In a country whose history has been marked by a long internal armed conflict, understanding peace is necessarily attached to rendering visible the multiple and contrasting stories and meanings associated with building peace. The people of Colombia have one thing in common: an internal conflict that started in the 1950s and that appears unending. However, the stories people carry about that conflict, their experiences, their responses, the anecdotes they remember and tell, their silences, vary from group to group. In this piece I discuss how I apply aspects of the communication approach embedded in the Coordinated Management of Meaning method to understand some of the ways peace is elaborated in the middle of war. CMM is a unique and useful method to bring attention to the ways Colombians have narrated peace and war, and most importantly, to identify and reveal new possibilities of narration.

The Colombian conflict and the attempts to bring peace have been narrated from the perspective of the central government and from the voices of urban political elites. The official history of violence is reduced to a political conflict between rebel groups and the government over the control of the state. And the official history of peace-building is a compilation of peace processes between rebel groups and different national and local governments that have pacified—i.e. kept violence at bay temporarily—but have not been conducive to sustainable peace. CMM has allowed me to bring to the surface the many stories that have been silenced and, in spite of not being part of the official narrative, are fundamental pillars of the history of that country and ought be conceived as entry points to transition from war to peace. In places where violent conflicts are part of everyday life, how peace-building is narrated, which perspectives are drawn on and which are silenced, is central to what is being disputed. And, as in all disputes, power is exercised.

We do not choose the cultural world we are thrown into (Heidegger 1996); and that world has established norms and meanings that, as we grow up, we learn to navigate. This is perhaps the first experience humans have with the exercise of power. Not choosing where we land at the moment of our birth might make us feel constrained. However, Pearce claims that “the exercise of power always seems to cut in two ways, both liberating and constraining […] and so it is with the power of language and culture that enables us to move into a world of meaning and purpose that we did not create”( Pearce, 2007, p. 98). Colombians are born in a world where the official narrative portray them as mere victims of violence. They grow up believing that if the war is to end, it is exclusively in the hands of the national government to finish it.

In my ethnographic work among community leaders, I have been told many times, “the government is not doing enough”, “we need more of the government to bring peace to our territories”, and the like. However, because I have accompanied the ethnographic method with CMM, I have learned that often what is said does not correspond to what is done. Utilizing CMM, I have noticed that community leaders in Colombia, notwithstanding the narratives of victimhood and violence, elaborate peaceful responses to the violent conflict that create experiences of peace in their communities—inhabitants feel peace as the result of the work of these community leaders. It is not only in what they explicitly say that one finds alternative narratives to the official one, but in what they do.

Indeed, alternative narratives to the official one are found in the concrete actions of those who seek peace. But they are also found in some of the stories they tell, if one looks and listens with curiosity. Pearce claims that, “the Theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning points to the dynamic dance between coordinating actions and making/managing meaning as the site where we might find answers” (Pearce, 2007, p. 105). In workshops with people concerned with bringing peace to the country, I use the LUUUUTT model to make possible and watch this dance. Community peacebuilders—those who organize their communities to make life possible in the middle of a war—hold specific and concrete “stories” of peace. For instance, some of the areas where many forcibly displaced people live are considered territories of peace. That’s the case of the peace community of San José de Apartadó, where no armed actors, including the Colombian army, are allowed. It is also the case of comuna 8 in Medellin, a place that in numerous times has been named publicly as a “territory for peace” by its inhabitants. Governments also hold specific and concrete stories of peace. There is an article in the Colombian constitution of 1991 that mandates the sitting government to seek and secure peace. And when one reads the Colombian political history there is a peace process every 15 years. What appears to be the issue is that more often than not, these stories do not dance together, and if they do, the different parts are uncoordinated. When they try, the dance seems clumsy, forced, uncomfortable. This is due to the fact that the different stories of peacebuilding in that country are read in isolation to each other.

CMM proposes that we approach the world by embracing its mysterious nature, with curiosity. There are many unknowns, and if we venture ourselves to enter them with curiosity, new meanings emerge. Pearce claims, “culture seems coherent, consistent, and complete […] but the closer one gets to it, the more we see that there are fractures and fissures, open-ended escape valves” (Pearce, 2007, p. 98). The LUUUUTT Model specifically and the communication perspective in CMM in general allows for a wider comprehension of the obstacles—linguistic and otherwise—in the search for peace in Colombia. Most importantly, it allows us to identify the unexplored possibilities to transform that conflict for good. Peace in Colombia will not come from our appealing to the coherent, consistent, and complete readings of the country’s history, but from our exploration of the fractures, fissures, and indeed, open-ended valves that are found in the stories and in the concrete actions of the many Colombians who have sought peace in the shadows of the official narrative.

Joan Camilo López
Youth, Peace, and Society program manager
AC4-Climate School, Columbia University

References

Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and time. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Pearce, W.B. (2007). Making social worlds: A communication perspective . Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.