Understanding Conflict Imaginaries: Provocations from Colombia and Indonesia (Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies) 3031039750, 9783031039751

Citation preview

Understanding Conflict Imaginaries Provocations from Colombia and Indonesia Simon Philpott Nicholas Morgan

Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies Series Editors

Oliver P. Richmond University of Manchester Manchester, UK Annika Björkdahl Department of Political Science Lund University Lund, Sweden Gëzim Visoka Dublin City University Dublin, Ireland

This agenda-setting series of research monographs, now more than a decade old, provides an interdisciplinary forum aimed at advancing innovative new agendas for peace and conflict studies in International Relations. Many of the critical volumes the series has so far hosted have contributed to new avenues of analysis directly or indirectly related to the search for positive, emancipatory, and hybrid forms of peace. Constructive critiques of liberal peace, hybrid peace, everyday contributions to peace, the role of civil society and social movements, international actors and networks, as well as a range of different dimensions of peace (from peacebuilding, statebuilding, youth contributions, photography, and many case studies) have been explored so far. The series raises important political questions about what peace is, whose peace and peace for whom, as well as where peace takes place. In doing so, it offers new and interdisciplinary perspectives on the development of the international peace architecture, peace processes, UN peacebuilding, peacekeeping and mediation, statebuilding, and localised peace formation in practice and in theory. It examines their implications for the development of local peace agency and the connection between emancipatory forms of peace and global justice, which remain crucial in different conflict-affected regions around the world. This series’ contributions offer both theoretical and empirical insights into many of the world's most intractable conflicts, also investigating increasingly significant evidence about blockages to peace. This series is indexed by Scopus.

Simon Philpott • Nicholas Morgan

Understanding Conflict Imaginaries Provocations from Colombia and Indonesia

Simon Philpott Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Nicholas Morgan Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

ISSN 1759-3735     ISSN 2752-857X (electronic) Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies ISBN 978-3-031-03975-1    ISBN 978-3-031-03976-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03976-8 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © John Rawsterne/ patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Many people have made the research that informs this monograph possible. The Screening Violence project began as a conversation over a couple of drinks among academic colleagues at Newcastle University. Discussion quickly extended into reading about the social imaginary and regular meetings involving other investigators on the project, namely, Guy Austin and Philippa Page, both at Newcastle University. Paula Blair joined our discussions on the social imaginary and sharpened our understanding of film and the ways we might use it as a research tool. Peter Baker posed challenging theoretical questions. Having decided to frame the project around five different polities with overlapping but different experiences of political violence, Roddy Brett, now at Bristol University, and Brandon Hamber, at Ulster University, joined as investigators and brought focus and clarity to our thinking about imaginaries. Without those two years of preliminary work and reflection, the project would not have gotten off the ground. Thank you one and all! Since being awarded the funding, it has been a delight to work with the core team of Guy Austin (our tireless Principal Investigator, or bagman as we know him), Roddy Brett, Brandon Hamber, Philippa Page, and our Research Associate, Gemma McKinnie. It is hard to imagine a better team of academic colleagues to work with. We wish to warmly thank our Professional Services colleague Carolyn Taylor of the School of Modern Language at Newcastle University for her outstanding skills in putting our project budget together and for her forensic management of the budget once we had been awarded the grant. In our research sites in Colombia and Indonesia, we have been privileged to work with numerous academic and filmmaker colleagues who v

vi 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

made the research possible. It is their commitment to and support of the project that enabled us to identify potential project interlocutors who have so generously given of their time and with great courage shared their own experiences. In Indonesia, we would like to extend our deepest gratitude to Diah Kusumaningrum, Ayu Diasti Rahmawati, Muti Kurniasari, Ogik, Coory Yohana Pakpahan, all based at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. Whether brainstorming on Indonesian films suitable for showing in the project, organising film showings, setting up screens and projectors, looking out for the well-being of project participants, or facilitating travel to different parts of the country, we were in awe of our colleagues’ energy and thankful for the committed intellectual engagement with the Screening Violence project. A special note of thanks to Poppy Sulistyaning Winanti who, as Vice Dean for Research, Community Service, Cooperation, and Alumni Affairs at Gadjah Mada, made comfortable working visits possible and extended warm hospitality. Many thanks to Yosep Anggi Prasetya, Arya Sweta and their team at Limaenam Films whose initial interest in the project has extended to working patiently with us at the many film showings and putting together an account of the project through the eyes of documentary filmmakers. In Colombia we owe a debt of gratitude to old friends. Pablo Burgos was the eye behind the lens and a tireless travelling companion in the most difficult of personal circumstances. Our academic partner Manuel Beltrán at the Universidad Claretiana in Quibdó played a key role in organising focus groups in Yuto and Quibdó while Napoleón García Anaya did the same at the Universidad Tecnológica del Chocó and in Tutunendo. Rafael Perea Chalá and Oscar Larrahondo were instrumental in setting up the screening at the Universidad del Pacífico in Buenaventura, while Tancredo Iván Vargas set up the very first pilot event in Bogotá. Gearóid O Loingsigh provided his usual invaluable advice during the planning stage and team members Orlando Castillo and Ana Mercedes Panchoaga offered their insight, contacts, and endless patience in explaining the project’s aims and encouraging participation. Yilver Mosquera facilitated a crucial series of interviews in his beloved Patía and the arrival of Eduardo Restrepo provided a boost at a key moment in the project. It is a pleasure to know that we still have another eighteen months to share ideas with many of these colleagues. We also note that it is a bittersweet moment as we lament the passing of José Oscar Córdoba, Rector of the Universidad Claretiana in Quibdó, who supported the project from the outset with his usual charisma.

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

vii

Our greatest debt is to those who have worked with us over years, watching, responding, reflecting on the films we have shown and often sharing difficult intimacies with others in the audience and with the research teams. To those who participated in film showings in Bogotá, Yogyakarta, Tutunendo, Solo, Quibdó, Jakarta, Buenaventura, Yuto and Ambon, our sincere thanks. That some participants must remain nameless provides the most vivid reminder that the legacies of conflict can endure for decades. Thank you for helping us better understand what our research is trying to achieve. The research carried out for this monograph was only possible through generous funding provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R006512/1).

Contents

1 Concepts  1 2 Contexts 27 3 Encounters 73 4 Concluding Thoughts121 References125 Index131

ix

CHAPTER 1

Concepts

Abstract  In this section, we discuss the concept of the social imaginary, highlighting key themes and thinkers in its development, paying particular attention to the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor. While not conventionally understood to be scholars of the social imaginary, we note Benedict Anderson, Antonio Gramsci, and Michel Foucault, all serve as points of reference in reflection on the development of the social imaginary. We highlight the ways that the work of Hegel and Marx need to be read imaginatively to fully appreciate the depth of their critique. Our concerns with liberal ideas and practices of peace-building are set out in the context of an introduction of conflict imaginaries. We argue that conflict imaginaries are the shared images and analogies that situate subjects in relation to political violence but that they are specific to communities and individuals, highly contested, and that multiple imaginaries may be at work in framing a conflict. We critically analyse the claims of those who claim to be mere bystanders to conflict situations and reflect upon the concept of competitive victimhood. We situate our research in contexts of space, scale, and time, and note our determination to address local imaginaries of conflict. Finally, we emphasise that unlike scholars of the social imaginary who focus on the facilitation of sociability and community building, our work addresses the factors that produce and reproduce conflict in the imaginative realms of those who experience it and participate in it. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Philpott, N. Morgan, Understanding Conflict Imaginaries, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03976-8_1

1

2 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Keywords  Social imaginary • Conflict imaginary • Cornelius Castoriadis • Charles Taylor • Liberal peace • Antagonists • Bystanders • Time • Space • Scale • Affect

Understanding Conflict Imaginaries The reflections presented in this short monograph emerge from a project that sets out to explore the collective representations through which conflict is understood in places that have experienced intense periods of civil strife. The sites chosen, in Algeria, Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia and Northern Ireland, share violent histories but are in many respects very different, with diverse political cultures and different relationships to the polities to which they are embedded. Our underlying assumption is that to understand conflict properly we need to explore the imaginative worlds of those who live with it, whether as participants or bystanders. The project analyses the metaphors, tropes and images used in each of these locations to represent political violence in order to determine what they have in common and what separates them. Working across different research sites posed an important question about how best to access the imaginations of the interlocutors we sought to work with. Recognising that asking communities to reflect on their own conflicts is difficult and perhaps simply reinforces local imaginaries, we decided upon working with the different communities in each of the five primary research sites through viewings of films about the conflicts of others. The visual mediums of fictional cinema and documentary film are relatively inclusive and often emotionally engaging, and so encourage participants to explore their understandings of conflict and reconciliation through their interpretation of a range of different contexts. We argue that asking communities to reflect on the violence of other polities creates a space for critical reflection on the ways that individuals and communities understand their own experiences of conflict and possible transitions from it. Thus far, our research indicates that screening representations of unfamiliar conflicts produces rich discussions about the nature of political violence. The place of political violence within these imaginative worlds is a complex one. Violence ends debate and silences discourse and in a very immediate sense it speaks for itself. Yet political violence has an impact not only on perpetrators, survivors and witnesses but on everyone who knows that

1 CONCEPTS 

3

it has taken place. This kind of violence takes place within shared frameworks, some of which explain and legitimise it, while others disavow and condemn it, or support an equally violent response. As well as sending a message, therefore, violence itself emerges from a particular way of imagining the social world. To understand how conflict comes about and why it disappears, therefore, is not simply a matter of analysing its material stakes or the balance of power between combatants but also of immersing ourselves in the passions and beliefs that animate it. Although we recognise that such imaginings are rooted in the material conditions of a world in which violence is routinely used in the daily organisation of social, political and economic life, we emphasise their importance in determining the direction that any given conflict may take. We assert that the only way to meaningfully explore such representations is by focusing on local understandings of antagonism, armed confrontation and post conflict coexistence, however the latter might be defined. Our primary ambition, therefore, is to introduce and give substance to the concept of conflict imaginaries. In this respect, we note that despite the necessity of researching violence in its specific context, both scholarship and policy documents have often invoked a universalizing discourse of human rights and transitional justice. We agree with the insights provided by those critics who suggest that such an approach lacks sufficient nuance precisely because overarching analyses and proposed national solutions often neglect intense local experiences that demand distinctive attention. Citing Roger Mac Ginty, Jan Selby observes that ‘…liberal peace-building exercises a “near monopoly” within contemporary peace operations, such that it applies worldwide a “highly standardized” model of how to create sustainable peace—“a peace from IKEA: a flat-pack peace made from standardized components”’ (Selby, 2013, pp. 61–62). Selby’s remarks highlight the importance of engaging with local understandings of antagonism that not only shape the tenor of conflict and post-conflict but also play an important role in determining the prospects for peace and reconciliation. There are two further reasons why we consider it important to think in terms of conflict imaginaries. Firstly, the approaches mentioned above tend to characterise internal conflicts in quantitative terms. UN documents, for example, describe ‘non-international armed conflicts’ as ‘protracted armed confrontations’ which ‘must reach a certain threshold of confrontation’ or a ‘minimum level of intensity’ to be officially recognised (ICTY, 1995, para. 70). Quantitative definitions of this sort are part of a

