Confronting Violent Peace: When Peace Processes become the Crisis of Armed Conflict

By Richard Georgi

Based on the Article in Security Dialogue (2022): Peace that Antagonizes

Negotiating peace agreements should ideally be a means of ending violence. The political reality in Latin America and many other places around the globe, however, teaches us that political violence and polarization tend to surge after armed fighting comes to an end. The 2016 peace agreement in Colombia promised a different path as it has been applauded for its unique inclusive and comprehensive spirit. The stalled implementation of key reform projects and the systematic killing of community leaders, former combatants, and human rights defenders (HRDs), nevertheless, seem to have cast the same violent shadow over this peace process five years after the ceremonial signing of the agreement.

I aim to understand the violence that emerges when peace seems on the horizon by centring on the voices of HRDs, who risk their lives advocating tirelessly a peace with social justice in Colombia. I contend that their perspectives contribute a novel angle on a conundrum that has informed whole libraries in Peace and Conflict Studies and that is typically approached by two explanations: First, protracted armed conflict transforms society so profoundly that the formal end of armed struggle does very little to overcome entrenched orders of violence. Second, war-to-peace governance deals with exceptional challenges—such as the ‘vacuum’ and re-configuration of power after armed groups demobilize—rendering violence inevitable in the process. Learning from HRDs, I submit, teaches us about the contested nature of peace as a societal imaginary and the crisis nature of peace processes as a third explanatory in-road.

What distinguishes HRDs? The United Nations famously defines HRDs qua their activism as persons, who promote basic rights and freedoms peacefully; yet this definition tells us little about the political movement. I argue that the diverse ‘ecosystem’ of human rights activism in Colombia is historically bound together by the common resolve to tell a different story about violence and armed conflict. HRDs challenge the myths, reproduced by warmongering elites, that violence and all injustice plaguing the country are only due to the existence of the guerrilla, invoking that political, economic, or gender-based violence has been systematic under the welcomed pretext of, and not due to (counter-)insurgency.

From this point of view, the 2016 peace agreement represents a caesura in Colombian history; not only vanished the FARC-EP as an arch-enemy and scapegoat but the country’s leadership also recognized the political nature of armed conflict, its victims on all sides, and societal root causes. Although these changes appear mostly symbolic in nature, betrayed by the absence of meaningful implementation policies, they bear manifest consequences, because they question the hegemonic imaginary of ‘guerrilla terrorism’—(in-)famously installed by former hard-line president Uribe—of what has suddenly become ‘the past’, which formed the ideological bedrock for a war machine enveloping politicians, narcotraffickers, and paramilitaries in powerful assemblages that are commonly known as parapolítica.

However, this symbolic change did not automatically engender peace but a lacuna where the dominant imaginary of history that determines the meaning of the present and the future built thereon, is questioned. A lacuna that an amorphous alliance of political sectors on the right-wing, who have benefitted from the war mood, successfully exploited to regain political power from the (neo-)liberal incumbent of the presidency who had negotiated the peace deal. They re-staged the war discourse in the disguise of an image of the ‘peace of victors’ that mobilizes historical fears about Communism, secularism, or diversity. This imaginary is antagonized by HRDs who forge their unity in the common opposition vis-à-vis the fearmongering that perpetuates the idea of the eternal fight as the basis of governance. Precisely the tensed contestation over imaginaries of peace discharges in massive anti-government protests and violent attacks against activists, which HRDs perceive as tolerated, or actively orchestrated by right-wing elites in power.

The stories of HRDs inspired me to recast post-foundational notions of crisis, inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings in a fascist prison cell, to describe the nature of peace processes: ‘[Peace process as] crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old [imaginaries of conflict that governed society] is dying and the new [imaginaries of peace] cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms [antagonistic conflicts over the future in peace and physical insecurity of activists fighting for their vision] appear’.

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Article details:

Peace that antagonizes: Reading Colombia’s peace process as hegemonic crisis
Richard Georgi
First Published May 24, 2022 Research Article
DOI: 10.1177/09670106221084444
Security Dialogue

About the Author

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Richard Georgi recently received his PhD in Peace & Development from the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg. In his PhD thesis, he investigates the entanglements of hopes and frustrations that shape the experiences of Colombian human rights defenders in-between the formal end of armed conflict with the FARC-EP and the deferred promise of peace. Georgi draws on the canon of deconstructionist, post-foundational philosophy to place the voices of activists in critical conversation with current, polarized research debates in fields such as Human Rights, Conflict Studies, and International Relations. He has previously written about human rights and postcolonial readings of securitization in the case of the Zapatista uprising in Mexico. His research interests concern the philosophy of human rights, activism as forces for good and evil, (post-)conflict entrapments, digital infrastructures, de/post-colonial theories, and feminist methodologies. Besides his scholarship, Georgi has gathered extensive experiences in different (inter-)national activist contexts, which informs both his staunch defence and relentless criticism of human rights.