Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This chapter addresses how, despite the global post-Cold War context of international rapprochement, Colombia’s grotesque internal armed conflict continued under President Alvaro Uribe. It explores how Uribe’s war on Colombia weakened the FARC-EP guerrilla, pushing it back to peripheral zones of the country, and how this strategy precipitated an unprecedented humanitarian disaster. As such, it details the massive patterns of victimization and state-sponsored human rights violations that occurred under Uribe, as a means of contextualizing the demands made by many participants in the victims’ delegations to Havana. The chapter concludes that it was out of these darkest episodes of political violence that the Santos–FARC-EP peace talks emerged, bolstered by both the partial military hurting stalemate and the significant impact brought by civil society and victims’ organizations as they consolidated themselves as political actors.
This chapter offers a longitudinal historical perspective of the evolution of patterns of political violence and victimization in Colombia, with the aim of contextualizing the historical processes that shaped the testimonies and proposals presented by the victims’ delegations that visited Havana in 2014. An understanding of the experiences of survivors framed within the wider historical trajectory of the armed conflict is of fundamental significance if we are to understand how the conflict has persisted and why victims made the demands they did in Havana. The chapter begins by discussing the patterns of violence that shaped Colombia’s post-independence period and turbulent mid-20th century. The analysis then turns to Colombia’s internal armed conflict, outlining the dynamics and causes of the conflict.
Since the 19th century, Colombia has experienced a series of complex, intersecting conflicts at the local, subnational and national levels. The most recent manifestation of such violence has been Colombia’s internal armed conflict. The violence perpetrated within this context has left over nine million victims. Under such circumstances, victims and survivors of political violence have sculpted pioneering initiatives to withstand and bring closure to this violence. Since the early 2000s, victims of political violence have become significantly important political actors in Colombia, taking part in formal peacemaking processes, most recently the Havana peace talks. This chapter brings together the research from previous chapters that has sought to understand how the victims’ delegations made sense of violent conflict and aimed to build peace by shaping the accountability mechanisms structured within the Havana talks. The chapter further illustrates the importance of the instrumentalization-empowerment spectrum as an approach to understanding the experiences of survivors and victims of political violence within formal victim-centred peacemaking and transitional justice initiatives. The chapter closes with specific policy recommendations for victim-centred initiatives.
This chapter builds on the argument that beyond the military dynamics of a hurting stalemate, two further factors are critical in explaining the path towards making peace in Havana, and, specifically, the inclusion of the victims’ delegations within this process: first, the role and leadership specifically of President Santos and his journey of from hawk to dove during the peace process; second, and significantly, building on wider global processes and shifts in peacemaking/peacebuilding norms and practices, the evolving role of Colombian civil society and victims as domestic political actors. Beginning with a discussion of peacemaking and peacebuilding in the wake of the Cold War, and particularly of the turn towards inclusion therein, this chapter addresses these issues in turn, tracing Colombia’s path from international pariah to the onset of the Havana talks. The research situates Colombia’s Havana process – and the victims’ delegations in particular – within the debates concerning the liberal peace and transitional justice paradigms.
This chapter begins to develop the analysis of the role that Colombia’s victims’ delegations played in the Havana peace process, which is the core theme of this book. It details the antecedents to direct victim participation in the Havana talks, before turning to the rationale for victim inclusion, drawing specifically on the perspectives of both those that participated in and organized Colombia’s victims’ delegations. The empirical discussion is situated within a broader argument that contends that the Havana talks and the nature of victim inclusion therein demonstrate the evolving trajectory of both the liberal peacebuilding and transitional justice paradigms. How transitional justice was addressed during the Havana talks illustrates the manner in which the foundational tenets and objectives of the paradigm have gradually shifted over time, becoming embedded gradually within liberal peacemaking and peacebuilding, and, in recent years, towards victim-centred transitional justice. The chapter ultimately contends that a complex, nuanced and context-specific understanding of participation should be adopted when evaluating victim inclusion in peacemaking and victim-centred transitional justice initiatives.