4 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

broader set of institutional discourses of conflict, transition and post-­ conflict that set out to guide the interventions of international agencies in any post-conflict situation. Such quantitative metrics reveal little of the specifics of any given case and in particular of how violence is embedded in other forms of social conflict. Galtung’s influential distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ understandings of peace presupposes the importance of thinking beyond the presence or absence of violent actions, while his ‘triangle of violence’ invites us to consider the relationship between ‘direct’, ‘cultural’ and ‘structural’ forms of violence, though Galtung does not use all of these terms in his original text (Galtung, 1969). For all its limitations, his emphasis on the importance of confronting ‘structural violence’ is a suggestive notion that questions the contested notion of the ‘liberal peace’, which has undergone sustained critique within disciplines such as International Relations (inter alia Duffield, 2007; Pugh, 2005; Richmond, 2010; Selby, 2013). We are deeply interested in how structural violence striates the imaginaries of social actors and how these imaginaries themselves channel the course of violent confrontation. While there are undoubtedly patterns in the ways civil strife unfolds and concludes, without a sophisticated understanding of local imaginaries there is no prospect of apprehending the elements that make each conflict unique. Secondly, we are interested in the consequences of the liberal underpinnings of much research into political violence. For example, Duncan McCargo and Robert Taylor argue that the deep embrace by American political science of liberalism, with its assumption that human beings are ‘rational’, self-transparent actors motivated by material interest, militates against an understanding of other ‘realities’ (see McCargo & Taylor, 1996, pp. 211–213). Citing John Gray, Taylor notes that ‘it is distinctive of liberal thinkers to deny that there is within the diversity of forms of government and society disclosed to us in history a legitimate variety of frameworks for human well-being’ (Taylor, 1993, p. 8). On this view, it is equally legitimate to argue that liberalism has a similarly limited appreciation of the ways that human beings experience violence, as perpetrators, victims or bystanders. Narrow in their understanding of modernity yet hegemonic in the social sciences, liberal assumptions limit research into political violence and its consequences (Selby, 2013, pp. 58–59). Thinking in terms of conflict imaginaries, we claim, allows us to avoid some of these problematic assumptions by focusing on the value-laden collective representations that shape the social world within which the actions of violent actors make sense. Our recognition that all social actors

1 CONCEPTS 

5

share such cognitive models immediately raises questions for us as researchers for we, too, inhabit not only the social imaginaries associated with our disciplines but also those that mark our own personal life histories. We do not pretend to have successfully negotiated such problems in the work done to date but have tried to address them by engaging in a fieldwork process in which we work at length with a range of interlocutors, exploring their understandings of conflict and violence while making clear our own assumptions about the project in which we are engaged.

Social Imaginaries: A Slippery Concept Before going any further, however, some consideration of the idea of the social imaginary is in order. Though referenced with a certain regularity in the social sciences, the concept remains underdeveloped in contemporary social science, and lacks grounding in empirical research. Thus, while the use of the term implies the reader’s familiarity with its meaning, many references to the social imaginary are little more than explanatory gestures that appeal to a ‘cultural’ category that invites as many questions as it provides answers. In such cases, a little probing reveals that the social imaginary seems to denote a set of assumptions and attitudes—one might say prejudices—that are deemed to be dominant in a given context at a given moment, though who shares them, how they shape the actions of real people, and how they may be related to different sets of attitudes and assumptions is generally unclear. Examples might include the belief that American egalitarian individualism produces a political culture driven by rationality whereas the role of religion in Islamic polities renders Muslims ill-­suited to dealing with contemporary political problems. The passionate nature of Italian and Spanish peoples explains why there are so many successful motorcycle racers from these countries whereas English eccentricity explains their love for cricket, a game sometimes played over 5 days and producing no result. Such imprecision reveals the existence of a ‘common sense’ use of the concept, too underdeveloped to be much use as an analytical tool. Nonetheless, a number of scholars have developed the central concept in some detail, in the process suggesting points of similarity with other ways of thinking about collective understandings of the social that do much to reveal what is at stake in these debates. It is with these uses of the social imaginary, therefore, that we start our attempt to arrive at a working definition of the term.

6 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Perhaps the most influential and certainly the most referenced use of the term deploys it as a label for a fundamental set of assumptions that makes social life possible. Cornelius Castoriadis, who offers the most densely elaborated of these accounts, argues that it is a neglected concept in the social sciences and humanities. His interest in the imaginary arises from his disillusionment with the determinist aspects of contemporary Marxism. Against this economism, Castoriadis’ work is animated by a desire ‘to identify the creative force in the making of social historical worlds’ (Gaonkar, 2002, p. 1). Positing an ontology of creation, he argues that every polity is self-creating or ‘self-instituting’: it cannot be produced by or deduced from pre-existing conditions, even though these constrain it. This approach explicitly recognises that while human beings do all the same things, they do so in unique and unpredictable ways (Gaonkar, 2002, p.  7). Castoriadis therefore repudiates the idea that new and emergent forms of social life are merely adaptive surface variations of an underlying order, but rather emphasises ‘the emergence of radical otherness, immanent creation, non-trivial novelty’ (see Gaonkar, 2002, p. 6). Furthermore, to identify the imaginary is to discover that which, ‘amongst the infinity of possible symbolic structures’, ‘specifies one symbolic system, establishes the prevalent canonical relations, orients in one of the innumerable possible directions all the metaphors and metonymies that are abstractly conceivable’. Thus ‘[w]e cannot understand a society outside of a unifying factor that provides a signified content and weaves it with the symbolic structures’ (see Strauss, 2006, p. 324). On this account, the imaginary is a fundamental, set of unifying beliefs shared by all the members of a given polity. A further unavoidable point of reference is Charles Taylor, who defines the social imaginary as comprising how people imagine their social existence, their relations with others of the same polity and, in particular, their assumptions about how social interactions are supposed to take place. This includes everyday expectations about how one conducts economic transactions, socialises in a pub, or engages with political processes, as well as ‘the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (Taylor, 2004, p. 23). Taken as a whole all of these presuppositions amount to ‘a form of understanding that has a wider grasp of our history and social existence’ (Gaonkar, 2002, p. 10). This complex and not fully articulated understanding of a given socio-political situation is routinely carried in ‘images, stories, and legends’ and is widely shared, making

1 CONCEPTS 

7

possible common social practices and a generally shared sense of legitimacy (Taylor, 2004, p. 23). These definitions suggest links to other ways of thinking about the deep presuppositions that underpin everyday life. They are not quite the same as Wittgenstein’s ‘background’, which includes the physical conditions of possibility within which meaningful acts take place, are reminiscent in some respects of Searle’s related account of ‘social reality’, which notes the usually unremarked processes through which ‘cars, bathtubs, houses, money, restaurants and schools’ come to ‘seem as natural to us as stones and water and trees’ (Searle, 1995, p. 4). They are also similar in some respects to what Hannah Arendt calls ‘common sense’, ‘the basic human facility that lets us make elemental judgments about everyday matters’ (Crehan, 2016, p. 49) and which ‘presupposes a common world into which we all fit’ (Crehan, 2016, p. 51). The taken-for-granted nature of the social world conceals the work of the imaginary in bringing it into being. For Castoriadis, the imaginary is, the ‘constitutive magma of meaning’ (see Gaonkar, 2002, p. 6), and there can be no language, culture, art, or institutions external to the ‘radical novelty’ immanent to human beings, individually and collectively (Castoriadis, 2007, pp.  72–73). Yet he also emphasises that ‘[o]nce created, both imaginary social significations and institutions crystallize, or solidify…[into] the instituted social imaginary’ (Castoriadis, 2007, p.  73). Here the radical imaginative potential of human beings is tamed, channelled, regulated and brought into line with social norms, with the demands and requirements of a given polity. From this perspective, socialisation is a process of absorbing social institutions and shared meanings, of grasping notions of right and wrong, of learning what is to be revered and hated. ‘When that socialization occurs, the radical imagination is stifled, to a point, in its most important manifestations: it expresses itself more conventionally and repetitiously’ (Castoriadis, 2007, pp. 74–75). A central problematic emerges, namely, the tension between the possibilities of the human imagination and the collective manufacture of the norms and taboos that restrain this underlying potentiality. The political significance of this state of affairs has been the object of much discussion and is at the centre of a number of well-known debates. At its most radical the belief that the social imaginary is so naturalised it is rarely if ever apparent to those who inhabit it, appears in Althusserian notions of ideology, with their claim that it is ideology itself that constitutes human subjects and that there is, therefore, a direct link between the notions of

8 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

‘subjectification’ and ‘subjection’, an idea subsequently developed in some of Foucault’s work (Althusser & Balibar, 1972, pp.  225–253; see, for example, Foucault, 1980). At this point, then, we engage with complex theoretical exchanges about the role of collective representations in the construction of political subjectivity, often referred to as the structure versus agency debate. In a famous paragraph, Marx writes that ‘[m]en make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx, 1978). Here he implicitly recognises the importance not just of the material disposition of resources in a given social formation but of something very like the social imaginary in the shaping of political beliefs and practices. Thus, he claims that it is precisely when contemporary actors ‘seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before’ that they ‘anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language’ (Marx, 1978). Weber, in open dialogue with Marx’s work, uses a striking metaphor to represent the relationship between ideas and practices. While noting that ‘[n]ot ideas, but material interests, directly govern men’s conduct’ he immediately adds the telling comment that, notwithstanding the importance of material interests, ‘the “world images” that have been created by “ideas” have […] determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest’ (Weber, 1946, p. 280). The refusal of idealism, accompanied by a recognition of the power of social imaginaries, continues to characterise later debates. From a conceptual point of view, we note a problematic tendency to reify the imaginary, to wrench it out of context and remove it from those who create, modify, and invoke it. Its singularity in these accounts is in itself a problem, as is the need to identify what represents the fundamental logics of social life that are supposedly shared by all. According to Taylor, for example, ‘once we are well installed in the modern social imaginary, it seems the only possible one, the only one that makes sense’, a metaphor that suggests that the social imaginary is a place we inhabit rather than something that exists intersubjectively (Taylor, 2004, p. 17). Such claims bring the conceptualisation of the social imaginary closer to other frameworks that attempt to account for the relationship between collective representations and social practice, such as Bourdieu’s habitus, that ‘generative principle of regulated

1 CONCEPTS 

9

improvisations, installed in a lasting fashion’ (Bourdieu, 1972, p.  78). Bourdieu’s emphasis on the embodied, internalised nature of the habitus, resonates with the taken-for-granted, unexamined nature of Taylor’s putative imaginary, even though his emphasis is on the cognitive dispositions, based on experience, through which people come to understand themselves as social beings. The importance of metaphor is strikingly exemplified here: for Taylor human beings are installed in the imaginary, while for Bourdieu something rather like the imaginary is installed in them. In both cases a range of assumptions have been so naturalised that social actors find it difficult or even impossible to recognise them, let alone interrogate them. The implication is that even when they feel they are improvising or being spontaneous they are in fact limited by the shape of their social imaginary. Bourdieu uses a similar metaphor to Weber’s to explain this relationship, describing the habitus as a ‘train that takes along its own tracks’ (Bourdieu, 1980, p. 73). The artistic ingenuity and imaginative reach of these explanatory metaphors is striking. Whether in high theory or popular culture, image, metaphor, allusion, simile and a range of other devices inform the ways human beings make their world meaningful. David McNally, for example, notes Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is packed with ‘jokes, puns, wisecracks, sarcasm, parody’ while Marx’s Capital, by careful design and artful presentation, ‘overflows with symbolism, metaphors, ironic barbs, and a stunning range of allusions to world literature.’ The outrage, condemnation, irony, Gothic imagery, and highly dramatic constructions are not examples of florid pose but integral to Marx’s search for a language in which to express the horrors of capitalist everyday life. Marx’s references to vampires and werewolves are deliberate, calculated, and require the reader to engage Capital as a work of imagination or a text the affective power of which arises from the pain of the labouring body (McNally, 2011, pp. 117–119). Yet their deployment reminds us that in exploring imaginaries we are working with the same tools and materials that are the object of our analysis. Of course, we are stretching these comparisons to suit our own purposes, as most of the thinkers referred to here do not use the term social imaginary and the metaphors that are the vehicles for their insights conjure up divergent ways of understanding the relationship between representations and practices. A principal difference is between models that seek to identify underlying assumptions shared by whole ‘societies’ or ‘civilisations’, problematic terms in themselves, and those that seek to

