Peace that antagonizes: Reading Colombia’s peace process as hegemonic crisis

Abstract

This article explores how disruptive political conflicts evolve in peace processes by studying Colombian human rights defenders’ discourses about the peace process with the FARC-EP. While post-conflict scholarship has predominantly discussed violence and societal frictions as caused by legacies of war or flawed peace governance, I focus on the confrontations over political imaginaries that are endemic to peace processes. Through the lens of post-foundational discourse theory, I read the peace process as hegemonic crisis. This allows me to unpack the entanglement of political change and conflict, to which my discussions with human rights defenders allude: On the one hand, the peace agreement opened a political moment, in which it seemed possible to leave behind the hitherto hegemonic imaginary of the conflict as terrorism that had protracted the ‘state of war’; the advocacy for peace with social justice, on the other hand, it restaged historical confrontations with elites of the political right as antagonistic conflict over the meaning of peace. My analysis not only challenges the paradigm of war-to-peace transition, but also defines discursive conditions under which disruptive conflicts turn a peace process into an enduring interregnum, where the dawn of the post-conflict epoch is perpetually deferred and activist lives are threatened.

‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971: 276)

Introduction

How do disruptive political conflicts evolve in peace processes? The current Colombian peace process with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP) suffers from an apparent paradox that has tragically marked many peace initiatives in Latin America: On the one hand, the Colombian government of former president Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC-EP made history in 2016 when they declared an end to armed confrontations that had lasted more than five decades. Both parties endorsed the comprehensive scope of the peace accords as a key transformative step towards a new era in which the end of political violence would become Colombian reality. On the other hand, the post-accord period has been eclipsed by political polarization, upheaval and killings, leaving 465 human rights defenders (HRDs) assassinated in the period 2016–2019 (Programa Somos Defensores, 2020). ¹

The surge of violence and disruptive conflicts after armed struggle ends, not just in Colombia but around the globe, has sparked criticism of the conceptualization of peace processes as linear and frictionless transitions (Öjendal et al., 2021). Correspondingly, a growing body of literature on Colombia’s most recent peacebuilding efforts points to the persistence of ‘chronic violence’ (Pearce and Perea, 2019: 248) in the form of militarization (Rodriguez, 2018), social inequality and ‘militaristic neoliberalism’ (Sachseder and Meger, 2020), or war legacies and state abandonment (Holmes and Pavon-Harr, 2019).

I suggest a different, complementary perspective through a study of how HRDs perceive the peace process, brought to light in 50 in-depth interviews carried out over six months of fieldwork. My analysis reveals that HRDs understand disruptive conflict as endemic to the peace process, which they experience as trapped in violent confrontations over what vision of peace shall lead into the ‘post-conflict’ future of Colombia. Based on the accounts of HRDs, I read the peace process as hegemonic crisis, that is, a moment of political conflict where imaginaries of armed conflict are unsettled, and related meanings of peace remain contested. ‘Hegemonic crisis’ offers an alternative interpretative frame to the paradigm of ‘war-to-peace transition’, which, even if implicitly, prevails in policy and scholarship that cast peace processes as continuous passages out of armed conflict towards a perhaps utopian end state of peace (Klem, 2018).

The concept of crisis – as discussed in post-foundational discourse theory (PDT) ² –provides a fruitful analytical vocabulary to unpack the entanglement of political change and conflict that I found apparent in the descriptions of the peace process. According to HRDs, the demobilization of the FARC-EP and the transformative agenda of the peace accords offered a political moment, when it seemed possible to change the hegemonic imaginary of conflict as terrorism, which former president Álvaro Uribe had inscribed into the laws and institutions that had governed a protracted state of warfare in the name of defending society (Echavarría, 2010). However, HRDs recall that their activism for peace with social justice has faced the counter-mobilization of the political right, which restaged historical conflicts under the auspices of peace. The reflections of HRDs indicate that ‘peace’ itself has become a contested, undecided or, as I shall call it, ‘floating signifier’, the meaning of which remains uncertain in the competition of rival discursive campaigns.

I apply Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxist interpretation of crisis in terms of dislocation, antagonism and hegemony to flesh out HRDs’ discourses on the political fault lines that surface in and threaten to erode the peace process in Colombia. Studying these fault lines is vital if we are to arrive at a greater understanding of how frictions in peace processes develop into disruptive and violent conflicts. Methodologically, my analysis does not take HRDs’ voices as sources of data on violence, but as interpretations of political reality in their own right. While the anti-peace agreement discourses of the political right have been amply studied elsewhere (e.g. Cardona Zuleta and Londoño Álvarez, 2018; Gomez-Suarez, 2016), I reconstruct the views of HRDs, who are not only among the prime targets of post-accord violence, but also represent a historically significant oppositional movement for peace with social justice (Tate, 2007).

My reading of the Colombian peace process as crisis theorizes the political moment, where ‘the old [imaginaries of conflict] is dying’, ‘the new [imaginaries of peace] cannot be born’, and violence appears as a ‘morbid symptom’ in this ‘interregnum’ of insecurity (Gramsci, 1971: 276). The ‘interregnum of insecurity’ alludes to undecided political conflicts over the desired transition out of armed conflict, which lock the peace process in a limbo of violent uncertainty, where the return to status quo ante pax seems as unattainable as the dawn of the post-conflict period.

Ultimately, this framing serves to unpack how the struggle over hegemonic imaginaries of social reality informs disruptive conflicts in peace processes. It thus offers an alternative in-road for post-conflict scholarship that explains violence and polarization predominantly through legacies of war or flaws in peace governance (Suhrke and Berdal, 2012). In particular, the focus on the crisis of political meaning speaks to recent debates about the societal frictions triggered by peacebuilding (Björkdahl et al., 2016), the rise of political spoilers (Reiter, 2015; Stedman, 2008) and the insecurities that develop from the reconfiguration of identities and sociopolitical relations after armed fighting ends (Rumelili and Çelik, 2017). I shed light on the discursive conditions under which confrontations with elites over the settlement of armed conflict emerge (see Hirblinger et al., 2019).

