moving-between-academic-anthropology-and-practitioner-work/ Three anthropologists share insights on the challenges of crossover careers and how to have an impact in the real world. There is considerable scope for crossover between political and legal anthropology and the worlds of business, government, no...

The 2016 Peace Accord signed between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP guerrilla was narrowly rejected by the public in a polarising referendum. This article focusses on government officials in the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution in charge of peace negotiations, and explaining the peace process to societ...

Este libro narra la historia de la Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó, una emblemática organización campesina de víctimas, que se declaró ‘neutral’ frente al conflicto armado interno colombiano en la región de Urabá, en el noroccidente de Colombia. Revela dos narrativas centrales de la identidad colectiva de la Comunidad, llamadas ‘radical’ y...

This thesis studies officials in the government of Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos (2012-2018), a liberal politician whose central policy was a peace process with the FARC-EP guerrilla (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army), which sought to end fifty years of war. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside the Office...

En 2016, la Colombie a dit « Non » à la paix lors d’un référendum, suite à une campagne intense de désinformation. En réponse aux demandes de la société pour une information officielle sur l’accord de paix, le gouvernement a employé une stratégie appelée « Pédagogie de la paix » pour combattre les « mythes » de la campagne pour le « non » par des «...

In 2016, Colombia said “No” to peace in a referendum, after a staunch misinformation campaign. Responding to society’s calls for official information on the Peace Accord, the government employed a strategy called “peace pedagogy” to counter the “No” campaign’s “myths” with “realities”. But can we really know which is which? Based on ethnographic re...

Review of Gill, Leslie. A Century of Violence in a Red City: Popular Struggle, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. A Contracorriente, Vol. 17, Num. 2 (Winter 2020):294-304

The Havana Peace Accords of 2016 sought to end five decades of internal conflict in Colombia. As well as disarming the FARC, they promise to bring state institutions to abandoned regions and enable citizen participation. However, there is an obstacle to this which has consistently been overlooked by Juan Manuel Santos' government: a chronic distrus...

This chapter describes the founding of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó in 1997, self-denominated as ‘neutral’ to the armed conflict. Their project was initially seen as a temporally limited protection strategy, influenced especially by the Catholic Church, indigenous communities and Colombian NGOs. Three other ‘peace communities’ formed...

The organic narrative combines the Community’s experience of cacao farming with their experience of self-organisation as a community, producing the symbiosis between natural and social environments. Elements include food sovereignty, linked to the Community’s need for protection but also their self-portrayal as an ‘alternative community’; the contr...

This chapter describes a more recent development in the Community’s radical narrative, in which President Juan Manuel Santos is perceived to be ‘the same’ as ex-President Álvaro Uribe, despite different official rhetoric on peace and victims’ rights. It describes how the Community’s four demands have been translated into orders by the Colombian Con...

This chapter describes the author’s experiences doing participant observation with the Community members in the cacao groves, learning the different stages of cacao production. Through a literary and reflexive narrative about this experience, thoughts emerge on Community members’ perception of space and of nature, and of the meaning of ‘the organic...

Drawing on Community members’ testimonies, and documents from the personal archives of Jesuit priest Javier Giraldo, this chapter describes the Community’s ‘rupture’ with the state and their development of four demands they require before resuming dialogue with it. This history includes ruptures with the military and the justice system, massacres i...

Drawing on Johan Galtung’s terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative peace’ from the field of peace studies, this chapter proposes understanding the Peace Community’s collective identity as that of an ‘alternative community’. It proposes that this identity logic has evolved from a grassroots analytical and lived process which corresponds to the analytical age...

Setting the historic and geographic scene, this chapter describes the region of Urabá, rich in natural resources, characterised by settler colonisation and conflict, and the so far undervalued economic dimension to the local dynamics of violence. It describes the cacao boom of the seventies and eighties and the 1985–1996 campesino development proje...

This chapter explores the cultural shift from a community that was ‘neutral’ in pragmatic, short-term protection terms, to a longer-term organisational process. It describes their forced displacement after their declaration of neutrality, the new conditions which led to self-organisation, explores the principles and regulations they agreed on for t...

The introduction proposes the analytical continuum of chocolate and politics as the double core of the book, drawing on materialist anthropology. It introduces the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, an emblematic organisation of victims of the Colombian conflict, mostly studied from the frame of human rights, thus meriting a fresh gaze from s...

This book examines the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, in the conflict zone of Urabá, Colombia, from the perspective of critical, post-modern politics and anthropology. Telling the story of an emblematic grassroots social movement, it reveals hitherto unseen socio-economic dimensions to national political struggles. Proposing a methodology...

The Peace Community of San José de Apartadó in Urabá is one of the most emblematic groups of victims of the Colombian conflict. Trapped between the guerrilla, the paramilitaries and the army they declared themselves ‘neutral’ to the conflict, but violations continued, and they declared themselves in ‘rupture’ with the Colombian state. This article...

All over the world, rural and minority communities are vulnerable to human rights violations, often due to larger economic interests in their land. This policy and practice note argues that it is important to recognize community initiatives that denounce and resist such risks as acts of autonomous human rights defence. To illustrate this, it looks...