Festschrift for Jonathan Spencer

Gwen Burnyeat

I started my PhD in University College London on 4 October 2016, two days after the peace referendum in Colombia, in which 50.2 percent of voters rejected the peace accord signed with the FARC guerrillas that sought to end 50 years of war. The “No” vote told people that the peace deal would turn Colombia communist, end private property, and impose “gender ideology” on children in schools, turning them all gay (Gómez-Suárez 2016). The No campaign manager later admitted they had purposefully tried to make people “go to vote angry” (Semana 2016a), and the state council ruled their campaign had used “generalized deceit” (Semana 2016b). This kind of disinformation campaign is familiar to us all now—but in 2016 it seemed just to be beginning.

I had been living in Colombia for several years, working with peacebuilding organizations and communities. When I landed back in London, my childhood home, I had planned to study the way that civil society groups had successfully mobilized people around peace. But the referendum changed everything. Lots of indignant Colombia scholars started to analyze the success of the No campaign, much like we did in the UK with the Brexit referendum result. But I decided I had to focus on why the “Yes” vote had lost. So I spent a year with government officials in the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the branch of the presidency in charge of peace negotiations. They created a strategy they called “peace pedagogy,” travelling the country to give talks to different audiences, from rural communities to the business sector. They presented the “facts,” and tried to counter the “lies” that were spreading, as they saw it. They did this before the referendum, and then continued afterwards, trying to explain to people what had been agreed so they could make an informed choice in the presidential elections of 2018, between the candidates who promised to continue implementation of the peace accord, and those who opposed it. At the end of my fieldwork, those elections were won by one of the main opponents of the peace deal.

It was Jonathan Spencer’s work that helped me start to make sense of all this when I got back from the field, particularly his delineation of the field of the anthropology of politics (Curtis and Spencer 2012), and his placing at the heart of this field Chantal Mouffe’s (2005) conceptualization of the political as conflict, and the clashing of factions in society. This was important for me to understand the way that the polarization created over the referendum continued to shape the struggles over the peace process.

The loss of the referendum was a huge setback for Colombia. A modified deal was ratified by congress and began to be implemented in December 2016: 13,000 members of the FARC disarmed, transitional justice institutions were created, and slowly and unevenly, implementation continued. But the referendum created a major legitimacy deficit that has haunted the peace process ever since. Just as Jonathan insists on the political nature of the Sri Lankan conflict (Spencer 2007), I argue in my book, The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia, that peace is political: it’s political because it involves a settlement between warring parties and negotiations between the government and the establishment; it’s political because peace accords reform political systems and depend on political will for implementation; and, crucially, it’s political because public support for peace processes is contingent on citizens’ perceptions of politics (Burnyeat 2022a).

One of the ways I took forward Jonathan’s agenda was by looking at the anti-politics of the government officials I worked with. They saw peace pedagogy as a technical exercise, and believed that explaining “the facts” of the 300-page peace accord was the right way to “debunk the myths,” as they put it, which had been spread by the No campaign. They tried to perform an idealized state-society relationship that they thought should be above politics, while construing the No campaign as populist emotional disinformation and their own narratives as rational objective truths. Jonathan’s critique of the political nature of anti-political discourses (Spencer 2007) helped me theorize what I call the cultural liberalism of Colombian government officials, which has at its heart a belief in a binary division between rationality and emotions, and a blindness to its own ideological nature (Burnyeat 2022b). I argue in my book that the government’s emphasis on rational explaining to counteract disinformation was a liberal response to so-called “post-truth” politics, and I think we could see the same problems at work in the U.K., in the ways that liberal discourses interpreted the results of Brexit. I was fortunate to have Jonathan as one of my PhD examiners, and his comments helped me strengthen the thesis as I turned it into the book.

After finishing my PhD, I began a new postdoctoral project at the University of Oxford studying political polarization in Colombia. All my friends and colleagues there were talking about how the peace process was stuck in the polarization created by the referendum and exacerbated by the 2018 elections. New political identities had formed between Yes and No voters, which intersected with myriad pre-existing divisions, such as between left and right, but also rural and urban, rich and poor, and between different experiences of the armed conflict, such as those who had been victims of the guerrillas versus those who had been victims of the state and paramilitaries. Seven years on, this divide remains salient, and has evolved through elections and other political events, acquiring new associations (Movilizatorio 2021; 2022). Surveys suggest that many Colombians believe their society to be more divided than ever before (Edelman Trust Barometer 2023).

For this project, I spent five months across two visits visiting different regions of Colombia, talking to a cross-section of people in different regions with different political orientations about their experiences and perceptions of polarization, before and after the 2022 elections, in which the country’s first ever leftist president, Gustavo Petro, was elected with a promise of “total peace”, meaning full implementation of the 2016 peace accord, and negotiations with the remaining armed groups in Colombia, which include both the ELN guerrilla and FARC dissident groups, and various paramilitary and criminal groups. These elections brought back the 2016 referendum division and evolved the association between left-wing politics and peace.

