Between War and Peace: Political Organizing in Twenty-First Century Colombia in the Face of Party Decline confronts the puzzle that in the past three decades, Colombia’s democracy deepened as political parties weakened. Despite the academic consensus that parties are indispensable to democracies and that institutional reforms are key to democratic deepening, the book centers its attention on the cultural dimensions of making peace and making war as ideological guides and in a civic associations’ perspective as organizers of politics. It argues that peace and war efforts structured ideological thinking and political organization as new actors entered the political field.
To make this argument, the book project studies the reconfiguration of the Colombian left over the past three decades, as some left-wing rebel groups demobilized through peace agreements while others continued in war. Drawing on two years of fieldwork across five cities—including two rounds of extensive participant observation in each city, over 170 in-depth interviews, archival analysis of local newspapers, and 6,050 systematically coded protest events from 1985 to 2022—the dissertation argues that the left found few spaces to grow politically. The left was constrained not only by repression but also by cultural rejection, as it was perceived and strategically framed as too close to the insurgency.
The study addresses two questions at two levels of analysis: 1) At the local level: why were former rebels able to win office, control the local state, and become important strongholds of the left for national politics in three cities—Pasto, Santa Marta, and Bogotá—while facing challenges in Manizales and Bucaramanga? 2) At the civic association level: what were the associational bases supporting former insurgents’ projects, and how did these interact with cultural meanings produced at the convergence of peace and war efforts? These two levels structure the results sections of the book project.
The first findings section shows the place-based experiences of war and peace efforts and explains why the left was able to grow in a few urban places but not others. As war continued, the cultural representations of the left were, and intentionally were made, as too proximate to the armed left. Two chapters show, first, the configurations that were particularly averse to the left and, second, the ones that opened spaces. I combine two temporalities (long and short term) to make a cultural argument that explains the political subjectivities that reject or create space for the left.
The second section is structured around three chapters that show the operation of associations in the local contexts presented previously. Chapters 3 and 4 center on two forms of “politics in disguise” by employing the cases of Manizales and Bucaramanga (Ch 3) and Santa Marta (Ch 4). In these contexts, where a left-wing political project seemed at odds with cultural backlash and violent repression, left-wing groups innovated to establish themselves as significant political contenders by articulating upon associational bases not interpreted as left: organized soccer fans, environmental associations, and university administrations. The potential of these associations to be articulated into these projects emerged as they confronted the frames from peace and war. For instance, organized soccer fans developed a political understanding toward the left as the 2016 Peace Tribunal exposed extrajudicial killings of young poor kids. Chapter 5 centers on the cases of Pasto and Bogotá, which are exceptional in that political subjectivity against the left did not consolidate. Instead, an associational space fostered by a late entry of war (Pasto) and by the demographic reconfiguration produced by war (Bogotá), interacting with the local state, generated fertile ground for left-wing projects.
