By Gwen Burnyeat
Author of
The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2022).
In 2016, the year of Brexit and Donald Trump’s first election, Colombia voted “No” by just 0.2% to a peace agreement signed between the government of President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC guerrilla (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which sought to end fifty years of war.
The “No” campaign was led by the right-wing Democratic Centre Party. They told people that the peace accord would turn Colombia communist, grant impunity for human rights crimes, and impose “gender ideology” on children in schools. Messages were spread on billboards, from church pulpits, and in WhatsApp groups. Colombia’s highest administrative tribunal determined that the campaign had used “generalised deceit.”
This kind of disinformation campaign seems familiar now, but in 2016 it felt new. The Face of Peace analyses a strategy by the Santos government to try to combat disinformation about the peace process. Using what they called “peace pedagogy”, government officials from the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the branch of the presidency in charge of peace negotiations, travelled around the country speaking to different audiences presenting what they saw as “the facts,” speaking to rural communities, state officials, the armed forces, the business sector, the media, and other groups.
I spent a year with this government team, observing their presentations and their everyday office work and life. I also interviewed over eighty government officials, members of the FARC, civil society, and the international community, to reconstruct the evolution of government peace pedagogy from the start of the peace process in 2012. The Face of Peace documents the officials’ experiences communicating with sceptical audiences and translating the peace process for public opinion before and after the referendum.
The officials I followed often talked of the difficulties of “giving face”—in Spanish “dar la cara”—a common Colombian idiom meaning both to be present in physical encounters and to assume responsibility for something. They would say things like, “It’s not our fault the peace process is falling apart, but we’re the ones who have to go to dar la cara, give face to people in the regions.” Giving face as the government meant being on the receiving end of the many perceptions Colombia’s diverse audiences had of the government, in a context of historic distrust in the state.
The Face of Peace explores how all governments “face” society. The Santos government tried to “give” a “face of peace,” but, as I show, the face of the government is created by a complex ecosystem of people, institutions, and their interactions—not only by a president. Although Santos dedicated great efforts to negotiating with the FARC, achieving an internationally celebrated accord that won him the Nobel peace prize, his government failed to invest the same efforts in constructing a government-society alliance for peace. This was the fatal error of the peace process and became visible in the aftermath of the referendum. The peace deal was renegotiated, incorporating demands from the “No” campaign, and a new deal began to be implemented in December 2016. But the Democratic Centre continued opposing it, and their candidate, Iván Duque, won the presidency in 2018 on an anti-peace accord platform. After an initial drop in violence when 13,000 FARC combatants disarmed, an uptick of conflict followed, widely blamed on Duque’s failure to implement the deal.
The book explores an attempt to do what many people say governments should be doing: using education to counter disinformation. Yet it is increasingly obvious that people don’t form political opinions based on rationality alone, but also on emotions, identity, culture, history. The Colombian case provides a window into the global crisis of liberalism and the problems of seeing rationality as an antidote to disinformation. As I argue, we need to look harder at the ways liberalism reacts to what it perceives as post-truth politics, and how it construes things as “disinformation” in the first place. In particular, I show that we must question our assumption that rational explaining is not political.
The Santos government officials drew on international expertise on transitional justice, disarmament, and myriad other technical issues, but there was no manual on “peace pedagogy,” as this was arguably the first peace process occurring in the new informational ecosystem in which we live. The Face of Peace uses their successes and failures to offer lessons for other political processes 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.