The article accordingly proceeds as follows: First, I contextualize the current peace process in the historical contentions around conflict and peace in Colombia. Then, I ground my theoretical understanding of crisis in PDT and reflect on my empirical methods. Finally, I read the peace process as hegemonic crisis in the discourses of HRDs by paying attention to notions of dislocation, antagonism and hegemony in the interview transcripts.

Peace and conflict in Colombia: Contesting conflict imaginaries

The commonly held claim that the 2016 peace agreement heralds the end of the longest-running conflict in the Western hemisphere originates from the grand narrative that the Colombian conflict is in essence a military struggle between the FARC-EP and the Colombian state (Díaz Pabón, 2018: 15). However, the signatories to the 2016 peace agreement themselves transgressed this narrative of dyadic fighting, when they acknowledged the societal conditions of violence and conflict.

The Historical Commission on the Conflict and its Victims (CHVC) – mandated by both parties of the peace negotiations – published 12 different accounts of the origin, character, actors, conditions and effects of conflict in Colombia. These historiographic studies illustrate contemporary controversies that even leave unresolved the matter of basic terminology to qualify ‘conflict’; yet these studies concur in describing the struggle by the biggest guerrilla group, the FARC-EP, not as an isolated phenomenon, but as deeply embedded in partisan violence, state atrocities and socio-economic suffering that ravaged 20th-century Colombia (CHCV, 2015). Conflict scholars hold the concentration of land and the neoliberal development paradigm accountable for the mass displacement of millions of rural inhabitants, the growth of insurgencies and the militarization of resource-rich Colombian territories (see Hristov, 2014; Richani, 2013). Other studies emphasize oppressive, authoritarian traits in Colombian state formation and elites’ responsibilities for political violence resulting from paramilitarism and the drug economy (see, for example, López Hernández and Ávila Martínez, 2010). Research on spiking violence since the 1980s describes mass atrocities, which are closely related to the rise of paramilitary groups, in the larger narrative of what, for example, Gill (2016) has called a ‘dirty war’. ‘Dirty war’ denotes unbounded violence, perpetrated under the pretext of counterinsurgency, that has targeted and largely dismantled political opposition and popular movements (Gill, 2016: 18–19, 28).

Although many scholars and activists criticize the narrative of dyadic fighting for failing to grasp the complex relations between violence and conflict in more than seven decades of Colombian history, adequate narratives of conflict and the types of violence that their scripts would account for are neither self-evident nor consensual. Correspondingly, I suggest studying conflict not as something that is just ‘out there’, an extra-discursive phenomenon, but by way of its discursive representation as ‘conflict order’. Conceptually, the notion ‘conflict order’ captures contentious and fluid, yet socially efficacious imaginaries of conflict that serve as horizons of intelligibility for people to make sense of violence. I apply ‘conflict order’ to describe how hegemonic political discourses account for multifarious forms of violence as embedded in a larger sociopolitical script. Moreover, the term ‘order’ alludes to the ordering function of these conflict imaginaries that evoke social identities, practices and relations in protracted violence. Whereas many conflict scholars research systems of violence in Colombia for their pervasiveness and stability (e.g. Hristov, 2014; Richani, 2013), I theorize conflict order below with a discursive, post-foundational twist. PDT provides me with the analytical tools to focus on a central tension in peace processes that characterizes modern Colombian history: how the imaginary of conflict – and the concomitant vision of building peace – has itself become the subject of political conflict and hegemonic reinterpretation.

Let me briefly exemplify this tension in renditions of past and present peace initiatives that illustrate how imaginaries of conflict and the desire for peace are entangled. As Díaz Pabón (2018: 21) notes, the peace process that started in the early 1980s with the country’s multiple guerrilla groups marked a shift in how the government was addressing conflict in Colombia: from the military response under the previous ‘security statute’ to the first formal peace negotiations, which recognized the political dimension of the conflict. The peace process not only gave birth to the new Patriotic Union party (UP), which represented the political agenda of insurgents and the oppositional left in political institutions, but also instantiated the new constitution of 1991, a hallmark for HRD to claim basic rights, political participation and multiparty democracy. The novel vision of peace that attends to political exclusion and grievances for ending conflict faced resistance by those actors for whom violence has been profitable – chiefly drug traffickers and paramilitaries, as well as certain sectors of political elites and the military, who orchestrated atrocities against the UP and stifled democratic overture (López Hernández and Ávila Martínez, 2010).

After the subsequent decade of escalating violence, President Pastrana Arango was elected in 1998 with a strong mandate to achieve peace with the two biggest guerrilla groups, who had abandoned the previous process. The peace negotiations with the FARC-EP started in 1999 and ultimately failed in 2002, as many observers remark, due to ongoing violence, lack of trust and incompatible agendas (Díaz Pabón, 2018: 25). The frustrations with these peace negotiations fed the successful presidential campaign of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who offered a different vision of conflict and peace. Although Uribe moderated the peace initiative with paramilitaries, his ‘Democratic Security’ policy represented in the eyes of Díaz Pabón an all-out war discourse that rebranded violence – in the spirit of post-9/11 – as terrorism (Díaz Pabón, 2018: 27; Torres del Río, 2010: 354). His government propagated a hegemonic, nationalist and militaristic discourse of a nation under siege by the FARC-EP, who as terrorists were deprived of any political recognition (Echavarría, 2010). The conflict order also subjected HRDs to a fierce ‘self–other’ antagonism, ostracizing them as guerrilla supporters and threats to the nation (López de la Roche, 2014). Uribe expected the imaginary of heroic fight against terrorists, which only knows military victory, to continue, when his Minister of Defence, Juan Manuel Santos, was elected as president in 2010 (Díaz Pabón, 2018: 28).

