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The Face of Peace: Pedagogy and Politics among Government Officials in Colombia's Peace Process with the FARC-EP
Abstract
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 of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government department responsible for peace negotiations and for explaining the peace process to society, called ‘peace pedagogy’, plus interviews with government officials, international advisors, activists and FARC ex-combatants, it asks how the Santos government communicated the peace process to Colombian society, and how the culture of government officials shapes their work. Building on anthropology of the state, it calls for studying governments ethnographically, as dynamic ecosystems within the wider state, and draws on peace pedagogy officials’ perspectives about their struggles ‘giving face’ (dar la cara), in representing the government to sceptical audiences, to conceptualise how governments ‘face’ society. It also advances the anthropology of liberalism, by showing how liberal world-views are reproduced through ‘cultural liberalism’, the intertwinement of cultural values with political ideology. After a polarising referendum which narrowly rejected the peace accord signed with the FARC, government officials blamed themselves for being ‘too rational’ and ‘not emotional enough’, in contrast to opponents of the accord whom they perceived as right-wing populists. I pinpoint their belief in an imagined binary between rationality and emotions and explore how it shaped their work, showing that while the Santos government spent great efforts negotiating with the FARC, they failed to dedicate the same efforts to communicating with Colombian society, ultimately undermining the peace process. By analysing how this culturally liberal binary shaped the Santos government’s ‘face of peace’, this thesis offers new light from Colombia onto the crisis of liberalism in the global North.
Citizen participation takes centre stage in Colombia's 2016 peace agreement. Its practical implementation, however, has proven difficult. This case study examines targets and tactics of exclusion in participatory development programmes established under the peace accords. Drawing on qualitative data generated between 2021 and 2022 in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, this article argues that exclusion affects societal (sub‐)groups, organisations and communities as a whole and involves a large array of implicit‐elusive, direct‐explicit and coercive mechanisms. This matters for implementing inclusive peacebuilding more generally.
In 2009, the Colombian Constitutional Court issued ruling Auto 004, declaring 34 indigenous groups as being at risk of extermination due to the internal armed conflict and ordered the Colombian government, led by the Interior Ministry, to protect them. Since then, although the critical situation persists, the government has proven its compliance with the Court´s order through a documentation process. The purpose of this article is to examine the role of documentation in mediating legal protection in a violent context. Based on yearlong participant observation at the Colombian Interior Ministry, the study approaches the production of the government´s documentary response as an artifact. It addresses its formulation and context within the institutional setting, the discussions regarding what to include and what to exclude, and the decisions that shape its content. It highlights how the assembled document enchants, by skillfully combining the aesthetics and technical aspects. It illustrates how numbers that portray compliance are constructed and displayed in the document, while concealing the failure to make the changes that were ordered: a phenomenon termed here as complying incompliantly. The paper´s originality lies in deconstructing the powerful governmental sophism of money invested as compliance with an obligation, through ethnographic attention to the document. Likewise, the analysis is part of the challenge dealt with by studies of the gap between law and reality, by suggesting that the problem lies not in a gap between well-intended law and the violent reality that overflows it but rather in the way this “gap” is filled by complex documenting processes. As such, the paper contributes to the anthropological studies on law, documentation and accountability.
This article was named the runner-up for the 2019 Enloe Award. The committee commented:
This article addresses several provocative questions about the emphasis on “victimhood” in feminist studies of conflict and transitional justice. The author situates her own researcher positionality in the politics of knowledge production about women’s narratives of “victimhood” in Colombia’s transition from violence, reflecting on methodology and theorizing her active role in generating accounts, co-producing and participating in hierarchies, and imposing meaning onto fieldwork contexts. The article offers creative ways to rethink and reimagine the political, discursive, and spatial dimensions of gender, violence, the state, the transitional justice industry, and the politics of victimhood and agency.
ABSTRACT
Feminist researchers are increasingly paying attention to the politics of victimhood during transitions from violence. In this article, I address the dilemmas of researching victimhood when the researcher herself is part of the production of its politics and hierarchies. Based on in-depth fieldwork in Colombia, I examine dilemmas related to (1) directing the research gaze during transitions from war; (2) investigating violence without requiring people to re-narrate harms suffered during armed conflict; (3) engaging with both voluntary and imposed silences; and (4) navigating the complicated tug of loyalties among conflict-affected actors. I argue that ethics and methods are inseparable from each other, from the findings of the research, and from the meaningful study of power and violence. Collectively, these insights contribute to an ongoing interdisciplinary conversation about power and politics in the study of violence.
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