IPAP · The Intersectional Politics of Antagonism in Peacebuilding

The Intersectional Politics of Antagonism in Peacebuilding

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.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union