The Intersectional Politics of Antagonism in Peacebuilding

Project Information

IPAP

Grant agreement ID: 894411

DOI

10.3030/894411

Project closed

EC signature date 10 April 2020

Start date 1 September 2020

End date 31 December 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 224 933,76

EU contribution

€ 224 933,76

Coordinated by

ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - IPAP (The Intersectional Politics of Antagonism in Peacebuilding)

Reporting period: 2020-09-01 to 2022-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The project “Intersectional Politics of Antagonism in Peacebuilding” (IPAP) investigated how peacebuilding institutions can implement a peace agreement that has been contested and work to include groups that have engaged in antagonist actions against a peace accord. The project built on the observation that even when peace agreements include transformative measures that address the root causes of conflict, they may be rejected by the social groups that are aimed to benefit from their transformative provisions.
The project broke with a tendency in peace literature to treat resistance against peacebuilding as a deviance, abnormality or uncivility, or as a manifestation of political and economic elites’ fears of losing power from the transition to peace. In contrast, this project bore in mind that conflict is an inherent element of contemporary human societies, and thus peace agreements are always accompanied by societal groups that do not accept them or actively engage in actions to undermine them.
The IPAP project drew on feminist intersectional approaches and connected three main bodies of literature: feminist methodologies to the study of peace, resistance to transitional justice, and agonistic pluralism and reconciliation. The project contributed to this literature by foregrounding the relations between peace institutions and the individual political subjectivity of actors who have purposefully engaged in acts to work against, prevent or disrupt the implementation of a peace agreement. This project generated new knowledge that contributes to the development of more inclusive and emancipatory approaches to peace processes
IPAP used the case study of the 2016 Colombian peace agreement with a focus on transitional justice institutions and concluded that the possibilities of implementing a peace agreement in the midst of resistance are determined by two interrelated conditions. One is the peace institutions’ ability to reach out to victims and peace movements whose formation predated the peace agreement that created them. The other is peace institutions’ strategized efforts to bring into their processes individual and collective victims who have not been part of previous organizing process or who do not feel represented in existing victims’ movements. IPAP found that for this to happen, peace institutions can find important allies among NGOs with strong social capital and grassroots players whose life experiences share intersectional bonds with collective victims’ experiences. These allies can have the leverage to manoeuvre and the citizens’ trust which government institutions may lack. NGOs with strong social capital and expertise in human rights may prove to have major flexibility and responsiveness than government institutions to adapt to emergent victims’ needs arising from their participation in transitional justice processes.
Accountability continues to be essential to the endeavour of satisfying victims’ rights. However, the recognition of the victims and the acknowledgement of responsibilities by the perpetrators for the harm caused to the victims contribute to processes of truth recovery and have a strong impact on realizing victims’ right to symbolic reparation. Victims can play important roles in planning the modalities of their participation in public acts of acknowledgement of responsibility. The possibility for these events to become spaces of agonistic dialogue also depend on the extent to which victims are placed at the centre and recover their authority to publicly name the experience of violence they have endured. Peace institutions’ legitimacy is strongly determined by their explicit willingness to become democratic entities. This may be demonstrated by the institutions’ capacity to allow their terms and procedures to be receptive to and shaped by victims’ expression of difficult emotions and to acknowledge the validity of their unruly voices.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

IPAP used the 2016 Colombian peace agreement and its implementation as a rich case study of antagonism to peacebuilding. The peace process that led to this agreement involved numerous transformative measures and actors, but was rejected when submitted to a referendum by the social groups it sought to benefit.
IPAP’s research strategy was organised into 5 work packages covering a review of institutional and legal frameworks of peacebuilding in Colombia, mapping of the actors involved, fieldwork and data analysis, secondments at swisspeace and the University of Warwick, and dissemination activities.
IPAP’s main research focus was on the Centres for Historical Memory of Bogota and Medellin, paying particular attention to activities conducted to enable and support the work of two Colombian transitional justice institutions: the Truth Commission and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP). The methodology was primarily based on a eight-month ethnographic fieldwork consisting of participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The research strategy also included online interviews and data collection from peace institutions’ websites and peace activities conducted online by the Truth Commission and the JEP. The research methodology sought to observe peace institutions from two angles: first from the antagonistic discourses and practices surrounding and shaping their contribution to the peace implementation process, and second from the experiences of actors such as functionaries, victims and activists involved in peace work taking place in these institutions.
Data collected through ethnographic methods and desk research yielded several outputs including scientific articles, blog posts, workshops and seminars where the research progress and results were disseminated. Furthermore, the dissemination strategy included the project’s blog UnfoldingPeace, and the postgraduate seminar "Gender and Transformative Approaches to Peace" taught at the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The IPAP project’s most significant contributions to the state of the art consist in the identification of four key issues that have the potential to impact the capacity of peace institutions to bring antagonistic actors into spaces of dialogue:
1. The inclusion of transformative provisions in a peace agreement aimed at tackling the causes of violence is important for providing restorative justice to victims and responds to a victim-centred approach. However, penal accountability continues to be a legitimate claim of particular importance to victims, without whom the legitimacy of a peace process might be highly compromised.
2. The ability of peace institutions to reach out to a plurality of constituencies, involving victims affected by all actors to the conflict (e.g. illegal and state armed actors), impacts the legitimacy of peacebuilding processes and peace institutions.
3. People’s refusal to support a peace process is neither an opposition to peace as such nor an absolute rejection of peace institutions, but a purposeful reaction against specific effects that a peace process or its institutions produce.
4. The responsiveness of peace institutions to victims’ emotions and their ability to loosen their institutional requirements of rationality and impartiality play a major role in enhancing these institutions’ capacity to bring antagonistic actors into the peace process and to transform antagonistic resistance to peace into agonistic forms of reconciliation.

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