10 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

identify the different dispositions that characterise different ‘groups’, as is the case with Marxist approaches and the sociological thinking of Weber or Bourdieu. However, even those models that emphasise the importance of underlying assumptions in the quotidian functioning of social life nonetheless have to recognise some measure of heterogeneity. Foucault’s early theorisation of the épistémè, for example, is strikingly reminiscent of Castoriadis and Taylor’s view of the social imaginary in its claim that ‘there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice’. Yet later he will note that ‘the épistémè is not kind of underlying grand theory, but a space of dispersion, an open field of relationships endlessly available to interpretation’ (our translation (Foucault, 2001, p. 676). Indeed, the notion of the social imaginary as a fundamental cognitive guide which enables social reproduction is both seductive and in many respects implausible, not least because of the functional role it affords a cohesive set of collective representations, especially as formulated by thinkers like Taylor. In this respect, Anderson’s notion of the imagined community is a useful point of comparison. While his approach helps to explain how the nation is naturalised, leading as it does to people being prepared to die, and kill, ‘for such limited imaginings’ (Anderson, 1991, p. 7), it does not engage with the ways in which the nature of this imagined community becomes a bone of contention, its contours, meanings and consequences a source of intense political dispute. In other words, while the belief that there is such a thing as the nation is shared by people who come to think of themselves as part of this form of political community, the direction and development of that community is a source of intense disagreement. The fissured and politicised nature of these understandings means that when it comes to imaginaries of conflict Gramsci’s notion of ‘common sense’, which, as Kate Crehan notes, is very much at odds with Arendt’s use of the term (Crehan, 2016) provides another important point of reference. The description of common sense as ‘an ambiguous, contradictory and multiform concept’ or ‘a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions’ (cited in Crehan, 2016, p. 51) provides a useful way of thinking about social imaginaries as made up of fragments rather than complete systems. Furthermore, Gramsci’s claim that common sense ‘is a collective noun, like religion: there is not just one common sense, for that too is a product of history and a part of the historical process’ (cited in Crehan, 2016, p. 56) underlines the contextual, contested and potentially antagonistic nature of collective

1 CONCEPTS 

11

representations. It is the ‘messiness’ and plurality of Gramscian common sense that most interests us here. Finally, we also want to note that the question of just how social imaginaries are disseminated has not been considered in any detail. In this regard, we note the contribution of Davoudi and Brooks who emphasise the performative nature of social imaginaries. In their discussion of imaginaries of scale, they note that an imaginary is ‘a performative act through which socio-spatial relations are reproduced and contested, and political projects are consolidated.’ Similarly, ‘[p]erformativity foregrounds relations of power in which contestation and resistance are ever present’ and ‘urges us to attend to questions such as: why, what and how certain scalar imaginaries are called into being, and what makes some stick and become institutionalized and others fade away or get side-lined’ (Davoudi & Brooks, 2021, p. 54). Within this in mind, we note the importance in our work of how conflict imaginaries are performed in social settings such as our focus groups.

Conflict Imaginaries How, then, do we define a conflict imaginary? At the outset, we should emphasise that this concept is an abstraction that we attempt to use as an analytical tool. We focus on periods of violent conflict but the way that collective representations frame these experiences is inevitably related to broader representations of the social. Broadly speaking, we agree with Gaonkar’s view of social imaginaries, in the plural, as occupying ‘a fluid middle ground between embodied practices and explicit doctrines’ (Gaonkar, 2002, p.  11), a point that we will expand on shortly. Furthermore, we seek to limit our assumptions. Thus we make no preconceived claims about how regular they are, nor how much of a hold they exert on real social subjects, nor to what extent they might be seen to hold communities together. Rather, we use the notion as a provisional label for the imaginative resources, the repertoire of images, analogies and tropes, that emerge when we ask people to tell us how they understand conflict. Instead of assuming that such repertoires are obvious and transparent, we argue for the need to describe and analyse them in detail in order to understand their implications. We further assume that conflict imaginaries are only intelligible as such if they are arrayed against other ways of thinking about the social world, ways of thinking that are not just abstractions but intimately associated with people who imagine the world differently:

12 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

people who have different interests or identities, people who are adversaries, opponents, enemies. Indeed, conflict imaginaries imply the existence of a ‘theory of mind’ on the part of those who produce and reproduce them, as they imply that those who are not on ‘our’ side see the world differently from ‘us’. Conflict imaginaries, then, are the sets of shared images and analogies that situate subjects in relation to political violence and those who participate in it. They are inevitably related to broader understandings and representations but play a specific role in modelling the nature of antagonism, revealing identifications and enmities, and expressing a range of affective investments and attachments. They include emotionally charged images, which we set out to excavate and analyse. The attempt by political entrepreneurs of all stripes to impose their perspectives through the use of emotionally potent oversimplifications is an important part of this dynamic, and the role of emotion is something to which we will return shortly. Yet we also suppose that such images are open to a variety of responses and interpretations, which depend on the structures of feeling (Williams, 1977, p.  128) through which people understand their relationships to others. We suppose that social actors are usually aware of the existence of contradictory, often competing imaginaries, without necessarily accepting any of them in their entirety, and we aim to describe how these are appropriated and adapted in context by our participants. Indeed, we want to consider how all of these signifying resources are used to achieve contextually defined goals. Beyond these ‘contents’ and ‘uses’, we seek to be attentive to the conditions of possibility that make them thinkable, that is to say, to the underlying assumptions that have to exist in order for particular ways of imagining conflict to make sense. This aspect of our work directs our attention back towards the deeper underpinnings of social imaginaries. In this regard, we recognise that it may be the case that actors in conflict share fundamental assumptions about what society is or ought to be but nonetheless have opposing interests. It is also possible—indeed, we would claim likely—that conflict is represented as stemming from irreconcilable ways of imagining community, as a struggle between different expectations about the deep structural norms that people believe should prevail in a given polity. All of the above needs further development and illustration, so at this point let us consider both the sorts of contents that we expect to find in our conflict imaginaries and the relationship they have with the

1 CONCEPTS 

13

experiences of people who have lived with conflict. Any conflict imaginary, we believe, inevitably contains the answers to four main questions, who, why, when and where, the answers to which contextualise and to some degree ‘make sense’ of the experience of violence. None of these questions, however, can be taken in isolation, as they are all interrelated in complex ways. As we attempt to systematise our understanding of conflict imaginaries we will focus on how deep affective attachments are expressed through them. In the following section, therefore, we consider some of the contents that we expect to find in conflict imaginaries, which partly reflect the initial results of the fieldwork carried out during the pilot phase of the project. We cannot currently systematise these contents, however. We do not adopt a structuralist approach and make no assumption about the exhaustiveness or otherwise of the provisional categories presented below, which will constantly be open to revision. They can, in any case, only be understood in relation to each other, and it is the underlying ‘logics’ of the metaphors, tropes and memes that make up conflict imaginaries that most interest us. All of these engage with each other in different and often complex ways. Indeed, the point about imaginaries is that they refuse to be tamed, and are resistant to systematisation within simple categories. However, in order to flesh out our notion of the conflict imaginary we approach the term under a number of subheadings. We do not adopt a structuralist approach that tries to cram the imagination, with all of its vibrancy, diversity and darkness, into a rigid set of preconceived categories. On the contrary, we recognise that the implications of metaphors are often unexpected, setting the path for the actions that may be conceived at any given moment. Sets of metaphors converge or pull in different directions, creating particular representations of reality. Exactly how that happens, and how it frames practice, only emerges with detailed analysis. In the following section, therefore, we present a provisional list of features to be taken into account, though these are not be thought of as a prescriptive set of categories of analysis. Antagonists and Bystanders The framing of antagonism is an obvious place to start in our exploration of conflict imaginaries (henceforth CIs). CIs describe the nature of conflict, representing those who are involved and what is at stake. This often takes the form of representations of who ‘we’ are and who ‘they’ are that explain the nature of the confrontation. There is often a responsive aspect

14 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

to CIs, which recognises and responds to how antagonists imagine the conflict, though sometimes the enemy is so dehumanised that what they think is of no consequence. The identitarian aspect of these imaginaries may hinge not only on the fact that the enemy somehow threatens the identity of one set of participants but that they stop them from being who they want to be, blocking their ability to fulfil a destiny or collective desire. A further point here is that the group identities framed within CIs, which play a key role in driving conflict, emerge or are transformed through the struggle itself, and this process leaves its mark in the representation of the identities of all those involved. That is to say, CIs may be saturated with pre-existing identitarian tropes, but the communities they invoke are never simple sociological realities but contested, dynamic visions of community that both influence and are influenced by conflict. Such collective identities are multiple: ethnic, religious, class-based, national, regional, political and so on. Given that our focus in this project is on internal conflict the ways in which CIs figure the relationship of the combatants to the imagined community is crucial, and notions such as regional, ethnic and national identity are unavoidable points of reference. Opposing CIs often engage in ‘competitive victimhood’, which amplify ‘our’ grievances and minimise ‘theirs’, sometimes reversing the idea of exactly who is victim and who is perpetrator. Even in a situation like early 1990s Rwanda, where it may seem clear that Tutsis were overwhelmingly the targets of Hutu militias, the latter often claimed they were the true victims as it was the conduct of Tutsis that roused them to atrocity. On this account, the humanity of those engaged in killing is necessarily sacrificed because they must unwillingly take action against those who bear responsibility for conflict (Gourevitch, 1999, pp. 93–99). Some CIs frame violence as between opponents who are entirely other, aberrant subjects who bring suffering to whole communities for perverse reasons. In such cases, the imaginers may see themselves as victims, trapped between opposing camps, though these non-participants often have complex relationships with violent actors, and may think of themselves as having more agency than the non-participant role suggests. Sometimes, CIs relegate violence to particular places and actors, and the imaginers deliberately choose not to confront the realities of conflict. In Colombia, the saying algo debía, ‘they must have been involved in something’ (literally ‘they must owe something’), seeks to ascribe a logic to conflict, suggesting that those who suffer somehow brought it on themselves, and that a shrewd avoidance of politics will somehow protect

