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Chocolate, Politics and Peace-Building pp 1–35Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Introduction: The Chocolate-Politics Continuum

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Part of the book series: Studies of the Americas ((STAM))

Abstract

The introduction proposes the analytical continuum of chocolate and politics as the double core of the book, drawing on materialist anthropology. It introduces the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, an emblematic organisation of victims of the Colombian conflict, mostly studied from the frame of human rights, thus meriting a fresh gaze from social anthropology, which offers the opportunity to understand them in their own terms, rather than as a case study. It proposes seeing this as an analytical shift from the gaze of ‘negative peace’ to ‘positive peace’, using Galtung’s terms from the field of peace studies. It gives an overview of the Colombian armed conflict and the category of victimhood, mobilised politically by groups such as the Peace Community to make moral claims. It presents the ethnographic scenario of Urabá, a conflict zone in the north-west of Colombia. It argues for seeing the production of the identity narratives of social movements as an everyday cultural practice, taking place simultaneously with other daily practices such as farming, drawing on Bourdieusian practice theory. It introduces the concepts of the ‘radical narrative’, the ‘organic narrative’ and the ‘alternative community’ collective identity, and ends by describing the structure of the text.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I have written elsewhere: “Campesinos may be workers on the farms of others, or may own their land […] The term campesino can be translated as peasant or rural farmer, but the author dislikes these options, firstly because they sound potentially derogatory, and secondly because campesino is a whole cultural category in Colombia and other parts of Latin America that is not accurately conveyed by these translations” (Burnyeat 2013: 437n). I therefore maintain the original Spanish. All citations originally in Spanish are my translations.

  2. 2.

    The guerrilla also violated the Community’s human rights, and these acts were also denounced. However, in the Community’s perspective, as well as analysts such as Javier Giraldo, Centre for Research and Popular Education (CINEP) and the documentation of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as Peace Brigades International (PBI) and Amnesty International, the large majority of abuses, over 80%, have been at the hands of paramilitaries and/or state forces.

  3. 3.

    See http://cdpsanjose.org

  4. 4.

    The idea of ‘community’ is at the core of their collective identity (see Chap. 9). For this reason, I use the term ‘Community’ with a capital C, rather than an acronym such as PCSJA, because it is how they refer to themselves.

  5. 5.

    https://www.lush.com/

  6. 6.

    For analysis on international accompaniment as a strategy for the protection of human rights defenders , see Eguren and Mahoney (1997).

  7. 7.

    The objective of international presence is, first and foremost, the protection of the accompanied persons. Therefore, the conduct of the field volunteers is based on being visible—via the PBI logo on their uniforms—in places which the accompanied persons see as prioritised, during delimited temporalities, at their request. The interaction includes walking alongside threatened defenders when they undertake risky journeys and compiling field information about the conflict dynamics; but there is also an emotional component in the framework of international solidarity, because spending long periods of time with human beings means creating human relationships.

  8. 8.

    For an article I published after this field experience about community peace initiatives and protection strategies, see Burnyeat (2013).

  9. 9.

    http://chocolatedepaz.com

  10. 10.

    The mediation scenario falls outside the scope of this book; I stopped working with Brimelow after September 2015 and some of the information I gathered is delicate, because it could compromise the Community’s security. But the negotiations, discourses and positions I heard over that time period contributed to the strengthening of my analysis, especially Part II, because I observed the polarised narratives in action, and saw how difficult they were to overcome.

  11. 11.

    These date from 1994 to 2013. Footnotes to these clarify sources and appear as JGA (Javier Giraldo Archive), folder year/page(s).

  12. 12.

    Some Anglophone scholars eschew the term ‘paramilitarism ’, translated from the Colombian paramilitarismo , as Spanglish, and prefer to replace it where possible with existing English nouns such as ‘paramilitary groups’. Throughout my work, however, I have decided to use ‘paramilitarism’, firstly because it is an accepted coinage used widely by NGOs, and secondly because it retains semantically the idea of a phenomenon which goes beyond individual actors and groups.