Yet, Santos undermined the imaginary of terrorism through his official recognition of armed conflict and its victims in the 2011 Victims and Land Restitution Law, which reopened the door for peace negotiations with the FARC-EP as a political adversary. Uribe, on his part, mobilized all those sectors of the political right-wing under the banner of his Democratic Centre party (CD) that rejected the government’s change of course (Gomez-Suarez, 2017: 467–469). The CD, critics claim, orchestrated the public campaign against the peace process based on misinformation, canny simplifications and fear, which polarized against the imaginary of political conflict and the vision for peace with sociopolitical reforms that were eventually enshrined in the peace agreement (Cardona Zuleta and Londoño Álvarez, 2018). Thus, Gomez-Suarez has identified several scripts in the campaign that portray the peace process as a threat to the nation by invoking a Communist reorganization of society, the spectre of ‘castrochavismo’ – impunity for guerrilla violence and even ‘gender ideology’, which paints the unique gender focus of the peace agreement as a danger to the traditional societal order (Gomez-Suarez, 2016: 39–67). The anti-peace coalition of the political right succeeded in the peace referendum of 2016 and prepared for the 2018 presidential elections, which the CD candidate, Ivan Duque, won by a small margin. Although Duque changed the radical rhetoric from one of ‘tearing to shreds’ the peace accords towards making ‘modifications’ (Amat, 2018), his presidency rendered the future of the peace deal uncertain (ICG, 2018).

My analysis starts from the contestations around intertwined imaginaries of conflict and peace in the post-accord period. My discursive conceptualization of crisis captures how, in the view of HRDs, the promise for political change in the 2016 peace agreement has eventually rehashed historical conflicts with the political right under Uribe, this time over a future in peace.

Peace process as crisis: A post-foundational reappraisal

On a conceptual level, several contributions have reclaimed crisis in post-structuralist terms to discuss for instance the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ (Croft, 2006). Whilst much literature in critical security studies tends to conceive of crisis as a certain type of discourse on emergency, risk and securitization, current debates in PDT have proposed a different understanding. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s concept of dislocation, PDT scholars have argued for conceiving a crisis as a structural feature of any discourse, which is essential to explain why even hegemonic and socially anchored discursive orders always remain susceptible to change in political moments (e.g. Henderson, 2018; Nabers, 2015; 2019).

I harness debates in PDT to elaborate on how HRDs experience the peace process as a conflictual, political moment ‘in between’. Laclau reinterprets Gramsci’s concept of ‘organic crisis’ as hegemonic crisis of representation, ‘characterized as those [periods] in which the basic hegemonic articulations weaken and an increasing number of social elements assume the character of floating signifiers’ (Laclau, 1990: 28). In analysing the discourses of HRDs through this lens, I argue that the meaning of peace itself becomes unstable, indeterminate and ultimately suspended in competing political coalitions that depart from different imaginaries of conflict (see Laclau, 1990: 136; 2005: 132). In what follows, I unpack and deepen this proposition by exploring in turn the concepts of dislocation, antagonism and hegemony. Scholarly argument has yielded different, even conflicting theorizations of these key concepts in PDT (Marchart, 2018: 24); the following discussion foregrounds how I comprehend these concepts as a complementary vocabulary for analysing how disruptive conflict and change are entangled in HRDs’ descriptions of the peace process.

Dislocation and dislocatory event

The notion of dislocation denotes essentially the ontological condition that discourses – relational systems of signifiers that constitute meaning (Laclau, 2005: 68) – only come into being through negative limits of exclusion (Marchart, 2007: 153). The resulting, ‘constitutive outside’ ensures that no discourse is ever fully closed nor can it represent a stable and complete society (Laclau, 1990: 16–17). This implies that discourses only partially and temporarily structure the social, which Laclau theorizes as without any firm foundations and thus inherently instable and crisis-ridden (Laclau, 1990: 40; see also Nabers, 2015: 104; 2019: 270). On the other hand, the incomplete, dislocated nature of discourses enshrines the very freedom of political articulations to fixate meaning around new discursive ‘nodal points’ and, therefore, to induce political change (Laclau, 1990: 43–44; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 112–113). Without transcendental anchorage, particular discourses only momentarily represent what Laclau calls ‘social order’, that is, the institutionalized, or ‘sedimented’, symbolic imaginary that offers a horizon of intelligibility on which social subjects inscribe their identities and relations (Laclau, 1990: 34, 64; Marchart, 2007: 138–139; 2018: 90 f; Nabers, 2015: 109, 122, 153).

Even socially anchored symbolic orders, however, cannot escape their dislocated nature. Moments of dislocation reveal the contingency of social reality, when subjects experience the incompleteness of discourses as a lack that, if not addressed, uproots social identities and meaning (Henderson, 2018: 54; Laclau, 1990: 211; Marchart, 2018: 58). In the history of the Colombian conflict, for example, we can understand peace initiatives as moments of dislocation, when negotiations with the guerrillas put into question their political exclusion, render an alternative society in peace feasible, and reveal the contingency of the dominant conflict order. Dislocatory events disclose contingency, because discourses fail to ‘explain’ or integrate them into their horizon of intelligibility, leaving subjects undecided about the meaning of these events and the ways to go about them. Dislocatory events are not extra-discursive; they rather lay bare exclusions and ambiguities within social orders, offering an opportunity for oppositional forces to articulate alternatives where there is partial disruption (Laclau, 1990: 44; Marchart, 2007: 158–159).

I apply the concept of ‘dislocatory event’ to grasp the significance of the 2016 peace agreement for HRDs: Even though the agreement has in their eyes been betrayed by the absence of comprehensive implementation, the demobilization of the FARC-EP and the promise of structural reforms reveals the limitations and contingency of what they recognise as Uribe’s terrorism discourse. Yet, structural dislocation, and hence some degree of instability and crisis, are a constant in the social space and cannot be observed directly (Nabers, 2019: 265); this suggests, and my interlocutors insinuate likewise, that it is ultimately the manifestation of dislocatory events in political conflicts that triggers hegemonic crises.