1 CONCEPTS 

15

the imaginer from a similar fate. In cases such as that of Rwanda, however, people who may wish to remain as bystanders were drawn in by those undertaking the unpleasant ‘work’ (as violence is sometimes categorised) of torture and butchery supposedly on their behalf. Omer Bartov argues that the intimacy of intra-communal bloodshed makes knowledge of it unavoidable and so claims of being a bystander to violence untenable (Bartov, 2020). Doing nothing, failing to witness, and remaining silent are, on this view, forms of complicity. Of course, successful broadening of participation in informing, exposure, intimidation, and murder, diminishes issues of impunity, of being implicated in inhumane activity on the part of active perpetrators. Of Rwanda, Gourevitch notes: ‘[i]f everyone is implicated, then implication becomes meaningless. Implication is what? A Hutu who thought there was anything to be implicated in would have to be an accomplice of the enemy’ (Gourevitch, 1999, p. 96). In some cases, it is the silence of the victims that allows certain CIs to be reproduced without response. In his flawed but striking film The Act of Killing (2012), Joshua Oppenheimer reveals an Indonesian community in which long-­ congealed imaginaries permit perpetrators of serious crimes to understand themselves as heroes, their status sanctioned by a complicit state apparatus, while their victims live in agonised silence. In each of case, then, we need to be attentive to the fact that some imaginaries find expression more easily than others. To been seen to imagine conflict in particular ways may open participants up to continuing threat. Space and Scale The spatial aspect of CIs locates violence and represents its scale. In the first sense, the mapping of violence is one of their most significant features, especially at a local level. Such imaginaries reveal crucial information about where danger lies and where is safe, where boundaries are to be encountered or ambiguous spaces. Indeed, boundaries are key in the definition of community, which may be separated along relatively clear geographical lines or mixed in complex mosaics that mean that violence takes on an intimate and particularly ugly character. We explore how conflict imaginaries emphasise the links between community, place and violence, and how the striations of violence create zones of prohibition, ‘oases of peace’ that can be threatened, invaded and overwhelmed, alongside troublingly ambiguous sites marked by doubt and fear. As internal conflict flares, old boundaries may harden, acquiring more menacing connotations while

16 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

new boundaries, invisible to the eye and imperceptible to outsiders, make what had once been a short and peaceable walk to a nearby market into a calculation of risk and hazard. A frequent feature of internal conflict is the intimacy of the crimes committed (succinctly discussed by Bartov, 2020). Neighbours attacking neighbours, groups within communities that had hitherto successfully managed fissures in the social fabric, falling quickly into rumour-fuelled, extreme violence against people whose past conduct is likely at odds with hearsay about their supposed inhumanity. While we emphasise the materiality of the imaginary, and the importance of political economies as a driver of conflict, the acknowledgement that the violence we are analysing often occurs between people who not only know each other but have a range of mutually beneficial social and economic relationships is as significant as it is discomforting. On the one hand, it indicates the existence of distinctive conflict imaginaries among people who inhabit the same street, and who were perhaps visitors to each other’s homes prior to the outbreak of violence down that street. That is, people previously bound together by common norms and expectations may quickly develop imaginaries that cast self and other as irreconcilable. In short, what once was thought of as a ‘community’ can quickly be fractured and imagined as a space of confrontation. Furthermore, while the notion of internal conflict inevitably implies at some point an appeal to ideas of community, such communities are not simple sociological realities that map out the bounds of the local. For example, the supposition that the inhabitants of rural areas constitute organic, bounded communities that necessarily share a strong sense of identity—a problematic term in itself (see chapter 2 Brubaker, 2006) is often a misconception and even when such communities do exist their sense of collective identity is the result of a history of imaginative work. In Colombia, for example, ‘ethnic’ communities have politicised their self-­ understandings both as a result of grassroots activism and in response to turn of the century legislation that afforded them constitutional rights, including collective land title. These groups also have a significant engagement with international agencies and activist movements (Restrepo, 2013), so their attachments to local, regional and national identities are also linked to complex geopolitical self-understandings. When it comes to considering how Afro-Colombians and indigenous groups understand their relationship to the ‘armed conflict’, for example, simple identitarian notions obscure the nuances of what is at stake, as do the generalisations

1 CONCEPTS 

17

about these ‘communities’ themselves. Moreover, while all imagined communities have an outside, by the time we reach the national scale, patterns, layers, and practices of exclusion are often multiple and profoundly antagonistic. For many, being formally designated as Colombian or Indonesian provides scant protection from devastating forms of exclusion, including extra-judicial disappearance and murder. At the same time, the need to reform the nation, to save it, to protect from those who would destroy it, is a recurring point of reference in the imaginaries that drive violence. Spatial imaginings of conflict are not simply a matter of two dimensional mappings of the sites and boundaries of conflict, however. The vertical axis tends to be used in metaphorical forms of mapping that set actors in relation to each other in terms of relative status, often as an expression of anger at inequality. That the ‘social pyramid’ is naturalised in most contexts is telling in itself, the more so in places like our case studies with their very different colonial histories, where the class-based nature of status is partly lived through ethnicity. Sometimes the vertical and horizontal axes converge in striking ways, as in the case of the Colombian city of Medellín, where the mapping of the complex social cartography of the city is sometimes attached to an ironic inversion. Here, the imagined social pyramid, with the privileged on top and the poor below, is reversed through an appeal to another time honoured metaphor, with ‘heaven’ (wealth and privilege) located below while ‘hell’ (poverty, marginalisation and violence) is above, in the crowded barrios that stretch up the slopes of the Aburrá valley. Another important feature of the spatial aspect of CIs is the representation of scale. The body is the smallest, most intimate scale, the site of visceral feelings about safety or vulnerability, closely followed by the family and the local community. In these conflicts life itself is often at stake, something that those who have experienced violence first hand know very well, but which may seem distant to those who have not, even though they are aware of the possibility of finding themselves one day in the position of victims or perpetrators. Scale also plays a role in how the responsibility for the conflict is imagined: it may be the fault of small groups or even a few individuals, or an expression of human nature and therefore present in everyone, a perspective that appeals to the scale of the entire species while returning attention on the scale of the body, within which the potential for violence resides. Above all, however, we note that representations of scale play an important role in setting out the stakes of any given conflict: is it a struggle over

18 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

access to local resources, about identitarian claims, demands for autonomy, independence or sovereignty? Is it part of a battle for the ‘soul of the nation’ or of a transnational struggle against capitalism, communism, colonialism or racism? Is it a struggle for democracy? In most CIs it is a mixture of these things, and it is often revealing to consider at what point they invoke different scales, and for what purpose. Conflicts commonly represented as having international, national, or even regional dimensions may ignore local framings that are often at odds with such grand narratives. Thus, a Javanese peasant accused of communism by a neighbour covetous of their property and land might well frame their experience of persecution in the context of those very local factors rather than see themselves as collateral damage of CIA global strategy. That said, analyses based on class can be found in many places, and we are in no doubt as to the capacity of peasant communities for sophisticated analysis of global politics. While the imaginaries that circulate within population groups described as rural or indigenous are marked by distinctive features—as is the case with any other ‘community’, in fact—these are combined with local interpretations of what we might describe as features of ‘transnational’ imaginaries. Indeed, the geopolitical imaginaries that frame violence at different moments engage with local conflicts in complex ways. For example, the conflicts we study appear in a different light depending on whether they are seen from the perspective of the Cold War or that of neoliberal hegemony. In this regard, we need to bear in mind the role of the kinds of subjectivity constructed by such ideological formations, not simply as impositions from outside but as nuanced self-understandings marked by both local histories and global designs. Time Conflict imaginaries also inevitably have a chronological aspect. In the first instance what ‘they’—or ‘we’—did then, and to whom, is a source of grievance and confrontation, both now and in the future. This is apparent in the images that mark popular narratives and collective memory, especially through the framing of iconic events that mark rupture or key anecdotes that illustrate or explain participants’ beliefs, opinions and actions. The sense of a before and an after may be particularly evident in cases in which conflict leads to the transgression of once stable social norms. In such circumstances, once worthy lives are rendered abject, while hitherto unthinkable acts of violence quickly become normalised, even necessary.

1 CONCEPTS 

19

However, it is also clear that mass violence never springs from entirely uncultivated ground. Inevitably, preparatory ‘work’ (as it is sometimes called) precedes incidents of mass violence. In his striking work on the Rwandan genocide of the early 1990s, Philip Gourevitch highlighted months of Hutu demonization of Tutsis, much of it carried out via the medium of radio (Gourevitch, 1999, pp.  93–99). Such preparation requires the manufacture, reconfiguration, and mobilisation of grievance and suspicion, in itself linked to the trauma of colonialism. Indeed, as David Campbell noted of the conflict in what was Yugoslavia, the past will readily come into play: old resentments and slights are rekindled for present purposes. Combatants rearticulate and reproduce history and violently deploy it in a specific present. As he puts it, certain ‘individual practices render one not only as an ethno-nationalist but also an ethno-­ historian who naturalizes his nationalism historically’ (Campbell, 1998, p. 83). A dominant group or groups symbolically expelling others from the nation on account of their religious or political beliefs, or their ethnicity, class, or caste (or some combination of these identity markers) may assist in creating the conditions for ‘necessary’ action against those no longer deemed co-nationals. Campbell’s formulation strongly hints at the suppleness, the plasticity, of histories that can be bent and shaped to serve many different purposes. As Schmidt and Schroder put it, ‘[t]he symbolic meaning of prior wars is re-enacted and reinterpreted in the present, and present violence generates symbolic value to be employed in future confrontations’ (Schmidt & Schroeder, 2001, p. 9). As in the case of the former Yugoslavia, these narratives may refer to a very long historical narrative. The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the product of longstanding tensions between nationalist/republican/ Catholics and loyalist/Protestants endured for some thirty years of sporadic, low-intensity conflict. While mutual antipathy worsened once tensions manifested as violent conflict, suspicion and disdain arose in entrenched, longstanding discrimination in employment, housing, political representation and policing that went back long before the period of the Troubles themselves. The imaginaries associated with these practices invoke hundreds of years of history, and longstanding antipathies. Yet it is also striking that short-lived, intensive conflicts may produce social imaginaries of similar durability to lingering, low-intensity, systemic forms of conflict. In Maluku, for example, a province of Indonesia with a similar population to Northern Ireland, a short-lived conflict between 1999 and 2002 led to more violent deaths than The Troubles and a higher number