This chapter explores the extent to which the participants in the victims’ delegations played a role as peacemakers during the Havana talks. In this regard, it addresses whether the delegations were able explicitly to shape the specific content of Point Five and the Final Agreement. The chapter argues that the delegations were able to influence the content of the agreements across diverse spheres. As such, Point Five and the Final Agreement ultimately incorporated a considerable number of demands tabled by participants. However, the extent to which victims played a determinant role as peacemakers during the Havana talks was more closely articulated with and subordinate to wider structural factors and relations of power than was their capacity to wield relational transformation. Victims’ petitions were, in fact, incorporated only when they converged with and reflected the interests of the negotiating parties. As such, for the case of the role of victims as peacemakers during the Havana talks, a delicate balance exists between victim empowerment on the one hand and instrumentalization on the other.
This chapter presents the key empirical topic of the book: Colombia’s victims’ delegations. It then outlines the main themes to which the research is addressed: transitional justice and peacemaking; victim-centred transitional justice; and conciliation/reconciliation, peacemaking and transitional justice. Building on the empirical case study of Colombia’s victims’ delegations, it subsequently presents the key argument of the book, which aims to disclose a complex story: that the proposition of a sweeping narrative that articulates the reductive logic that victim-oriented transitional justice is paralysing and merely instrumentalizes victims’ narratives and experiences, and, in turn, collapses spaces for agency, contestation and resistance, is insufficient as an explanatory framework. It develops the initial conceptual framework of the book, drawing out the key themes of victim-centred transitional justice, reconciliation and peacemaking. It then presents the methodology of the research.
This chapter examines the process through which participants were selected for the victims’ delegations. What is of particular interest in this chapter is how the selection process – designed and led by elite national and international actors – addressed the fundamental issues of representation and gender. The research discusses the degree to which the extremely limited numeric participation in the delegations (60 out of over nine million victims) was politically effective and able to provide a meaningful, representative reflection of historical patterns of political violence and victimization. Drawing upon interviews with members of the victims delegations and other relevant actors in the peace talks, and situated within wider discussions around victim agency, transitional justice and representation, the chapter explores the efficacy of the principles of inclusion developed by the organizers and, relatedly, their envisioning of a so-called ‘universe of victims’.
This book addresses the fundamental question of how, in the face of unrelenting barbary and adversity, survivors of political violence and atrocity have sought to assert agency and contest power in Colombia, as they forge a path through which to bring an end to political violence, craft the effective means through which to reckon with the past, and reconstitute their political and moral communities. The book is in part about how war is fought, what its impact is, particularly on civilians, and the means that armed groups employ in order to achieve their ends; however, more emphatically, it is also about how those who survive atrocious violence narrate and make sense of war and attempt to construct peace, and, in so doing, transform political subjectivity and reconfigure relations of power. Drawing on unique interviews, the book builds on the case of Colombia to construct a new vision of victim-centred transitional justice, which is relevant for scholars and practitioners alike.
This chapter explores the role of the victims’ delegations as peacebuilders, looking specifically at the degree to which the delegations were able to effect relational change across three levels: (i) the individual level; (ii) the intragroup level; and (iii) the intergroup level (victims-perpetrators and perpetrators-perpetrators). The chapter argues that the delegations were, in part, an emancipatory project, while also signalling how the delegations precipitated episodes of depoliticization, retraumatization and revictimization. As such, the chapter further develops the argument that victim instrumentalization and empowerment may occur across a spectrum. It is contended that, alongside instrumentalization, politicization and, in some instances, revictimization and retraumatization, the delegations transformed the historically embedded perspectives held by the negotiating parties, leading to victim acknowledgement and the breakdown of the wall of perpetrator denial, while contributing to strategic decisions by the negotiating parties to de-escalate.