Antagonism

Antagonism can refer to the source of and response to dislocation, by which subjects attempt to master the experience of discursive lack and uncertainty through the construction of a threatening Other that stabilizes common identity (Marchart, 2018: 24 f.). Antagonization implies that societal forces erect political frontiers in the contest to redefine precarious social truths and order (Marchart, 2007: 140 f.). Stigmatization campaigns against demobilized guerrillas and the political left in Colombian peace processes can therefore be conceived of as antagonization that fuelled past political atrocities such as against the UP. The public antagonism with an alleged leftist threat served those forces in the military, political elites and armed actors, who felt historically insecure about the repercussions of successful peace negotiations, because they owed their power to violence that the imaginary of armed conflict had sanctioned (Torres del Río, 2010: 279, 337–338).

The rise of antagonism denotes the ‘moment of the political’, in which discourses openly dispute, and thus reveal the political origin of contingent social reality (Marchart, 2018: 92–93; see also Laclau, 1990: 34–35). This begs the question: how can we study antagonistic logics in discourses? Laclau contends that the construction of antagonistic frontiers must be understood in terms of the prevalence of the logic of equivalence within a specific discourse (Laclau, 2005: 78). This means that political articulations emphasize not so much the differences between, for example, activist demands for land restitution and gender equality, but their equivalence, or mutual identification, in relation to the common rejection of something that is threatening, such as systematic political violence under the pretext of counterinsurgency (see Laclau, 2005: 70). Following Laclau, the analysis of antagonism concerns the predominant articulations of a particular demand as the relatively universal representation of various other demands in a chain of equivalence. The antagonistic frontier hence unfolds in the discursive naming of a universalized demand, which reduces its particular content to the minimum of an ‘empty signifier’, whose sole function is to reference an excluded outside (Laclau, 2005: 98 f., 105; 1996: 36 f.).

The concept of ‘empty signifier’ allows me to discuss how HRDs pitch their vision of peace with social justice as a political frontier against the perceived threat of a ‘peace of victors’, which HRDs assume to be the vision of the political right. I trace the roots of this antagonistic reference in the political discourses of HRDs, which have forged common mobilization against conflict imaginaries that legitimize all kind of political violence as an inevitable part of counterinsurgency.

Hegemony

How do ‘dislocatory event’ and ‘antagonism’ inform my reading of the peace process as hegemonic crisis of representation? The concept of dislocation helps me to come to terms with the importance that my interlocutors attach to the peace accords’ promise of a new historical chapter, which questioned the war rhetoric against the FARC-EP and the paradigm of counterinsurgency that had governed Colombia. Antagonism alludes to how HRDs seek to seize this promise by advocating their political alternative for peace very much in opposition to their interpretation of the vision propagated by the political right. Through ‘dislocatory event’ and ‘antagonism’, I reconstruct the descriptions – as they emerge in the interviews – of undecided, disruptive political conflicts about peace in terms of hegemonic crisis.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have developed Gramsci’s theory of hegemony in the parlance of discourse theory as the political representation of social reality by a particular discourse (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 127, 134 f.; also Laclau, 1990: 66). Hegemonic discourses not only dominantly define the symbolic order of intelligibility and hence the shared reality of social subjects; they propel social subjects into altering the institutions and practices that anchor symbolic reality in the social world (Laclau, 2005: 106, 115; Nabers, 2015: 127). Dislocation, which keeps discourses from becoming fully closed and universal, renders hegemony an ever-lingering discursive struggle, in which different social forces compete to take up the impossible task of filling the void experienced through dislocatory events, of ordering meaning and social identities, and thus of solving the crisis of partial social disorder (Laclau, 1990: 63 f., 212). Consequently, Laclau maintains that the analysis of hegemonic struggles cannot end with the articulation of ‘empty signifiers’ and the potentially hegemonic discourses they inaugurate; it must also concern how the very contestation of social meaning deepens ambiguity through so-called ‘floating signifiers’, and thus plunges social order into hegemonic crisis. For him, the ‘empty’ and the ‘floating’ dimensions of hegemonic struggles are analytically distinct, yet often relate to the same signifier, with the former referring to the representation of antagonistic frontiers and the latter indicating the displacements of frontiers, if political competitors begin to define the same key signifier in different discourses. Contestations over the same signifier render its meaning indeterminate and (re)define hitherto existing frontiers in hegemonic struggles (Laclau, 2005: 131–133). The floating dimension becomes most visible in crises of hegemonic representation, when different discursive coalitions engage in open and undecided conflicts about the meaning of dislocated social reality (Laclau, 2005: 132).

I argue that HRDs’ discourses are indicative of hegemonic crisis because they articulate peace as ‘empty signifier’ for common political mobilization, but acknowledge its ‘floating dimension’ due to competition with the political right, leaving the meaning of peace ambiguous and undecided. The symptoms of hegemonic crisis are experienced by my interlocutors as an interregnum of insecurity in a twofold sense: uncertainty about a hegemonic vision of peace, and open antagonism that further fuels existing patterns of violence and threats against HRDs.

Setting the scene for HRDs: Studying discourse in interviews

My empirical analysis focuses on the discourses of HRDs as key activist figures, whose political interpretations of the current peace process are yet little studied. I take the view of HRDs as the main point of departure – which I complement with scholarly insights – for reconstructing the peace process and the antagonistic position of the anti-peace agreement coalition of the political right under Uribe, whose self-representation and proper political discourses diverge from the descriptions of my interlocutors (see Gomez-Suarez, 2016). Studying exclusively the voices of HRDs, as one side of political struggles, does not aim to give a comprehensive explanation of the peace process; rather it harbours important insights into how disruptive conflicts evolve, based on first-hand experiences of those who have endured violence and yet formed a major opposition against the claim of Uribe and his followers to the hegemonic interpretation of conflict and peace.

The infrastructure of nongovernmental organizations that originate in and reproduce human rights activist discourses in Colombia has been my entry for identifying interview partners. In the process of contacting interlocutors who define themselves as HRDs, I was careful to include organizations with different thematic emphases – e.g. land, LGBTIQ+ or victims’ rights – and regional scope, accounting for major national associations in Bogotá and smaller organizations in the conflict-affected regions of the Middle Magdalena Valley, Valle del Cauca on the Pacific coast or Catatumbo in the Venezuelan borderland.