20 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

of internally displaced people. The very different history of Maluku meant that for centuries Christians and Muslims successfully and formally managed differences and tensions, without conflict. The concept of basudara, of shared kinship and mutual aid and assistance across the religious divide, held the peoples of Maluku in community. Yet, when the bonds of community broke down under a range of new pressures, violence arrived swiftly and disastrously. Both are complicated cases but the history of tension between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland is enduring while violence between Christians and Muslims in Maluku was intensive. Despite the conflicts having quite different trajectories, however, the imaginaries, once in place, have proven exceptionally difficult to loosen. One description of Ambon (the epicentre of the violence in Maluku province) is that there has been ‘reconciliation without truth’ because confronting the truth threatens reopening still raw wounds and places at risk the integrity of institutions that involved themselves in the violence (see van Klinken, 2017, pp. xv–xviii). In short, a new history has been born that has the potential to be rearticulated to fit the needs of future conflict. Bearing particular sets of identities often implies powerful emotional attachments to specific histories. All of the figurative resources that produce CIs are steeped in a history that is constantly invoked, elaborated and re-elaborated. Yet the use of historic resources may be complex and troubling, productive of all kinds of ambiguities. Thus, the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit (‘afterwardness’), whereby there is retroactive attribution of traumatic meaning to earlier events now forms part of the contemporary Israeli experience of the Holocaust. On this account, repressed memory becomes trauma and manifests retrospectively. As summarised by Bill Nichols: ‘Haunted by the ghosts of wars past, and that horrific ur-­ event, the Holocaust, subject to a seemingly endless series of chronic traumas, time takes on a new quality for Israelis’ (Nichols, 2014, p. 84). Raya Morag’s work on perpetrator trauma in Israeli society and cinema has important insights on intergenerational transmission of experience. For example, Morag argues that while Israeli soldiers serving in the Occupied Territories, increasingly as armed police, have no direct experience of the Holocaust, it nonetheless produces a profound crisis of identity arising from the tensions between Jews as victims and Israelis as perpetrators. Morag uses the term ‘persecuted perpetrator’ to refer to the ‘crisis brought about by the historical burden of the Jews as a persecuted people […] realized in the utterly unbearable—and inevitable—subject position.’ She invites comparison with American soldiers serving in Iraq and notes the

1 CONCEPTS 

21

unlikelihood of their collective memories producing such powerful crises of identity (Morag, 2012, p.  27). Morag’s is an interesting analogy because, as Philip Gourevitch notes, racialized fault lines dating back to the Civil War and before continue to animate politics, society, hearts and minds in the contemporary US (cited in Cruvellier, 2019). While these may not have produced the forms of agonising tension afflicting Israeli service personnel, the well documented use of discriminatory and othering terms by US soldiers to describe their enemies suggests ways in which racialized imaginaries facilitated atrocities against Iraqi civilians, while not systematically producing similar perpetrator crises for US service personnel. Ariel Heryanto perhaps provides an insight into the variegated experience of conflict and trauma being transmitted through the generations. Commenting on documentaries made since the fall of Suharto’s regime in 1998 in which survivors of the mass killings and persecutions of mid-­1960s Indonesia have provided ‘talking head’ accounts of their experience to camera, he notes that despite victims using standard Indonesian, the style of delivery, the subject matter, and the choice of rhetorical devices do not readily resonate with those who do not share their experiences (Heryanto, 2012, p.  228). Heryanto speculates that the capacity of Indonesians to enjoy a frank exchange between positions is hampered by the ossification of different views into what he calls ‘fatally belonging’ to one or other view on a wide range of issues (Heryanto, 2012, pp. 234–235). The articulation of historical resources, then, is a crucial feature of CIs. Before we leave this point, however, it is important to recognise the importance of how the future is imagined. As noted above, a key driver of conflict is often the antagonist’s role in blocking access to a desired state of affairs, and we explore the impact of these hoped for outcomes on beliefs about the present. In the most general terms, we explore the ways in which our participants imagine the future, asking what life after conflict would mean and in particular whether the imagined future is essentially a continuation of the present or a radical rupture. It is here that the creative imagination may be revealed most clearly, as well as the implications of sedimented CIs for the possibilities of coexistence or even reconciliation, in itself is often a loaded and deeply problematic term. Is it necessary for all of the ills contained in the CI to be remedied before conflict is over? What would peace look like, and how would it be lived? In a case like Colombia’s armed conflict, for example, the difficulties many participants express when it comes to accepting the possibility of a future that is anything other than a continuation of the present has proved to be a

22 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

stumbling block for attempts at peace building, the more so because the violent dynamics of everyday capital accumulation continue to reinforce a fatalistic outlook in the body politic. Affects and the Limits of Representation Theorists of social imaginaries are generally concerned with the ways in which they facilitate human sociability, contribute to norm making, and emphasise unspoken, collective understandings that enable the transaction of the everyday without explicit rules. They focus on the signifying processes that underlie the symbolic systems of the imaginary, which is sometimes referred to as a ‘grammar […] a framework for the interpretation of reality, socially legitimised, intersubjectively constructed, and historically determined” (our translation (Cegarra, 2012, p.  3). In this guise the imaginary appears as a shared set of assumptions about what counts. Furthermore, in much of what we have said here, CIs are understood as interlinked sets of representations. Yet the affects provoked by conflict imaginaries underline the embodied nature of cognition, and the importance of practice. While we are sceptical about some of the uses of the notion of affect, especially in Spinozan guise (Leys, 2011), we nonetheless recognise the importance of the body as a place where knowledge is stored. Ana Dragolović (2018) notes a range of approaches useful for our research, highlighting the work of anthropologist Annemarie Mol who argues that the human body is an ‘open system, always connected to other bodies, human and non-human, practices and performances.’ On this account, bodies are part of a wider brain-body-world entanglement, an assemblage that straddles generations (Dragolović, 2018, p. 121). Dragolović explores the intergenerational transfer of trauma by showing The Act of Killing to mixed ethnicity (Indonesian-Dutch) Dutch residents with no direct experience of the violence portrayed in the film but nonetheless traumatised by it through family association. As one of Dragolović’s interlocutors observed: ‘I did not know many things about my parents’ lives in Indonesia, but now I know the violence from the prison came into our house…I grew up with the violence from the prison!’ (Dragolović, 2018, p. 126). Dragolović also draws on Paul Connerton’s work on society wide remembering as shared and collective. She notes Connerton’s focus on ‘non-inscribed memory—memory transmitted through human and non-­ human actors that includes embodied habits, traditions and rituals […]

1 CONCEPTS 

23

memories are not just inscribed through the construction of cultural texts but are also sedimented in the body’ (Dragolović, 2018, p.  124). Connerton’s insights make it possible to appreciate how the young resident of Amsterdam with no direct experience of Indonesia nonetheless lives out the affective dimensions of the country’s vast mid-1960s upheaval. The child may have been parented in the shadow of post-traumatic stress, and it may simply be quotidian habits—mealtimes set by the prison clock, the prisoner’s possessiveness of minor personal effects, and obsessive concerns about personal security—that slowly, invisibly, flesh out the conflict imaginaries of someone far removed from the events vicariously lived through parents. Here Vikki Bell’s work on ‘the background of felt dispositions […] transmitted by means other than speech—photographs, films, fiction and more embodied practices of remembering’ is also important (Dragolović, 2018, p. 124). Connerton’s and Bell’s work both add context to the experience of Dragolović’s interlocutors and advance their experiences beyond having been parented by sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder, which may well be the case in these examples, to a more detailed account of how lived experience is transmitted between generations. The fact that Dragolović’s interlocutors have no meaningful experience of life in Indonesia is highly suggestive of the lingering, embodied manifestations of CIs. Nonetheless, we need to recognise that representations of conflict constitute the primary object of our exploration. These may be readily apparent or require excavation, though one of the initial hypotheses of the project was that CIs can be understood in terms of the ‘logic’ of the tropes that constitute them.

References Althusser, L., & Balibar, E. (1972). Reading Capital. NLB. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso. Bartov, O. (2020, February 12). The Anatomy of a Genocide. Simon & Schuster. Bourdieu, P. (1972). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1980). Le Sens Pratique. Les Editions de Minuit. Brubaker, R. (2006). Ethnicity Without Groups. Harvard University Press. Campbell, D. (1998). National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia. University of Minnesota Press.

24 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Castoriadis, C. (2007). Figures of the Thinkable (H.  Arnold, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Cegarra, J. (2012). Fundamentos teórico-epistemológicos de los imaginarios sociales. Cinta Moebio, 43, 1–13. Crehan, K. (2016). Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives. Duke University Press. Cruvellier, T. (2019). Philip Gourevitch: Living in Rwanda with the Genocide (Somewhat) Behind  – Part 1. Retrieved June 2, 2020, from Fondation Hirondelle https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/justiceinfo-­comment-­and-­ debate/in-­depth-­interviews/40830-­philip-­gourevitch-­living-­in-­r wanda-­with-­ the-­genocide-­somewhat-­behind-­part-­1.html Davoudi, S., & Brooks, E. (2021). City-Regional Imaginaries and Politics of Rescaling. Regional Studies, 55(1), 52–62. Dragolović, A. (2018). Knowing the Past Affectively: Screen Media and the Evocation of Intergenerational Trauma. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 17(1), 119–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022217732870 Duffield, M. (2007). Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples. Polity. Foucault, M. (1980). Two Lectures (C.  Gordon, L.  Marshall, J.  Mepham, & K. Soper, Trans.). In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Pantheon. Foucault, M. (2001). Dits et écrits. Gallimard. Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, Peace and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/002234336900600301 Gaonkar, D.  P. (2002). Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction. Public Culture, 14(1), 1–19. Gourevitch, P. (1999). We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. Picador. Heryanto, A. (2012). Screening the 1965 Violence. In J. T. Brink & J. Oppenheimer (Eds.), Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence (pp. 224–240). Wallflower Press. ICTY. (1995). The Prosecutor v. Dusko Tadic, Decision on the Defence Motion for Interlocutory Appeal on Jurisdiction, IT-94-1-A, 2. Klinken, G. v. (2017). Ale Rasa Beta Rasa – What You Feel, I Feel: Compiling History Together in Ambon (H.  Syaranamual, Trans.). In J.  Manuputty, Z. Salampessy, I. Ali-Fauzi, & I. Rafsadi (Eds.), Basudara Stories of Peace from Maluku: Working Together for Reconciliation (pp. xv–xxiv). Monash University Publishing. Leys, R. (2011). The Turn to Affect: A Critique. Critical Inquiry, 37(3), 434–472. Marx, K. (1978). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Foreign Language Press.

1 CONCEPTS 

25

McCargo, D., & Taylor, R. H. (1996). Politics. In M. Halib & T. Huxley (Eds.), An Introduction to Southeast Asian Studies. I.B. Tauris. McNally, D. (2011). Monsters of the Market: Zombie, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Vol. 30). Haymarket Books. Morag, R. (2012). Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. I.B. Tauris. Nichols, B. (2014). Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. Studies in Documentary Film, 8(1), 81–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280. 2014.900954 Pugh, M. (2005). The Political Economy of Peace-Building: A Critical Theory Perspective. International Journal of Peace Studies, 10(2), 23–42. Restrepo, E. (2013). Etnización de la negridad: la invención de las ‘comunidades negras’ como grupo étnico en Colombia. Universidad del Cauca. Richmond, O. (2010). A Genealogy of Peace and Conflict Theory. In O. Richmond (Ed.), Palgrave Advances in Peace-Building: Critical Developments and Approaches (pp. 14–38). Palgrave. Schmidt, B., & Schroeder, I. (2001). Anthropology of Violence and Conflict. Routledge. Searle, J. R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. The Free Press. Selby, J. (2013). The Myth of Liberal Peace-Building. Conflict, Security & Development, 13(1), 57–86. Strauss, C. (2006). The Imaginary. Anthropological Theory, 6(3), 322–344. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499606066891 Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press. Taylor, R. H. (1993). Political Science and South East Asian Studies. South East Asia Research, 1(1), 5–26. Weber, M. (1946). Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions. In H. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds.), Essays in Sociology. Oxford University Press. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Contexts

Abstract  Here we introduce the social and local contexts in which our research is situated, Colombia and Indonesia. Recognising the difficulties of providing complete histories of our research sites, we nonetheless set out the primary drivers of conflict in both countries. Our key concern in this section, is to offer specific contexts for and content of conflict imaginaries noting the ways that different actors produce and reproduce imaginaries of, for example, fear and coercion and the ways these are negotiated and resisted by others. For Colombians and Indonesians, the past remains a fluid and threatening presence in contemporary political imaginaries as responsibility for and the consequences of violent histories remain contested and dangerous terrain for ordinary people. Keywords  Colombia • Indonesia • Catholicism • Guerrillas • Liberalism • Liberals • Murder • Democracy • Communism • Islam • Mass killing • Nationalism • Fear As part of the current project, we have begun to chart the historical development of conflict imaginaries in our sites but we have insufficient space here to do justice to these complex universes of meaning. Indonesia is a vast and diverse archipelago, with different religions and ethnicities, while Colombia is a highly regionalised, pluricultural state with two hundred © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Philpott, N. Morgan, Understanding Conflict Imaginaries, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03976-8_2

27

28 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

years of republican history. Furthermore, our challenge in the project is to understand how conflict imaginaries are lived through the everyday experience of our participants, which requires a much broader cultural knowledge than we can provide here. We also note that our emphasis on the local means that the naturalisation of the nation and national history in the pages that follow is in itself problematic, though the nation as ideal continues to loom large in the way political antagonisms are represented. Given these demurrals, therefore, this section needs to be understood as an attempt to provide readers unfamiliar with Indonesian and Colombian history with a minimal context within which to make sense of the conversations analysed in section three, and by no means as a definitive or stand-­ alone analysis. It is inevitably limited in scope, the more so because it needs to explain both what happened during these conflicts and suggest some of the ways they were and continue to be imagined, which in itself is a part of ongoing political struggles.