But following Jonathan’s insistence on recognizing the inevitability of conflict in everyday life, I found myself questioning the very notion of polarization. All societies are divided, so what is the difference between polarization and just, well, politics? As Mouffe argues (2005), promoting the liberal ideal of harmonious coexistence can be dangerous, even engendering more violent divisions, when we do not make room for processing conflict peacefully. We should not pathologize the concept of polarization:  some political science research suggests that narratives about polarization circulated by the media or politicians can become self-fulfilling prophecies, as they simplify differences, and entrench the idea that the other represents an undesirable extreme (Fiorina and Abrams 2008). And, as some of my interlocutors in Colombia suggested, conflict is not always necessarily a bad thing: sometimes we need it, to challenge an unjust status quo.

In this project, I took polarization as an emic category, a story that people told themselves about political difference. Although many people agreed Colombia was polarized, they meant different things. Some saw polarization as between left and right, or pro- and anti-peace. Others saw polarization as a word used to stigmatize their side. Still others said things like, “polarization is between us civilians who want peace, and the armed groups, who are together with the politicians” (Fieldnotes, October 26, 2021). While the concept of polarization suggests a single, objective spectrum with two clear poles, this didn’t correspond to their lived experience of political difference. My anthropological approach to polarization aims to complicate political science studies that use large-scale surveys and voting behavior to provide big pictures of political divisions.

Politics has always involved conflict, as Jonathan has so clearly emphasized. So why do so many popular debates suggest that today, people see the world as more politically divided than before? Is there really something new happening? There have certainly been changes to the architecture of politics, with new technologies, social media, algorithms, and the convergence of politics with entertainment.

But this widespread anxiety about societies worldwide being increasingly divided is also a story—which doesn’t mean there’s no truth to it, just that it’s a culturally constructed narrative. My next project, a five-year Starting Grant selected by the European Research Council (ERC), puts this story and its effects under the microscope. It’s called Stories of Divided Politics: Polarization and Bridge-Building in Colombia and Britain, and I’ll be drawing on my experience of the Colombian peace process to study it together with my own country, whose 2016 referendum similarly continues to reverberate both in macro-politics and in everyday life. I’m excited to be bringing this project to Edinburgh when from January 2024 I join the School of Social and Political Science (which Jonathan helped set up) as a lecturer (assistant professor) in Social Anthropology, to study stories and experiences of polarization in both Colombia and the U.K., and the practitioners who try to build bridges across political divides. I’ll be turning to Jonathan’s work and seeking out his advice as much as I can, to grapple with these issues that affect so many societies worldwide.

Gwen Burnyeat is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Social Anthropology at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. She is a political anthropologist and writer, producer of award-winning documentary Chocolate of Peace, and member of peacebuilding organisation Rodeemos el Diálogo. Her latest book, The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia (University of Chicago Press 2022) won the 2023 Public Anthropologist Award.

 

Works Cited

Burnyeat, Gwen. 2022a. The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

—. 2022b. ‘“We Were Not Emotional Enough”: Cultural Liberalism and Social Contract Imaginaries in the Colombian Peace Process’. Critique of Anthropology 42 (3): 286–303. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221120166.

Curtis, Jennifer, and Jonathan Spencer. 2012. “Anthropology and the Political.” In The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology, edited by Richard Fardon, Oliva Harris, Trevor Marchand, Cris Shore, Veronica Strang, Richard Wilson, and Mark Nuttall, 168–82. Thousand Oaks, CA:  SAGE Publications Ltd.

Edelman Trust Barometer. 2023. “2023 Edelman Trust Barometer Annual Report.” New York:  Edelman.

Fiorina, Morris, and Samuel Abrams. 2008. “Political Polarization in the American Public.” Annual Review of Political Science 11 (1): 563–88. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.053106.153836.

Gómez-Suárez, Andrei. 2016. El triunfo del No: La paradoja emocional detrás del plebiscito [The Triumph of the No: The Emotional Paradox Behind the Plebiscite]. Bogotá: Icono.

Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. New York: Routledge.

Movilizatorio. 2021. “Estudio nacional sobre xenofobia y polarización” [National Study on Xenophobia and Polarization]. Report. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M_1Wr7-bmBWEmIY-GaSrlNbGWtu9_vQ8/view.

—. 2022. ‘Estudio de Reconciliación y Polarización en Colombia: Resultados Segunda Fase’ [Study on Reconciliation and Polarization in Colombia: Second Phase Results]. Report. https://issuu.com/movilizatorio/docs/final_aalta?embed_cta=embed_badge&embed_context=embed&embed_domain=cdn.embedly.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=cdn.embedly.com&embed_id=0%2F93260297.

Semana. 2016a. “Álvaro Uribe regaña a Vélez por revelar la estrategia del No” [Álvaro Uribe Scolds Vélez for Revealing the No’s Strategy], 6 October 2016. https://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/plebiscito-por-la-paz-juan-carlos-velez-revela-estrategia-y-financiadores-del-no/497938.

—. 2016b. “Consejo de Estado dice que hubo ‘engaño generalizado’ en campaña del No en el plebiscito” [State Council says there was “generalized deceit” in the No Campaign in the Plebiscite], 19 December 2016. https://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/consejo-de-estado-reconoce-que-hubo-engano-generalizado-en-campana-del-no-al-plebiscito/510010.

Spencer, Jonathan. 2007. Anthropology, Politics, and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.