Interviews are a key component of an expanding method toolbox in post-foundational discourse analysis that allow researchers to evoke articulations that tend not to be included in published documents (Marttila, 2016: 177 f.). I conducted 50 interviews during two research periods: the first post-accord presidential campaigns in 2018, which politicized different agendas for peace; and after one year under the right-wing government of Ivan Duque in 2019, when nascent anti-government protests targeted the deficient implementation of the peace accords. Over sometimes several hours, I ‘co-constructed’ the interviews with my interlocutors through fixed, theoretically informed questions and open-ended dialogue. I take ‘co-construction’ from feminist literature that perceives of interviews not as a form of extracting data, but as often disquieting encounters in which researcher and interlocutor inevitably become co-authors of the produced text (see Ackerly, Stern and True, 2006).

My discursive approach does not consider individual interview narratives by themselves, nor does it focus on the diverging experiences of my interlocutors. Instead, I accentuate the commonalities and coherences across the interviews that lend visibility to an underlying human rights activist discourse, that is, a common horizon of possibility for my interlocutors to articulate their subjectivity as HRDs. Therefore, I have unpacked the triad of dislocation, antagonism and hegemony in discourse-analytical terms as ‘contingency’, ‘lack’, as well as ‘empty’ and ‘floating’ signifiers. These terms served as categories according to which I have read key passages of the interview transcripts on the work of HRDs, the significance of the peace agreement and visions of peace in Colombia. As I will now discuss, these analytical categories expose discursive relations that allow me to assemble dispersed activist accounts into a common reading of the peace process as crisis.

On the entanglement of change and conflict: The peace process in the discourses of human rights defenders

Showcasing direct interview quotes, I unfold my reading of the peace process as crisis in three steps: First, I discuss how HRDs speak a (counter-)discourse that has rendered contingent hegemonic imaginaries of armed conflict; second, I argue that the peace agreement gains significance for HRDs as a dislocatory event, which has unsettled Uribe’s terrorism imaginary, triggered a discursive lack and provided the opportunity to advocate change towards social justice; finally, I show in my interlocutors’ descriptions of the ‘empty’ and ‘floating’ dimension of peace how rising antagonism has entrapped post-accord Colombia in disruptive political conflict.

The political discourse of HRDs

Luis ³ – a lawyer at one of the first Colombian human rights organizations, the Political Prisoners Solidarity Committee (CSPP) – explains to me a differentiation of violence that is foundational to understanding human rights discourses in Colombia:

“We have historically talked about sociopolitical violence, that is to say, the serious violations of human rights in Colombia, all of which are not [exclusively] explained by the armed conflict in Colombia [. . .] We have had an armed conflict with human rights violations [. . .], but, at the same time, we have had violence [originating from] the head of the state that is directed at certain political and social sectors.”

(Interview 1)

My interlocutors allude to how the imaginary of armed conflict with left-wing insurgents historically covered up this political violence under a smokescreen of counterinsurgency. Illustratively, Rodrigo from the internationally renowned José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective (CAJAR) asserts:

“We cannot say at the end of 50 years that ‘everything that happened in this country was because there was an internal armed conflict’, because that does not correspond to the historical truth. There were programmes [. . .] for extermination [. . .] from the Colombian state [. . .] to destroy organizations [in order] to vacate regions that would later be invaded by transnational companies and mega-projects.”

(Interview 2)

Reflecting on decades of experience as a human rights lawyer, Rodrigo continued to give me the example that military officials have harnessed the imaginary of a ‘nation threatened by terrorism’ to stigmatize lawsuits against state-sponsored atrocities as a form of ‘lawfare’, or guerrilla strategy to betray military victories and incarcerate the ‘heroes’ of the security forces. Alejandro, who built his reputation as an activist and writer through years of participating in peace and human rights initiatives, similarly ponders the effects of the excessive use of war rhetoric under Uribe:

“Well, [what has been] achieved, and this was very well done by Uribe, is the construct that the big problem in Colombia is the FARC, and that it is the only problem. And I think that [. . .] the FARC in arms was a problem [. . .] but here there is a discursive political construction, where everything is the FARC, and they are the only ones responsible. Here there is no responsibility of state agents, [. . .] no responsibility of politicians, [. . .] no responsibility of businessmen.”

(Interview 3)

These testimonies resonate with current studies that discuss the rise of human rights discourses as a response to intensifying violence in the 1980s, which systematically targeted leftist popular movements and oppositional activism (Gill, 2016; Tate, 2007). Activists began to establish the human rights discourse as a common surface of inscription for all those who have demanded justice for political violence since the ‘dirty war’ but who have equally been denied a voice in the hegemonic conflict order. The following narrative of Inez, a leader of the Campesino Association of the Cimitarra Valley (ACVC), sheds light on how human rights afforded a political counter-discourse to make claims, forge solidarity and reinstate subjectivity:

“We were peasants who knew that we were living on these beautiful lands [. . .] and from one moment to the next that happiness [was] truncated without [our] knowing why, but in the midst [. . .] of that persecution, the peasants prepared themselves [. . .] and we began to learn about defending the rights of civil society [. . .] [now] we believe that as an association we are strong, we feel accompanied [. . .] [The basics of rural life] is a [human] right, which we have had to understand [. . .] And from that knowledge we began to educate ourselves, to grow, to make ourselves respected as campesinos, to raise voices so that they would recognize us and understand that [we are] protected by national and international law and respect for humanity.”