Conflict Imaginaries in Indonesia For Indonesian nationalists, the first half of the twentieth century was not just a prolonged struggle for independence from the Dutch, but over the character, foundations, values, and political structure of an independent nation. The people of the Indonesian archipelago did not share a sense of national identity prior to the creeping colonisation of the Dutch. Rather, from the Netherlands Indies which by the early twentieth century spanned Aceh in northern Sumatra to west New Guinea, the idea of a single nation was creatively fashioned by two generations of young anti-colonial nationalists, transforming it from a ‘nation of intent’ into something held dear in the hearts of those who yearned for independence (Cribb, 2001, p. 226). An extensive range of philosophical and political ideas and ideals informed anti-colonial nationalism as its imaginative dimensions drew in ever more of the population of the Netherlands Indies. Indonesia now celebrates the holiday of National Awakening Day on May 20. This marks the founding of Budi Utomo / Boedi Oetomo (Beautiful/Noble Endeavour) (Formichi, 2012, p. 20) on May 20 1908, a small, conservative organisation made up of elite Javanese officials of the colonial regime. Its primary purpose was to use the talents of its members to improve the education and cultural awareness of young people. The organisation was sufficiently unthreatening that it was approved by Dutch colonial authorities and only slowly did its focus shift to politics with members appointed to the Volksraad

2 CONTEXTS 

29

(a conservative, advisory council) by Dutch authorities. It is significant that contemporary Indonesian governments continue to celebrate the founding of Budi Utomo as marking Indonesia’s national awakening given its narrow, conservative, elite origins. It is a celebration that downplays the contribution of more progressive forces to the process of national awakening. Nonetheless, Budi Utomo activists promoted an idea common in many anti-colonial nationalist struggles. It is the claim that the peoples of the Netherlands Indies had a distinctive past, history, and cultures which the later leadership, Sukarno (Indonesia’s first president) prominent among them, argued conferred a right to self-determination in the form of an independent nation. The geographical expansiveness of the Netherlands Indies and its inclusion of tens of different ethnic groups, languages, and many religious traditions means that nationalists articulated the idea of the nation in political, rather than ethnic, terms (Cribb, 2001, pp. 222–223). Even the name, Indonesia, a nineteenth century European anthropological term that means ‘islands of India,’ is important not for descriptive reasons but because ‘…it represented an idea, which transcended all the complicated and interlocking regional identities of the archipelago’ (Cribb, 2001, p. 225). Nonetheless, regional, religious, and ethnic rivalries were obstacles to the articulation of the one nation, one people, one language envisaged in anti-colonial nationalism even as people coming together from different parts of the archipelago facilitated debates about the making of a new nation. Indonesian identity necessarily had to be invented and in its secular form encompassed aspects of western and primarily Javanese political thought (given the prominence of Javanese activists in the anti-colonial movement). That is, in addition to indigenous ideas, secularism drew on thought introduced by Dutch colonists including liberalism, social democracy, socialism, and Marxism. Opposition to continuing Dutch rule united secular nationalists but otherwise the struggle over ideas was at times bitter. Moreover, open development of pro-­ independence discourse was hampered by Dutch repression of nationalists during the 1920s and 1930s. The Dutch, determined to maintain their position, repeatedly intimidated, harassed, arrested, and exiled nationalist activists, splintering organisations and efforts to expand nationalist activity beyond the confines of Java and parts of Sumatra (Nawawi, 1971, p. 165). Upwards of 85% of Indonesians now identify as Muslim and it has long been the dominant religion among peoples of the archipelago. Indonesians are Sunni Muslims and while there are conservative and orthodox beliefs

30 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

(often designated as santri meaning strict or orthodox), the beliefs of many Javanese Muslims incorporate indigenous Javanese, Hindu and Buddhist elements, reflecting the many different influences on Javanese culture. This form of Islam is spiritual in the Sufi tradition and the system of belief is called kebatinan (loosely translated as inwardness) in Indonesia. People adhering to this more syncretic Islam are often referred to as abangan (nominal or local) (Cribb, 2001, pp. 226–227). Unsurprisingly, different, at times inimical, modes of Islamic thought are an important strand in Indonesian anti-colonial nationalism. Evidence of the fluidity and flexibility of Islamic thought appears in the 1912 founding of Sarekat Dagang Islam (later simply Sarekat Islam) (Union of Islamic Traders / Islamic Union) an organisation ostensibly representing the interests of Muslim small traders of batik against the more powerful Chinese textile industry (Formichi, 2012, p. 21). While throughout its history there were ongoing struggles for control of the organisation’s theological/philosophical bases, Sarekat Islam is notable for early attempts to synthesise socialism and Islamic precepts of social justice and focused on improvement of the conditions of the exploited Javanese peasantry (Formichi, 2012, p. 21). The organisation grew extremely quickly and by the early 1920s, Sarekat Islam had transformed into a political party with a membership of around 1 million (Nawawi, 1971, p.  165). Among the many anti-colonial, Islamic organisations across colonised Asia, none took larger strides than Sarekat Islam in efforts to combine Marxism and Islam, with some among its leadership arguing that the struggles of pan-Islamism against colonialism and capitalism were consistent with the struggles of Marxism against the same forces (see Sidel, 2017). While the so-called Red Hajis of the 1920s emphasised the deep commitments to social justice and opposition to capitalism in Marxism and Islam, the two were never comfortable bedfellows. The communist vision of a strong party/state control over all aspects of political and social life, including religion, alienated many Muslims and ultimately put paid to ongoing cooperation. Despite engaging with Islamic activists, the Comintern ultimately worsened tensions between the left and Islam as its doctrinal rigidity prevented it from accommodating aspects of Islamic thought. It failed to grasp the prospect of an alliance that might well have reshaped the global political landscape had it succeeded (Sidel, 2017). Despite Sarekat Islam’s success in mobilising opposition to continuing Dutch rule and the appeal of Marxist thought to proletarian workers and others inspired by the Bolshevik revolution, internal pressures and Dutch persecution overwhelmed the organisation by the late 1920s and,

2 CONTEXTS 

31

henceforth, Islam and communism were not again reconciled in Indonesia (or anywhere else) (Sidel, 2017). It must also be noted that Sarekat Islam and the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), founded in 1920, were staunch rivals in anti-colonial nationalism, both seeking to create mass support. The PKI successfully infiltrated Sarekat Islam and this caused great tensions between the two parties during the 1920s. By 1923, leaders with far greater commitments to Islam than socialism began imposing party discipline on Sarekat Islam members to marginalise PKI influence over the organisation (Formichi, 2012, p. 23; Nawawi, 1971, p. 165). We will return to the influence of Islam on contemporary Indonesian identity later but for now it is important to note that the divisions between Islam and communism that sedimented in the 1920s are profoundly consequential for the conflagration in Indonesia forty years later when organised Islam in alliance with the military turned on the PKI and associated organisations. As noted, the later 1920s and 1930s were difficult for anti-colonial nationalists in the Netherlands Indies as the colonial state engaged in extensive repression including arrests, imprisonments, and exiling of nationalist leaders. Debate and division between nationalist activists continued. As such, the efforts of nationalist leaders to negotiate even limited forms of representation and participation made little impression before the colony was overrun by Japanese imperial forces in early 1942. However, as the war turned against Japan and its inevitable defeat became apparent, nationalists hastily prepared to take advantage of the moment and declare Indonesian independence. In the lead up to the declaration on August 17 1945, nationalist leaders, under Japanese sponsorship, had met on a number of occasions to thrash out an interim Indonesian constitution (see Elson, 2009, pp. 108–109). Some Islamic anti-colonial nationalists envisaged an independent Indonesia would be governed by sharia law. However, many Muslim Indonesians regarded such an Indonesia as unworkable as it excluded not just believers in other faiths, but also impinged upon those whose belief in Islam was, and is, a guide to life rather than determining of it. In other words, many Muslims saw no inherent contradiction in incorporating secular commitments with their religious beliefs. During these discussions a sharp division emerged between those that wished to separate the affairs of state and the affairs of Islam (seeking the formation of a state inclusive of all and no religious beliefs) and those who argued that human goodness could only arise from a state built upon the teachings of Islam (Elson, 2009, pp.  110–111). Islamic nationalists ardently

32 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

argued for a constitutional provision requiring Muslims to adhere to Islamic law and seven words to this effect were included in the draft preamble to the constitution, the so-called Jakarta Charter. These seven words were and continued, post-independence, to be a source of great tension and discomfort between Islamic and other nationalists and generated fierce debate between those of different outlooks. The day after the declaration of Indonesia’s independence, with Allied troops expected to arrive and after representations from Japanese officials and Christians from eastern Indonesia, the Jakarta Charter was dropped, at least temporarily, from the constitution. The unity of the newly declared republic took precedence over the religious sensibilities of Islamic nationalists and of their hopes for a privileged role for Islam in Indonesia (Elson, 2009, pp.  120–126). For many adherents, Islam’s diminished role was and remains a source of disappointment and discontent. Certainly, it contributed to sporadic attempts to establish breakaway Islamic republics in the years that followed. The politics of Islamic separatism is immensely complex and beyond the scope of the present work. It is sufficient to note that Islamic aspirations for a different kind of Indonesia have long been a thorn in the side of secular nationalists with the latter groupings largely holding sway for the bulk of Indonesia’s 75 years of independence. However, the passage of time has, arguably, seen Islam assuming greater importance in Indonesian life. Indeed, as Ariel Heryanto argues, ‘Islamization’ is the most visible feature of the final decade of Suharto’s presidency and the first after it (Heryanto, 2014, p. 24). A turbulent decade followed Sukarno’s and Hatta’s declaration of Indonesian independence. Regional rebellions beset the country from the outset with concerns about Jakarta’s perceived exploitation of the regions and overweening political dominance important factors in troubles in South Sulawesi and parts of Sumatra (Schwarz, 1994, p. 63). In 1950, a self-proclaimed Republic of the South Moluccas attempted to secede from Indonesia with the ensuing armed struggled between Indonesian forces and secessionists entailing extensive loss of life. US material support for such rebellions sharpened tensions between rebels and the government in Jakarta and also consolidated nationalist sentiment among those supportive of the unitary republic (Aspinall & Berger, 2001, p. 1006; Schwarz, 1994, p.  17). Indonesian demands that the Dutch cede sovereignty of West New Guinea further antagonised the US, the UK and Australian governments who were suspicious of Sukarno’s radical nationalism and courting of the PKI.  In electoral politics, no one party commanded

