Violentology: Expert Knowledge and Government Peacebuilding in Colombia 1958-1990

This dissertation studies the intellectual and political history of peace in Colombia from 1958 to 1990. To do so, I investigate how Colombian academics participated in their government’s responses to violence amid the ebbs and flows of political armed conflicts since the mid-20^th century. Throughout this period, the Colombian government tested various formulas to end violence which ranged from military pacification to peace negotiations, and from development programs to democratic reforms. Academics labored in parallel researching violence and engaging in intellectual exchanges with government officials over the ideal pathways to peace. In the process, these scholars both developed the academic field of violence studies and attempted to influence some of the most significant government peacebuilding efforts in the country. By 1990, the government-academia partnership for peace yielded a consensus around an approach I call “peace as democracy,” that would have its heyday in the 1991 National Constitutional Assembly. Although contemporary Peace Studies scholarship upholds peace and democracy as naturally aligned goals, the history of violence studies in Colombia demonstrates the large degree of contingency that yielded this result amid the continent’s longest armed conflict.

Drawing from previously understudied official and academic archives as well as oral history interviews, I follow two distinct, yet interrelated, intellectual generations of violence studies scholars. The first generation initiated the field in the late 1950s by studying the bipartisan armed conflict of the previous decades, known as la Violencia. Since the early 1970s, a new cohort of scholars embarked on a revisionist project of la Violencia period as they also turned their gaze to contemporary violence. By the 1980s, guerrilla insurgencies, counter-insurgent paramilitary groups, and a buoyant drug economy sustained high levels of violence in the country. Scholars from the new generation rose to national prominence through their participation in the 1987 Commission on the Study of Violence created by the Virgilio Barco administration (1986-1990). The press assigned the moniker “violentologists” to the group, and “violentology” soon came to denote a set of innovative ideas about violence and peace in late 20^th century Colombia. While this generation actively invested in the “peace as democracy” approach, they did so from an expansive understanding of democracy that the national government chose to circumvent. By interrogating the historical mismatch between intellectuals’ robust visions of peace and the government’s peacebuilding action, this research offers new insights on the role of expert knowledge in national peace efforts.