(Interview 4)

The ascent of human rights to the lingua franca of activism supplanted, as Gill (2016: 189 f.) critically remarks, leftist and class-based ideologies with a rather vague vision of social justice, which activists have generalized – and thus reduced of any particular meaning – so that it can couch very different demands and become a general signifier for all those who advocate social transformation. Rodrigo’s answer to my question on the role of human rights for his work illustrates the centrality of the demand of transformation for human rights activism:

“We consider that this country needs a deep social transformation in every sense, in the political [. . .], but also in the economic, in the social, in everything that has to do [. . .] with the defence of human rights, which is the foundation to achieve all those reforms and changes that the country requires. [. . .] The fulfilment and guarantee of human rights must be directed towards a superior goal which must be the political and economic transformation of the country.”

(Interview 2)

My interviewees do not define ‘the HRD’ as a specific vocation, but a political subjectivity: an open-ended and elusive frame of identification for those activists who commit themselves to transforming violent social reality in Colombia. This positioning for societal transformation, without narrowing transformation to a particular (legal) demand, shines through in how Victoria, an activist from the Corporación Claretiana Norma Pérez Bello (CCNPB), defines HRDs:

“all that set of beings who give their lives to defend the lives of others, to think about collective goods, to walk the territories in advocating for another country, in recognizing those injustices that exist anywhere in Colombia and in making use of the demand for human rights to transform things.”

(Interview 5)

‘Defending rights’ alludes to the common struggle as a persecuted political underdog against a contingent conflict order, in which the imaginary of armed conflict has served elites to rewrite violence as politically, morally or legally admissible.

The peace agreement as dislocatory event

Peace negotiations have historically been a demand of HRDs, not as an end, but as a means to achieving wider transformations for social justice. In outlining her hopes for post-accord Colombia, Irma – director of a nationwide-operating human rights NGO – puts this as follows:

“I believe that [. . .] the human rights movement was almost born with the slogan [negotiated peace], because we know that only through a negotiated solution progress can be made in overcoming conflicts, not just armed conflicts; because in Colombia the armed conflict is also a consequence of social, political and economic conflicts that have not been resolved. [. . .]. And in three years I think [the Truth Commission] will make a great advance, but there will surely still be a need to complement [. . .] the narrative of what has been happening in Colombia over [the last] 60 years.”

(Interview 6)

Her hope for addressing underlying conflicts resonates with the feminist perspective of the human rights lawyer Carolina from Corporación Humanas:

“It was very important that there be [peace] negotiations because [. . .] the discourse [was]: ‘Why is there no education? Because there is war’. [. . .] All the budget was directed towards war. For feminists and women’s organizations, [. . .] the majority of violence was not committed during the armed conflict [. . .] but for this there has been no institutional response, because they have been [busy] solving the armed conflict.”

(Interview 7)

Irma and Carolina hint at a revealing effect of the 2016 peace agreement – that it has exposed, in their view, that the armed fight of the FARC-EP cannot be blamed for all types of violence in Colombia. As Ana from Sisma Mujer concisely puts it, the peace deal represents the condition of possibility for recognizing and addressing the violence that the war drums had drowned out:

“Only now we know, only now we make it visible [. . .] Sociopolitical violence in certain territories has always been very high. The noise of war did not let you hear these things.”

(Interview 8)

I view these quotes as part of a larger tendency in the interviews to represent the peace agreement as a dislocatory event, which lays bare the limitations of Uribe’s war-on-terror discourse in explaining the prevalence of violence. When Irma and Carolina formulate the need of post-accord Colombia to complement ‘the narrative of what is happening’ and to find new ‘institutional responses’, they point to the visible failure of conceiving violence solely in terms of armed confrontation and the lack of different political solutions.

Martín, who observed multiple peace processes during his activist life as part of the Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission (CIJP), likewise suggests understanding the peace agreement not as a new beginning, but as the political opening of a conflict order governed by fear and authoritarian means under the imaginary of perpetuated war against terrorism:

“There is a culture that sometimes appears to be one of submission, but here there has been a lot of repression; repression generates fear and fears have been transferred from generation to generation. And fear also means forgetfulness, and that forgetfulness leads to negative repetitions. So, here an authoritarian order has been constituted simulating democracy. [. . .] That we had a guy like Juan Manuel Santos meant a [political] opening by someone who was trying [. . .] to solve a conflict for economic interests, for a group of families in Colombia and also for the [international audience].”

(Interview 9)

Martín resorts to the common motif among my interlocutors that the peace negotiations did not ensue from a broad hegemonic resolve to leave the imaginary of conflict behind, but rather from a discord within the power bloc of traditional parties and rich families after the end of Uribe’s reign. As an example, Nelson, from the Regional Association of Victims of State Crimes in the Middle Magdalena Valley (ASORVIMM), sees Santos as representative of the financial oligarchy, who had, in Nelson’s view, become interested in ending war to enlarge neoliberal rule throughout the guerrilla-held territories. For him, this explains why Santos abandoned the all-out-war politics of Uribe, who Nelson perceives rather as being at the service of the land-holding elite that has benefited from mass displacements through militarization (Interview 10).

When my discussion with Martín broached the immediate political effects of the demobilization of the FARC-EP, he underscored a new public awareness:

“There is a new type of awareness in Colombians. If the FARC in arms still existed, it would be difficult to achieve this level of awareness that the problem of the country is not the armed uprising, but [. . .] problems of injustice and social inequality [. . .] for which the political class and very powerful sectors of the economy in Colombia are responsible. And we believe that this is coming to light, [but it would not] if we had a FARC in arms.”

(Interview 9)

‘Awareness’ and ‘coming to light’ again relate to what my interlocutors perceive as the limits and contingency of Uribe’s discourses, whose hegemonic grip on interpreting the past and governing the future had already been unsettled before the negotiations started, as Luis reminded me:

“It was not until the Victims’ Law in 2011 that we recognized [. . .] [the] internal armed conflict in Colombia, while the previous administration [under] Álvaro Uribe Vélez [said] that it was a terrorist threat, therefore there could be no attention [paid] to victims. When you start to recognize the existence of an internal armed conflict [. . .] [this] leads to what we have now ultimately as the peace agreement.”

