Gwen Burnyeat has authored a vividly detailed ethnographic and analytical exegesis of her research on the Colombian peace process from 2017 to 2018. During this period, Burnyeat worked as a researcher for the Oficina del Alto Comisionado para la Paz (Office of the High Commissioner for Peace; OACP), the government agency responsible for organizing and implementing peace negotiations between the Colombian government and guerrilla groups. The book, as she attests, is “not simply a microlevel ethnography of Colombian government officials” (p. 2). Instead, Burnyeat's work shows how government officials represent their government and the Colombian state, which, she cautions, differs substantively from other examples of representation because, as many social scientists acknowledge, neither the state nor the government is an object. A recurring theme in the book is the way these officials embody the state, in what Burnyeat calls “giving face,” while being held individually and personally responsible for the government's acts. The OACP took on the role of educating Colombian society about the negotiations and the final agreement, reached in 2016. That role, referred to as “peace pedagogy,” failed dramatically, as Burnyeat notes. A week after the treaty was signed by representatives of the Colombian government and the leadership of the largest, oldest, and most powerful guerrilla group, las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC), the Colombian public rejected the treaty by a narrow electoral margin, with a high rate of abstention. Burnyeat's critical analysis of peace pedagogy and its failures elaborates an extensive and incisive critique of the liberalism underpinning both the treaty and peace pedagogy, as well as of liberal governments like the one led by Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, which negotiated the treaty. After the Colombian electorate rejected the treaty, the Santos government renegotiated several of its key aspects and pushed it through the Colombian Congress, which ratified it. About 80 percent of the FARC then demobilized. But, as Burnyeat's book emphasizes, many of the treaty's stipulations underperformed or were undermined by the government of Iván Duque, which succeeded the Santos administration in 2018. Much has transpired since the book was published. In 2022, Colombians elected Gustavo Petro, a former member of the M-19 guerrilla group, who leads the first left-wing government in Colombian history. Despite his vow to operationalize the peace treaty more effectively, violent conflict has persisted and increased between the government's army and police, the reconstituted remnants of the FARC, el Ejército de Liberación Nacional (the Army of National Liberation, or ELN, the second-largest guerrilla organization), several cocaine-trafficking organizations heavily involved in illicit gold mining, and various right-wing paramilitary groups. In the United States, the second election of Donald Trump has unleashed resurgent resource-seeking imperialist aggression by the US in Venezuela (and elsewhere), which often threatens to turn against Colombia. Setting aside these developments, which render a relatively small part of Burnyeat's analysis somewhat dated, readers can productively focus on her analysis of liberalism's ideological character and the complex relationships among government, state, and society, in her effort to understand the failures of peace pedagogy. The book's narrative exegesis hinges on an adept critical deconstruction of liberalism's mythology about itself as the embodiment of rationalism, as an application of reason and logic that describes society and aims to resolve social problems through purportedly technical or nonpolitical solutions. In other words, liberalism is a political worldview that denies it is political or ideological. Reading Burnyeat reminded me of my own shock at understanding this paradigm. In my first year of graduate school, I interviewed the Newsweek reporter who covered El Salvador, which was then fully embroiled in civil war. The reporter described his politics as “centrist,” in contrast to the distortions and ideological blinders of both the US left, which sympathized with the revolutionary Salvadoran guerrillas, and the Reaganite right, which, in the context of the Cold War, supported eliminating them. The reporter insisted that “centrist” (read “liberal,” as opposed to left or right) was synonymous with “objective.” When I pointed this out, I encountered what Burnyeat identifies as a symptom of liberalism's denigration of all that is identified as ideological on the right or the left, and liberals’ indignant incredulity that people “still believe that stuff.” Peace pedagogy, which aimed to educate and instruct the Colombian public about the negotiations and the final treaty, was forged in the crucible of elite Colombians’ liberalism, or “cultural liberalism,” as Burnyeat calls it. This meant that the OACP functionaries with whom Burnyeat worked were largely unable to comprehend the various emotional reactions against and often faith-based objections to the treaty, which the right-wing former president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, and his form of populism effectively mobilized to turn the tide against approval. The OACP attempted to maintain and communicate the idea that the peace treaty was a technical, nonpolitical solution to the seven decades of civil conflict. But this posture only increased the distrust and unease among many Colombians who realized that peace pedagogy and the peace treaty were, in fact, profoundly political. Liberalism is certainly in crisis—as is evident in the no vote in Colombia in 2016, the election of Iván Duque in 2018, and Brexit in 2020, as well as the election and reelection of Trump in the US. But I agree with Burnyeat that this does not signify the ultimate collapse of liberalism, which has undergone and emerged from many crises in the 19th, 20th, and now 21st centuries. I also agree with Burnyeat that liberals typically react to crisis by recommending and trying to implement “more liberalism,” primarily by explaining why people vote against what liberals calculate to be their own interests, and trying to figure out how to motivate them to calculate their interests rationally, that is, as liberals. But sometimes, as we are witnessing—especially when liberalism has been unmasked as an ideology, its promises seem tattered, and its premises have been vilified—people do turn to right-wing or left-wing alternatives. Interestingly, in the 21st century, many leftist alternatives coming to power promise to deepen, indeed to fulfill, liberalism's promise of democracy and human rights, as the elections of Petro in Colombia and Zohran Mamdani in New York City underscore, whereas the right's populism seeks to abandon liberalism and all of its promises once and for all. Burnyeat humanizes the liberal OACP workers in this book—she gives faces to the face of the government, and she is unflinching in her critique without giving up on liberalism's democratic promises. Before embedding with the OACP, Burnyeat worked as “a peace-building practitioner” and then as an anthropologist studying that type of work in a very specific location: the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó. This intentional community is located in Urabá, one of the most violent areas of Colombia; residents of San José de Apartadó rigorously abjure involvement with all the combatants in Colombia's conflict, including the government's army and police. They represent a leftist alternative that is not meant to rescue liberalism. In this book, Burnyeat acknowledges the community (and her own) dream of peace as utopian and distinct from the state's representation in the form of the OACP. Burnyeat's insights are remarkably valuable since she has worked on and studied so many facets of the peace process. This is a challenging book—the concept of face and faciality that recurs throughout the chapters as a central analytical hinge derives from the work of Deleuze—and it is definitely important for a readership beyond Colombianist scholars and other Latin Americanists. Burnyeat's analysis of liberalism falls within a much broader genre of critical thinking and is a pertinent and sharply observed addition to it. The fact that, notwithstanding its failures and mythos, liberalism remains a site of contention mirrors the necessity for an invigorated global political imaginary.
Les W. Field (Wed,) studied this question.
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