  13. 13.

    El Tiempo, 11 July 2013, ‘Editorial: Renace la Unión Patriótica’. http://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/CMS-12924130 [accessed 9 September 2016].

  14. 14.

    For example El Tiempo, 9 March 2005, http://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-1626851 [accessed 31 July 2015].

  15. 15.

    Law No.1448 of 2011 , ‘Por la cual se dictan medidas de atención, asistencia y reparación integral a las víctimas del conflicto armado interno y se dictan otras disposiciones’. http://wsp.presidencia.gov.co/Normativa/Leyes/Documents/ley144810062011.pdf [Accessed 9 August 2015]. The need for this law and a previous attempt at passing it developed between 2007 and 2009 but was repealed by Uribe’s government, due partly to the official discourse which did not recognise the existence of the armed conflict and the cognate argument that those who had suffered at the hands of the state should not be recognised as victims unless the perpetrator was found guilty by a court (Burnyeat 2010).

  16. 16.

    http://www.unidadvictimas.gov.co/

  17. 17.

    UNHCR figures as of December 2016: http://www.acnur.org/fileadmin/scripts/doc.php?file=fileadmin/Documentos/BDL/2017/10938 [accessed 18 March 2017].

  18. 18.

    ‘Palabras del Presidente Juan Manuel Santos en la entrega del Informe del Centro de Memoria Histórica’, 24 July 2013. At: http://wsp.presidencia.gov.co/Prensa/2013/Julio/Paginas/20130724_03-Palabras-del-Presidente-Juan-Manuel-Santos-en-la-entrega-del-Informe-del-Centro-de-Memoria-Historica.aspx [accessed17 March 2017].

  19. 19.

    http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21712136-which-country-improved-most-2016-our-country-year [accessed 31 January 2017].

  20. 20.

    http://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/consejo-de-estado-reconoce-que-hubo-engano-generalizado-en-campana-del-no-al-plebiscito/510010 [accessed 31 January 2017].

  21. 21.

    Giraldo (2010); Derechos de petición by Javier Giraldo (http://www.javiergiraldo.org/); communiqués by the Peace Community ; communiqués by international NGOs such as PBI, Amnesty International, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Operazzione Colomba.

  22. 22.

    http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/132431?redirectedFrom=organic [accessed 11 September 2014].

  23. 23.

    Community, ‘Estatutos de la Comunidad’, JGA 1995–1997/172–199.

  24. 24.

    http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/132456?redirectedFrom=organize#eid [accessed 17 July 2015].

  25. 25.

    http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/132452?redirectedFrom=organization#eid [accessed 17 July 2015].

  26. 26.

    Interview transcripts for ‘Solidarity Economy’ (2014 PBI UK non-public report, author’s personal archive).

  27. 27.

    Recent literature on new social movements has increasingly turned towards ethnographic methods to understand social movements as complex cultural compositions engaged in meaning-making operations, for example Casas-Cortés et al. 2008; Holland et al. 2008; Kurzman 2008.

  28. 28.

    DANE (National Administrative Department of Statistics). May 2007. Colombia una nación multicultural: Su diversidad étnica. Results and analysis of 2005 National Population Census. https://www.dane.gov.co/files/censo2005/etnia/sys/colombia_nacion.pdf [accessed 20 May 2017].

  29. 29.

    UNDP Colombia. Informe Nacional de Desarrollo Humano 2011. http://www.co.undp.org/content/colombia/es/home/library/human_development/informe-nacional-de-desarrollo-humano-2011.html [accessed 11 July 2017]

  30. 30.

    CIJP ‘Informe sobre el proceso’. JGA 1995–1997/126–130.

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    Gwen Burnyeat

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Burnyeat, G. (2018). Introduction: The Chocolate-Politics Continuum. In: Chocolate, Politics and Peace-Building. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51478-9_1

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