Peace agreements

El presente artículo analiza los discursos de los líderes políticos más representativos de la campaña del plebiscito por la paz en Colombia, el líder del Sí, presidente Juan Manuel Santos, y el representante más visible de la campaña por el No, el líder del partido político Centro Democrático, expresidente y senador Álvaro Uribe Vélez, quien encabezó durante más de cinco años una oposición frontal al gobierno y a las negociaciones de paz. En estos discursos se busca identifi car el uso de las emociones —de los componentes no racionales de la política—, específicamente del miedo como elemento principal para influir en la decisión de los electores a favor del voto aprobatorio o desaprobatorio de los acuerdos de paz firmados en La Habana (Cuba), entre representantes del gobierno de Colombia y de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). Para lograr este propósito, se realizó el estudio de tres intervenciones del presidente Juan Manuel Santos y dos del expresidente Álvaro Uribe Vélez anteriores al domingo 2 de octubre de 2017, día de la votación, y una intervención del gerente del Comité Promotor Nacional por el No —y reconocido uribista—, Juan Carlos Vélez Uribe, posterior a la jornada electoral en cuestión. Para presentar esta confrontación discursiva, el artículo describe el contexto institucional y las reglas de juego que demarcaron la acción política de los principales actores de esta campaña sui géneris.

Colombia’s 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC guerrilla extends beyond the end of the war and those measures for the disarmament, demobilization and reincorporation of former guerrillas. A large portion of the agreement is dedicated to the extension of the presence of the Colombian State into those areas of the country formerly under FARC control. The premise behind this extension, shared by Colombian elites as much as former guerrilla leaders, is that if the State remains absent then the areas will be occupied by criminal organizations interested in controlling the FARC cocaine trade, and, more generally, that the vast and sparsely populated territories will further descend into barbarism. This premise resonates with a long arc of persistent aspiration for a national identity that is shaped by the opposition between civilization and barbarism. Especially since the transformations effected by Colombia’s 1991 Constitution, the extension of civilization has been increasingly identified with the expansion of the rule of law and, therefore, with law’s mythical powers to order society and control barbarism. Under this premise, violence is equated to lawlessness and the remedy for violence assimilated to the expansion of the Estado social de derecho, the state form that embodies the rule of law in the Colombian Constitution. The foundational narrative of civilization versus barbarism, reflected by the hopes placed on the rule of law and the recipes for State-building by the 2016 Peace Agreement, continues to obscure the continuities between law and violence, and particularly the fact that the execution of legal institutions in formerly “lawless” territories maintains the violence of the moment of the adoption of legality. Both theoretical and empirical explorations of the present process of expansion of the Colombian State require critical examination of the hopes vested on law. A critical examination of this sort needs to engage with the continuities between law and violence explored in contemporary political philosophy and developed by Jean and John Comaroff’s ethnography. The productivity of this approach is highlighted by the essays in this dossier, which share the impulse to interrupt the foundational narrative of civilization and barbarism that remains in the institutions of Colombias’s present post-conflict endeavor.

The causes and consequences of ceasefires have become a burgeoning area of research. The concept of ceasefire success is integral to this research and plays a key role as either the dependent or independent variable in both qualitative and quantitative work. Despite its importance, it is not clear how ceasefire success should be conceptualized. This critically hampers the progress of theoretical and empirical research on ceasefires. This article offers a conceptual framework based on the central proposition that ceasefire success should be assessed in terms of two inter-related but conceptually distinct criteria: the immediate objective and the underlying purpose. The immediate objective, which is embedded in the definition of a ceasefire, is the cessation of hostilities (either permanently or temporarily). While all ceasefires share this objective, their underlying purpose, which is the reason for establishing the ceasefire, varies widely across cases. The immediate objective and the purpose, while conceptually distinct, are linked since the purpose informs the temporal and geographic scope of the cessation of hostilities. Based on this framework, we argue that researchers interested in ceasefire success need to clearly identify their assumptions and conceptual choices, which should take account of the political context of the ceasefires in question.