(Interview 1)

As the talks between the Santos government and the FARC-EP became public in 2012, HRDs mobilized people throughout the country to put their demands for social justice qua societal transformation on the agenda (CINEP, 2016). Whereas the dislocatory character of the peace agreement arguably originated from the (for many) surprising commitments of the government and former guerrillas to negotiate, the societal response of HRDs translated dislocation into a political moment in Colombia, which Juan from the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ) experienced as follows:

“I feel that [the promise of structural transformation] is what has generated the social mobilizations [. . .] concerning the implementation and defence of the accords. It is motivating to see that people are taking to the streets [. . .]; it is motivating to see that people on social media are concerned about the peace agreement. I feel that there is still a lot of misinformation regarding the agreement, but it is an issue that is under debate, in the public and social agenda.”

(Interview 11)

Yet, the success of the ‘no’ vote in the referendum crushed the hopes of HRDs for a common push towards a post-conflict epoch. My interlocutors remembered the unexpected public rejection of the peace accords not so much as a step back to war, since the FARC-EP was already demobilizing and the final, ratified version of the peace agreement did not change the recognition of victims nor the promise for deep-rooted political change enshrined in the accords. Instead, the referendum gained significance for HRDs as the advent of conflict over the meaning of peace with a discursive coalition orchestrated by Uribe’s CD, who felt betrayed by Santos’s peace deal (see Gomez-Suarez, 2016).

Antagonization of peace

The conflict over the meaning of peace notably came forth during the campaigns of the 2016 referendum. Young activist Julia of the Popular Women’s Organization (OFP), who participated in the pro-peace rallies in Barrancabermeja, recounted her impressions of the campaign season:

“[The] very strong effect of that was the polarization in the whole country [. . .] This polarization is still felt in every political discussion, or political decision [. . .]. For example, in the presidential elections of [. . .] 2018, the theme returned and continued to be a theme of a government that wants to end the peace accords.”

(Interview 12)

Julia expressed to me her astonishment about the politicization of the question of peace that was triggered by the anti-agreement campaign, whose brute force she had not anticipated. The campaign mobilized uncertainty and fear, specifically targeting the transformative aspiration of the peace accords, such as political inclusion, rural reform or gender-sensitive policies (Gomez-Suarez, 2017). This has restaged historical political confrontations about the imaginary of conflict – and the violence that it renders visible and obscure – in a new theatre of battle: the post-accord theatre of peacebuilding. In anticipation of the referendum, the political analyst José Gutiérrez Dantón (2016) contextualized the vote for peace in a history of resistance and struggle to transform the roots of political violence:

‘Support for the “yes” vote in the plebiscite should not obviate the fact that this is neither the end of the process nor the beginning of the construction of a new society, but rather one more step in a long history of resistance, on the long road to the formation of a popular bloc capable of imposing on the oligarchic sectors an alternative, radically democratic, egalitarian, libertarian model.’

We can study the looming antagonization of peace in post-accord Colombia from within the discourses of HRDs. When I asked Irma about the enemies of peace, her answer encapsulated what many HRDs have in mind, when they self-evidently speak of the ‘political right’ or ‘ultra-right’:

“In Colombia there are sectors linked to the right, the ultra-right that have become richer through the war [. . .] And they are sectors that have been attacking any peace initiative [. . .] parties [. . .] or social sectors that resist the transformations [. . .] that must be made in order to build [. . .] social justice and environmental justice.”

(Interview 6)

HRDs refer to the political (ultra-)right metonymically as Uribismo, not just because Uribe still enjoys enormous political influence and his presidency beefed up the spoils of war, but also because of his quasi-mythical status in Colombia’s extreme right (see Echavarría, 2010), which for my interlocutors symbolizes the reverse Other of their own altruistic identity. Luis’s quote below illustratively casts Uribismo as enemy, or embodiment of antagonism, which haunts HRDs’ discourses as the blockade to the full realization of desired societal transformation:

“What characterizes [Uribismo], in general, is an agenda [. . .] that contradicts rights. An agenda of regression from the victories that we, the defenders of human rights [. . .], have achieved.”

(Interview 1)

The concept of antagonism is helpful in accentuating the important nuance in the discourse of HRDs that relates disruptive conflict not to an actual ideological divide of the Colombian people but the sinister and nefarious divide-and-conquer strategy of right-wing elites, which, in their view, threatens social justice. We can understand this nuance in Rodrigo’s evaluation of the political landscape in Colombia:

“I believe that more than a polarization, there is an offensive of the economic and political power of this country against the part of society that calls for change. And that offensive is made through massacre, murder, dispossession, that is, in the same way as before, but also through stigmatisation; and then [people] ask whether society is polarized; [they should be asking] who is responsible for this polarization. Those who are demanding changes or those who are describing those changes as enemy actions or actions against the state [against those] who continue to do everything to put people in jail for defending ideas, for committing themselves to the defence of human rights.”

(Interview 2)

The election of Ivan Duque as first post-accord president inscribed the antagonism about peace in the relationship between government and opposition. Duque translated key slogans of the anti-agreement campaign, such as the criticism of alleged impunity, into his government’s vision of ‘peace with legality’ (Duque, 2018; see also Amat, 2018). My interview partners denounce Duque’s programme as a continuation of Uribe’s discourses that seeks to restore the conflict order as a mere farce of peace. Luis, for example, criticizes the use of ‘legality’ and ‘impunity’ as highly cynical in a discourse of the political right that, in his perception, advocates the punishment of former guerrillas as if they are a defeated enemy, yet absolves the crimes by, or with the tolerance of the military and state authorities (Interview 1). The governments’ vision of peace is described to me as the incompatible opposite of the activism of HRDs, creating as Juan told me

“an abysmal difference. I believe that nobody in this country would dare to say that they don’t want peace, but deep down [the right] does not want it. [. . .] What serves them is war, because war generates terror and the terror moves their political agenda [. . .] [They want a] peace of the victors, in which the state they seized is reaffirmed as sovereign, and the insurgents [. . .] have to adapt to the rules that are already pre-established [. . .] but where there is no place for social transformations.”