2 CONTEXTS 

33

anything like a simple majority. Indeed, in Indonesia’s first relatively free, fair, and open election conducted in 1955, the vote was split between four major parties with a host of smaller parties sharing the balance. The Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI) took 22.3% of the vote and 57 seats; Masyumi (an Islamic party) 20.9% and 57 seats; the Nahdlatul Ulama (also an Islamic party) 18.4% and 45 seats; and, the PKI 16.4% and 39 seats. By the late 1950s, the Indonesian experiment with democracy was foundering and Sukarno was steering Indonesia in increasingly authoritarian directions. Sukarno moved against Masyumi, banning it in 1960, for its support of Sumatran rebels that proclaimed the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia in the late 1950s. This and other events led to the early 1960s being a period of great ferment in Indonesian politics as Sukarno’s authoritarianism and capriciousness alienated and alarmed others in the political elite. On the night of September 30 1965, military officers kidnapped and later murdered six army generals in what may have been a failed coup d’état. Whatever its intentions, the move against the generals was poorly coordinated and the rebellion quickly brought under control by Major General Suharto. He blamed the PKI for the coup attempt and murder of the generals, a claim for which there is not strong evidence (Heryanto, 2006, p. 7), and with aid of Islamic militias set about a pogrom to physically eliminate the PKI from the Indonesian political scene. It has proven difficult to establish the numbers killed but estimates are commonly made in the 500,000 to 1,000,000 range though it is possible the army and militias murdered many more. Over 1,000,000 real and alleged communists and their fellow travels in labour, agricultural, women’s, arts, and other organisations were imprisoned as Suharto consolidated his power effectively relieving Sukarno of power in March 1966, becoming acting president in March 1967 and formally selected to the office in March 1968. Suharto remained in office until May 1998 when his already faltering support among ordinary Indonesians was grievously harmed by the Asian financial crisis which profoundly affected Indonesia. Suharto’s government was bureaucratic authoritarian in style. Throughout his tenure, Suharto brooked little meaningful opposition, crushing it when it arose. The New Order government he led dramatically recast the conduct of politics and the political architecture of the early independence period. In the early 1970s, he ‘simplified’ the political party system by forcing all legal parties to merge into two opposition parties, one Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (PPP) (The United Development

34 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Party), made up of Islamic parties and the other, the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia (PDI) (The Indonesian Democratic Party) of secular, nationalist, and Christian parties. The consolidation of the parties, the government’s capacity to structure national and regional representative bodies to minimise effective opposition, and the parallel military bureaucracy it put in place to ensure that the military reached all the way down through society into the smallest of villages, gave Suharto and his allies unprecedented control over Indonesian life. The government forbid political activity between periodic national elections (held roughly every five years). Civil servants were forced to pledge allegiance to the state and schooled such that loyalty became the preeminent requirement for a successful career. Once powerful unions affiliated to the PKI were banned and the government created new labour, family, professional, and other organisations under the leadership of loyalists. While such organisations may have done the bidding of the government, they showed little interest in or capacity to represent the interests of their members. Within a decade of Suharto’s rise to power, the alliance between student groups and the military that had helped bring down Sukarno frayed, as students came to resent the closed and authoritarian nature of the new regime. Periodic outbursts of campus-based opposition to the government was harshly dealt with. Repression of erstwhile Muslim allies in the confrontation with the PKI became a staple of the New Order’s rule in the 1970s and 1980s with Islamic radicals becoming the largest group of political prisoners in the later years of Suharto’s presidency (Heryanto, 2014, p. 28). Opponents of the government’s top-down development efforts risked being branded as communist or communist sympathisers and security forces dealt with them accordingly. Throughout the New Order period, development was the underpinning discourse of legitimacy for the regime. Creating, if not distributing, wealth was the regime’s mantra and measure of success. Another of Suharto’s key tasks was creating a ‘unitary national history’ to sustain and provide legitimacy to the regime. Until the mid-1970s, the country lacked a national history and Suharto’s government set about providing one that focused on the role of the state, framing only its actions as legitimate. This narrative turned the previous three centuries into a struggle for the Indonesian state against successive enemies: the Dutch, the communists, separatists seeking to divide the unitary republic (Formichi, 2015, p.  107). While the suggestion that Indonesia was a ‘nation without history’ (Schulte Nordholt in Formichi, 2015, p.  107) may seem curious given the decades long debates, arguments,

2 CONTEXTS 

35

disagreements, and struggles among nationalists about what it means to be Indonesian, the period up to the mid-1960s is characterised by precisely disagreement and division over that question. The regional rebellions of the 1950s driven by a host of fissiparous tendencies greatly undermined efforts to consolidate a political framework to aggregate and manage discontent and interests but also hampered efforts to establish a broadly agreed narrative of national history. Robert Cribb (Cribb, 2001) argues that the history of twentieth century Indonesian nationalism distils into three great streams: the Islamic, the communist, and the developmentalist (which incorporates much of the secular nationalist movement). He notes that the 1950s is notable for the ‘pillarization’ of Indonesian society. By this he means, that the followers of each of these streams became wedded to particular political parties and other social and professional organisations that ultimately aspired to see its particular stream take national power. The correlation between cultural and political identities were institutionalised and ossified (Cribb, 2001, p.  228). As such, Indonesia’s first president spent his twenty years in office working to hold the republic together as a range of different political forces tore at the thin social and political fabric that bound Indonesia together. Suharto set about dissolving these pillars and the strong associations between cultural identity and particular political loyalties. This task was undertaken not with persuasion but by forcible disruption of old allegiances and loyalties. For example, while it may seem rational and pragmatic to merge the different Islamic parties into one, there were significant antagonisms between them and the new party did not easily contain them. The same may be said of the merging of the secular parties of the right and left and Christian parties into the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia, which was even less cohesive than its Islamic counterpart. The government promoted national elections as a pesta demokrasi (festival of democracy) but such was the government’s control over the electoral architecture and the opposition parties that there was no prospect of its own electoral vehicle, the Partai Golongan Karya (Golkar) (the Party of Functional Groups), suffering defeat. Nonetheless, the opposition parties ‘performed’ for national elections despite going into each knowing there was no possibility of forming a government. However, the government was mindful of its victories being convincing rather than crushing such that the electoral process maintained a semblance of legitimacy. The government also worked extensively to promote two other foundations of its preferred history. The first of these was to place the five point

36 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

state ideology of Pancasila at the heart of its historiography. Sukarno originally crafted Pancasila (which roughly translates as Five Principles) shortly before independence as a means of drawing together the diverse peoples and traditions of the Netherlands Indies. He argued it was a uniquely Indonesian document informed by indigenous ideas and beliefs as well as those from Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, nationalism, and socialism. Pancasila is Sukarno’s attempt to resolve the tensions and contradictions in the competing views for the emergent nation held by nationalists, Muslims, Christians and others. Suharto’s New Order reconfigured the original principles such that they are now: belief in the almighty God (the use of the generic term rather than Allah is meant to be inclusive of Christians and those of other beliefs but implies monotheism); a just and civilised humanity; the unity of Indonesia; citizens, led by collective wisdom in representation; social equity for all the peoples of Indonesia. The principles themselves are innocuous but have been the site of ongoing political struggle particularly as pious Muslims resent what they perceive to be the undermining of Islam’s role in national life (Weatherbee, 1985, pp. 187–188). For the New Order, Pancasila became the basis of its governing strategy and more forcibly so after the late 1970s when it foisted mandatory training in Pancasila across Indonesian society but initially prioritising bureaucrats, students (school and university), and subsequently rolled out to other sectors including religious officials of all faiths and even those in informal sectors such as sex work (Weatherbee, 1985, p. 188). As Donald Weatherbee notes: ‘For the government, the internalization of Pancasila values is the necessary mental and spiritual prerequisite for citizens to discharge their duties to the state’ (Weatherbee, 1985, p. 188). In 1983, the government also compelled both opposition parties to adopt Pancasila as their sole ideological foundation, a particularly bitter pill to swallow for the PPP. By the mid-1980s, government legislation required all social organisations, including voluntary associations, to adopt Pancasila as their sole organising principle with the threat dissolution for those that resisted (Weatherbee, 1985, pp.  189–190). Despite Suharto’s regime being near the peak of its powers in the mid to late 1980s, it encountered persistent resistance to its ongoing attempts to reframe and control the social bases of Indonesian society and particularly from what it regarded as the extreme right, organised Islam. The other major plank in its historiography was demonization of the communist left. Suharto and his allies unremittingly portrayed the PKI as singly responsible for the events of the mid-1960s, depicting the PKI as

2 CONTEXTS 

37

traitors. Suharto positioned his government and its allies as saviours of the nation. Where resistance and opposition could not be sheeted home to identifiable forces such as organised Islam, the Suharto government blamed it on the shadowy forces of communism which it argued was an ever present, if not visible, threat. Making intertextual connections between communism and other ‘enemies’ of the New Order was a key aim (Heryanto, 2006, p. 20). In the wake of the purge and mass killing of the mid-1960s, the new government imprisoned around 1.5  million other suspects, most held without charge, a large number for a decade or more, and many dying (Heryanto, 2006, p.  36, 2014, p.  78). For example, Subandrio, Indonesia’s Foreign Minister at the time of the coup attempt spent 29 years in prison. One of Indonesia’s leading novelists, Pramoedya Ananta Toer served a decade in harsh conditions, forbidden to write, his library and papers burned upon his arrest. The vast majority of these detainees were guilty of no more than membership of, or association with, a legal political party that at the time the purge began was within striking distance of achieving power by peaceful, electoral means. Release from prison merely marked new modes of harassment, intimidation, abuse and humiliation. The government endorsed the identity cards of those released from detention with ET or ex-tahanan politik (former political prisoner). New Order officials also designated as ET those that stood in the way of its plans, for example, peasants who refused to give up their land for development projects. Others spared detention were nonetheless designated as tidak berish diri (unclean) for their actual or alleged association with the PKI, its affiliates and allies (Zurbuchen, 2002, p.  566). Yet millions more, the government designated as tidak bersih lingkungnan (environmentally unclean) to stigmatise those linked by marriage, descent, or institutions with the former two categories (Heryanto, 2006, pp. 36–38). Even the category terlibat G30S/PKI (involved G30s/ PKI) (G30S is an acronym for Gerakan 30 September or 30th September Movement) that supposedly identified those who actually or allegedly took part in the events of September 30 and October 1 1965, became so expansive that ‘…someone who was not yet born in 1965—or even 1975—could be labelled as “involved” in the so-called “abortive coup” of 1965’ (Heryanto, 2006, p. 38). The strictures such identity markers conferred are extensive. For example, former prisoners and those designated as criminals could not:

