A multi-scale ethnography of government pedagogy in Colombia and its impact on peace. Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas sought to end fifty years of war and won President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet Colombian society rejected it in a polarizing referendum, amid an emotive disinformation campaign. Gwen Burnyeat joined the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution responsible for peace negotiations, to observe and participate in an innovative “peace pedagogy” strategy to explain the agreement to Colombian society. Burnyeat’s multi-scale ethnography reveals the challenges government officials experienced communicating with skeptical audiences and translating the peace process for public opinion. She argues that the fatal flaw in the peace process lay in government-society relations, enmeshed in culturally liberal logics and shaped by the politics of international donors. The Face of Peace offers the Colombian case as a mirror to the global crisis of liberalism, shattering the fantasy of rationality that haunts liberal responses to “post-truth” politics.
Gwen Burnyeat is a junior research fellow in anthropology at Merton College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Chocolate, Politics, and Peace-Building.
Note on TranslationList of AbbreviationsPrologueIntroductionPart I Anthrohistory of the Santos Government1 Peace, Politics, and Public Opinion under Juan Manuel Santos, 2010–20182 The Rationality Drive: The Development of Government Peace Pedagogy, 2012–20183 The Anti-politics of Cultural LiberalismPart II Ethnography of Peace Pedagogy in Action4 Interface: The Enactment of Legitimacy by Explanation5 State-Consciousness: Three Layers of Responsibility and Trust6 Rendering Political: The Affective Labor of Liaising with the FARC et al.7 The Entangled Face: International Implication in Government ResponsibilityConclusionAcknowledgmentsNotesReferencesIndex
“This remarkable book combines sensitive ethnography, brave and imaginative analysis, and considerable passion to tell a story for our times about the failures of liberal peace-making in Colombia and the seemingly unbridgeable divide between the state and ordinary people. Its brilliant analysis of liberalism’s limitations provides sparks of hope for a more humane political future.”