(Interview 11)

He contrasted this ‘peace of victors’ with the HRDs’ discourse on ‘peace with social justice’, that is:

“a multiplicity of forms to understand peace, which come from each sector: A process that represents the possibility that many historically marginalized sectors – historically attacked – [. . .] can raise their voices and we can engage with structural transformations.”

(Interview 11)

Juan’s quote reveals that peace takes the place of an ‘empty signifier’ in HRDs’ discourses, which embraces broad activist dialogue on necessary social transformation that addresses violence in Colombia more broadly (see CINEP, 2016). Yet, the interviews also make clear that peace has ceased to be the prerogative of oppositional discourses on social justice and acquires a ‘floating dimension’ under pressure from an aggressive hegemonic campaign of the political right under Uribe. The open antagonization around the meaning of peace has fuelled disruptive confrontations in post-accord Colombia: Vested with executive state power, the political right seeks to modify the peace agreement in favour of its vision, confronted by massive protests that have fiercely criticized the government’s non-compliance with the accords and its failure to address inequality and violence (Programa Somos Defensores, 2020: 41–45).

We can read in the following excerpt from my conversation with César, researcher at INDEPAZ, how this disruptive conflict amounts to a crisis that defines the moment in between an imagined-conflict past and a post-conflict future:

“Post-conflict comes after a transitional stage and we are in the midst of this. The stages of transition in these processes are sometimes difficult, as is the case with the crisis we are living through today: a crisis due to the government’s failure to comply with absolutely all aspects [. . .] and they are killing the leaders, human rights defenders [. . .] Crisis [. . .] is part of the transition and everything depends on how the crisis is resolved today [. . .] [whether] we will have a positive transition or a negative transition.”

(Interview 13)

In this reading, ‘killing human rights defenders’ and the ‘government’s failure to comply’ are symptoms of an interregnum, where undecided political conflicts impede the hegemonic rise of a vision of peace that would herald a post-conflict epoch, yet also facilitate the increase of systematic violence against activists. The following quotes from Luis, Maria – community leader from the Pacific Coast – and Rodrigo are representative of my interlocutors’ description of political violence as a form of ‘silencing’ political mobilization:

“The sectors that have governed us from the far right want to keep the people poor and ignorant. So, they see a threat in the guarantee of rights [. . .] It is the fear of a government [. . .] that the same civil society begins to change their territories [. . .], because [now] they also have a shield with [the peace agreement].”

(Interview 1)

***

“So what guarantee does the state give us leaders? None, because they kill leaders since we are the ones defending [our] little piece of land [. . .] and then, if this one doesn’t speak, the others don’t speak.”

(Interview 14)

***

“If society remains with its arms folded waiting for that same elite to [. . .] comply with the agreements, we are going to remain waiting. So, the main thing is unity; it is the strengthening of the social movements to be able to go out to the streets [. . .] That is going to have enormous obstacles because social leaders are being killed [. . .] and in doing so, what [the elites] are doing is ensuring their policies.”

(Interview 2)

The reading of crisis hence conceptualizes a link between seemingly individual atrocities and macropolitical antagonism, which, according to HRDs, is apparent in the stigmatizing rhetoric of right-wing politicians, the repression of protest or the government’s refusal to implement effective security guarantees (Programa Somos Defensores, 2020: 49–78).

Conclusion

In this article, I aim to understand how disruptive conflicts evolve in peace processes by studying the voices of Colombian HRDs, who have strongly supported the peace process with the FARC-EP and become the target of post-accord violence. My discursive analysis of interviews with HRDs has proceeded through the lens of dislocation, antagonism and hegemony, which are key concepts of PDT. This lens has allowed me to see how the interviews represent the peace process as a hegemonic crisis, in which discursive coalitions contest the vision of peace, after the 2016 peace accords put the hitherto hegemonic imaginary of conflict into question. HRDs tried to seize the political moment, afforded by the peace agreement’s transformative agenda, but saw their advocacy for social justice confronted by a coalition on the political right under former president Uribe. In sum, the peace process has turned into an experience of interregnum for HRDs, where antagonistic and ultimately violent conflict over the meaning of peace defers the imagined transition towards a post-conflict future.

My reading of crisis conceptualizes how disruptive conflict evolves from the possibility of change. This offers an alternative explanation to scholarly debates that predominantly relate frictions and violence to the structural properties of post-accord societies and flawed peacebuilding, such as historical inequalities, poor state governance or the incomplete demobilization of combatants. While further research on other relevant societal discourses and the interrelation between structural causes and discursive antagonisms are also sorely needed, paying close attention to HRDs’ voices produces genuine insights into the political antagonisms that pervade what is ultimately a very complex panorama of violent conflict in Colombia’s peace process.

The concept of ‘hegemonic crisis’ challenges framings of peace processes in terms of war-to-peace transition: PDT offers analytical tools to explore the uncertainty, which ambitious peace agreements may trigger, as a discursive lack that eventually gives rise to conflicts over hegemonic imaginaries of social reality. These discursive conflicts risk turning an envisaged ‘passage towards peace’ – according teleological rhetoric – into an ‘enduring moment’ of confrontation. Such an ontological shift in the comprehension of peace processes casts a new light on the studies of societal frictions and insecurities in peacebuilding, specifically regarding the debates on the agential powers of elite spoilers to undermine sociopolitical reforms and obstruct eventually ephemeral implementation processes. The play between the unsettling of conflict imaginaries, which have ordered social reality, and the quest for new hegemony defines discursive conditions under which anti-peace coalitions mobilize and conflicts over peace emerge.

Embedding the experience of systematic violence in the context of macropolitical conflicts has been a core concern for HRDs, who reject depoliticizing narratives of violence as just common crime or remnants of FARC-EP insurgency. Peacebuilding in Colombia must engage with still-lingering war rhetoric and the larger political struggles so that the current crisis in post-accord Colombia can yield a common vision of peace beyond the order of conflict.