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The Colombian peace process between the government of then president Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP) guerrillas sought to end 50 years of war. Negotiations took place in Havana, Cuba, between 2011 and 2016, and the final peace agreement was heralded internationally as the most complete of world peace accords. But in 2016, Colombians rejected the agreement in a polarizing referendum amid a disinformation campaign similar to the Leave narrative in the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign in the United States.
A commonly proposed antidote to so-called post-truth politics is for states to increase civic education on key policy issues in order to help people distinguish “fact” from “fiction.” But, as I think many of us are increasingly realizing, it is often impossible to counter disinformation with what we believe to be truthful information, as people do not form opinions based on rationality. Our political views are shaped by emotions, culture, history, and identity—all complex forces, often even contradictory.
I spent a year embedded in the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace (OACP), the government institution in charge of the peace negotiations, doing ethnographic research on the government officials (2017–2018). I focused on their attempt to communicate the peace process to Colombian society, both before and after this referendum. They created a strategy called “peace pedagogy,” in which OACP officials travelled the country explaining the negotiations to different sectors of society. I reconstructed its evolution through interviews with government officials and audiences, drawing on a decade of living in Colombia and working with peacebuilding organizations throughout the peace process. And I witnessed firsthand the challenges OACP officials faced by observing their everyday work and lives in Bogotá, as well as dozens of peace pedagogy sessions across Colombia.
The purpose of peace pedagogy was to prepare the public for implementation of the peace accord, help them develop an informed opinion for the referendum, and dispel disinformation. The opposition party, the Democratic Center, led by former president Álvaro Uribe, spread scaremongering narratives about the peace process, claiming it would make Colombia communist, abolish private property, and impose “gender ideology” on schoolchildren, turning them gay and destroying the traditional Colombian family. Government officials in the OACP referred to these narratives as “myths,” which they believed should be countered with “realities.”
The problem with the OACP’s strategy was that it sought to be nonpolitical. The rationale of peace pedagogy was that the peace process involved a body of objective knowledge, on which the OACP was the authority, and that the government should teach Colombians this knowledge. This portrayed the peace process as above politics. But peace is inescapably political: It involves a political settlement between warring parties and negotiations between the government and the political establishment. Peace accords reform political systems and depend on political will for implementation. And, crucially, public support for peace processes is contingent on citizens’ perceptions of national politics.
Rational peace pedagogy
Peace pedagogy was not planned at the beginning of the peace process. In fact, it’s a world first. Peace education, a subfield of peace studies, refers to the teaching and acquiring of skills for nonviolent conflict resolution. In contrast, government peace pedagogy predominantly referred to the dissemination of information, first about the negotiations, then about the final peace agreement. It evolved organically, partly because citizens demanded information about what was being negotiated. The peace talks were bound by a confidentiality principle. All official communication about the peace process needed to be tightly controlled, as anything the government said publicly affected the power balance in the negotiations. This led the OACP to emphasize technical accuracy, to avoid seeming political. Officials memorized a script—an extensive document continually updated as negotiations progressed. This was accompanied by a lengthy PowerPoint presentation, with a clean, technical aesthetic, full of bullet points, statistics, and acronyms. As one official told me, “Our position was always to inform, not promote the peace process.” This explaining reflected a liberal belief that the government’s discourse about peace was not political, but based on objective truths.
People flocked to ask the government questions, filling open-air sports stadiums in small towns and sweaty auditoriums in municipal buildings. But “peace” quickly became synonymous with the political clash between Santos and Uribe. Uribe’s opposition began when Santos initiated the peace talks in 2012, complaining that Santos was negotiating with terrorists. In 2013, he founded the Democratic Center, which explicitly rejected the peace process. Presidential elections were held in 2014, and Santos pledged to complete the peace negotiations if he was re-elected, while the Democratic Center’s candidate, Oscar Iván Zuluaga, promoted disinformation about the peace process, claiming it threatened Colombian democracy. Santos’s victory, by 50.98 percent, suggested that peace had won, but only just. Over time, as the Democratic Center’s emotive disinformation messages took root in the collective imaginary, peace pedagogy became increasingly difficult. As the team’s director told me, discussing early pedagogy efforts in 2012-–2014, “We travelled all over the country, on the receiving end of everybody’s criticisms.”
The problem with the OACP’s strategy was that it sought to be nonpolitical.
Throughout the peace process, the OACP gave talks to thousands of Colombians, especially in war-torn areas where communities would be most affected by the peace deal. They also adopted increasingly creative strategies—online courses, workshops with local NGOs, informative booklets tailored to different groups. But in comparison with the rest of the OACP, the pedagogy team was tiny. It began with three people. At its height, it never had more than twelve. The three successive directors of the team over the course of the Santos administration, all women, felt that their work was undervalued compared with the work of negotiating. In retrospect, many of the officials thought that their insufficient communication with the public led to things going “well in Havana, but badly in Colombia,” as one put it.
The attachment to rationality
Santos and his senior ministers and officials shared certain cultural characteristics—they were upper class, from Bogotá, white, and educated in the best universities in Colombia and abroad. Santos, whose family is influential in the Colombian Liberal party, studied at the London School of Economics, and spent many years in London. He was a fan of former British prime minister Tony Blair, and coauthored a book with Blair about adapting the Third Way ideology to Colombia. The pedagogy team, meanwhile, were mostly young, middle- and upper-middle-class individuals from Bogotá, well-educated, and deeply personally committed to the peace process. They tended to see themselves as not political, often saying they were “not santista,” but they were what I call culturally liberal, as opposed to politically liberal: liberal ideology was embedded in their cultural worldview, intersecting with class, region of origin, race, and education.
Of course liberalism varies hugely across time and space, but there are commonalities, including the centrality of the rational individual, and the idea that states can improve society using objective, scientific knowledge—which underpinned the OACP’s notion of peace pedagogy.
The officials valued rationality in and of itself, but also in reaction to and repudiation of Uribe, who they saw as a right-wing, manipulative populist leader. Mauricio Rodríguez, former Colombian ambassador to the United Kingdom and brother-in-law and advisor to Santos, told me he thought Santos’s communication was “too rational and technical”; he should have tried to “sell [peace] emotionally.” But that was not Santos’s style. In contrast, he described Uribe as a charismatic “communicative genius,” who incited “hatred and fear.” This is a global liberal stereotype—the Latin American warlord figure, a captivating orator, folkloric, one of the people—and it reveals more about liberalism’s condescensi