38 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

…work in any form of government service, nor in any state owned corporation, strategic industry, political party, or news media. They were not permitted to become a minister in any religion, a teacher, village head, lawyer; [...] To vote or be elected; To obtain a passport and travel overseas; [...] To choose where to live or move house freely; [...] To obtain credit from the bank, even when they fulfil other requirements; To receive pensions to which they are entitled from their former employers when they were sacked in 1965. (Dibley, 1999; see also Heryanto, 2006, p. 36; see also Heryanto, 2014, pp. 77–78)

To suggest that the lives of those caught up in the government’s flexible, expansive, webs of accusation, suspicion, and alleged guilt, were ruined is simple fact. As Ariel Heryanto argues, the ‘mechanical reproduction’ and ‘elaboration’ of fear was recurrent throughout the New Order period with association with ex-political prisoners deemed socially contagious and hereditary. Periodically, this led to periods of social panic with engagements ended, marriages broken up, and mass dismissal of employees (Heryanto, 2006, pp.  4 & 18). Clearly, the government’s intimidation, harassment, and violence against a host of supposed threats to its fantasy of perfect order entail a simple desire for control through fear. However, Ariel Heryanto’s work is an important corrective to the: [...] general and easy tendency to see periodic anti-communist witch hunts as nothing but a political tool in the hand of a powerful military elite and the authoritarian government of the New Order to repress political dissent, discredit potential enemies, or attempt to legitimize its responsibility for past killings. (Heryanto, 2006, p. 4)

Heryanto is at pains to understand the state’s use of the events of late 1965 in ways that address the imaginative, simulative, generative aspects of New Order historiography. For example, he notes that the New Order’s history of the republic is confined to a glorification of the struggle for independence and for its overcoming internal threats such as Islamic extremism, regional rebellion and the political left. This history focuses on a few great heroes, military and paramilitary figures in the main, and is a caricature, highly simplified, exclusive of the undesirable, painful, and issues difficult to reconcile with its heroic struggle narrative. Such historiography was of course produced by the state but also in literature and film both of which were vigorously policed by the state to ensure there were no unpunished challenges to the official history. As Heryanto notes, this has

2 CONTEXTS 

39

deprived a great many Indonesians born over the last two generations of ‘…a basic and balanced education of their own national history’ (Heryanto, 2014, p.  7). The effects on literature are profound. For example, Paul Tickell argues much post-massacre Indonesian literature actively avoided direct reference to the killings. The reasons are at least two-fold. Firstly, he argues a god-fearing community only comes to terms with the massacre of tens of thousands of its members through denial and rationalisation. ‘Denial may take the form of simply desisting from writing of the slaughter. This is perhaps the least pernicious course. It is the rationalizations, the touting of accepted “truths,” that are the most pernicious’ (Tickell, 1993, p.  268). On Tickell’s reading, so acute are the horrors of what occurred in Indonesia in the mid-1960s that sublimation is the only way they can be scrutinised (Tickell, 1993, p. 269). Secondly, there is another significant limit to documenting the horrors of 1965: the state which is there to censor, repress, ban, imprison, torture. ‘The operative constraints force the author and work alike to mouth the orthodoxy of the powers that be. In such cases representation becomes little more than vertically imposed, agitational propaganda’ (Tickell, 1993, p. 258). The New Order’s production and maintenance of ‘history’ and the repression of those that contest it, inevitably generates tensions and contradictions. I have extensively cited Ariel Heryanto’s work because of the conceptual insights he has into the complex relationship between outright repression and the production of imaginative realms to sustain the New Order’s historiography. In so doing, he states a determination to avoid both what he calls Foucault’s determinism and Derrida’s galaxy of free floating signifiers (Heryanto, 2006, p. 11). Instead he focuses on the New Order’s production of a dominant discourse in which he treats discourse surrounding the events of 1965 as a limited form of communicative action, that presumes ‘…particular interlocutors, contingent upon specific underlying assumptions, and taking place in limited domains (social groups or communities) at certain moments and in certain contexts’ (Heryanto, 2006, p.  10). Notable in this practice is the New Order’s ‘…stridency, disproportion, over-statement, over-emphasis, hyperbole, and exaggeration’ (Heryanto, 2006, p.  11). The New Order’s ambitions of totality inevitably exceed its capacity to achieve them and Heryanto invokes simulacra as a means of understanding attempts to reconcile ambition and actual achievement. His use of the concept is more limited than Jean Baudrillard’s or Frederick Jameson’s but Heryanto notes that simulacra conceal nothing and are a copy for which no real has ever existed. In the

40 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

context of the New Order, Heryanto argues that the dominated are not mystified and nor do the elite believe expect them to be so. Rather, he argues, simulacra are not there to deceive but to ‘…intimidate and humiliate…demonstrating the regime’s capacity to manipulate situations out of proportion and at will, and get away with it’ (Heryanto, 2006, p. 12). One element in the production of New Oder state history is film. As early as 1969, state security agencies expressed interest in production of documentary films to engage in ‘psywar’ against internal and external enemies. The effort, though, was slow to deliver films of sufficient sophistication for them to be effective (Heryanto, 2014, pp.  78–79). In 1984, Suharto’s government funded and released the film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (Treachery of the G30S/Indonesian Communist Party). Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI is reckoned to be the most broadcast and watched film in Indonesian history (Sen & Hill, 2000, p. 148). The film presents the government’s version of the events of September and October 1965 and depicts communism as inherently evil, its followers beyond redemption and the leadership, cunning, ruthless, and sponsors of inhuman violence. The film depicts the chaos of Indonesia in the lead up to the coup and the government’s success in producing order and harmony through its actions. It was the first popular account of the events of the mid-1960s and, as noted, widely viewed. Indeed, a 2000 survey of some 1100 Indonesian school students found that 97% had seen it, the great majority more than once (Heryanto, 2006, pp. 50–51). However, it is not simply that Indonesians sought out the film for viewing, rather, they were compelled to watch it. The government ensured all civil servants and students saw the film and it showed annually on the national television network on the coup anniversary. Once established, private television stations also showed it (Heryanto, 2014, p. 81). Its version of events was the only available analysis of what happened in September and October 1965 to the great majority of Indonesians. It is also silent on the massacres and mass imprisonments that followed the coup attempt (Heryanto, 2014, pp. 81–82). However: [t]he film established the central and overarching framework for any public discussion, fantasy or allusion for most of the New Order period. Any public expression that implied doubt in the validity of the official history of 1965 or made reference to alternative narratives among scholars overseas was declared against the law and was liable to criminal prosecution…dissenting voices emerged from time to time during the New Order rule, if only to be

2 CONTEXTS 

41

immediately suppressed. This suppression has continued at the time of writing, more than a decade since the downfall of the New Order. (Heryanto, 2014, pp. 81–82)

Evidence for the ongoing tensions surrounding communism is extensive. Marxism-Leninism remains illegal in Indonesia despite Abdurraham Wahid, Indonesia’s first elected president after the fall of Suharto, imploring Indonesians to liberate themselves from the ‘chains of fetishism’ in his failed attempts to restore legality to the left. His call led to extensive elite and mass opposition (Zurbuchen, 2002, p. 572). Efforts to rebury victims exhumed from mass graves provoke strong resistance and protest on the part of Islamic organisations and others concerned with murky pasts and collective guilt. In one such ceremony, activists seized coffins, destroyed them and scattered remains to prevent their reburial in sanctified ground (see Heryanto, 2006, pp.  1–2 & 33 for an illustration of one incident; also, Zurbuchen, 2002, pp. 579–580). Around ten years after the fall of the New Order, the government confiscated and destroyed school text books it had commissioned, for offering a more balanced account of events in the mid-1960s after protests from conservatives and Islamic organisations. Indonesia’s two most recent presidents, including the incumbent, have strongly hinted at making a formal apology for past atrocities, including the massacres of the mid-1960s and related human rights abuses, but have shied away in the face of staunch protest from the military and Islamic organisations (Vatikiotis, 2015). In seeking to examine this past cinematically, Joshua Oppenheimer notes that the making of his films, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) were plagued with problems of harassment by individuals and groups hostile to his undertakings. Yet, despite the fact that communism remains a difficult, frightening topic for many Indonesians, Ariel Heryanto rightly notes that [...] no authoritarian rule can possibly impose total repressive domination without self-contradictions, gaps, and subversive responses from the population’ (Heryanto, 2014, p.  86). This then is the fertile terrain of the social imaginary. Heryanto refers to the historical amnesia of contemporary Indonesians. By that he means not just the previously referred to absence of a ‘basic and balanced’ history but the consequential [...] inability to have an adequate historical perspective in discussions about many contemporary issues’ (Heryanto, 2014, p. 7). This is undeniably an important matter in a country that continues, in broad, national discourses, narratives, and political

42 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

action, to define itself in the context of New Order historiography and imaginaries. Hyper-nationalism, which Heryanto directly relates to historical amnesia, and which targets a range of others, is deeply problematic in contemporary Indonesia. Nonetheless, in the two decades since Suharto’s fall, Indonesia has, of course, changed as successive governments have reduced the scope and reach of the extensive repressive apparatus (but not necessarily its discourses). The media environment has broadened, become more diverse, more open, and social media has made deep inroads into the everyday lives of Indonesians. Popular culture, including cinema, is an important site of contest, debate, and conflict about what it means to be an Indonesian. However, perhaps the most significant change, and one underway as a form of protest against the New Order in its final years, is the Islamisation of Indonesian society. That, in itself, is changing debates about Indonesia’s past and, as with earlier examples about holding together complex ideas of being a Muslim and a communist, is interesting for the articulation of Islamic modernity. That is, many young Indonesians comfortably reconcile piety with all the trappings of youth culture including social media, aspirations for wealth, drug usage, overseas travel, and relative social freedom (see Heryanto, 2014, pp. 30–37). Certainly, some Indonesian women in their 30s and 40s are perplexed about the alacrity with which younger women adopt the hijab or entertain polygamy. Whereas in the Suharto era, wearing the hijab was less common and marked a form of resistance to the secular nationalism of the New Order, it now functions as a form of pious political correctness much to the frustration of those women who seek personal control of decisions about modes of attire (Heryanto, 2014, p. 47). That is, some women resent the encroachment of (patriarchal) organised religion in the form of pressure to attire themselves in ‘approved’ fashion. Indonesian collaborators in this research attract vaguely disapproving comments at staff meetings for not conforming to what male colleagues assert are dress norms. For some civil servants, the choice is entirely removed when particular mayors or other elected officials dictate that all (Muslim) civil servants will wear the hijab on Fridays. Nonetheless, given the deep entanglements between organised Islam and the crushing of the left in Indonesia, the ongoing growth of Islam’s role in national, regional, and local life is significant for our work on conflict imaginaries. The growing influence of Islam in Indonesia is a reminder of the persistence of religion in identity imaginaries. Barabara-Ann Rieffer (2003) notes the neglect of religion in most major studies of nationalism

2 CONTEXTS 

43

including those by Gellner, Anderson, and Hobsbawm, all regarded as seminal. Indeed, it may have been Benedict Anderson who noted that scholars became so accustomed to examining the ways states made use of religion that the ways that religious operatives increasingly make use of the state is entirely overlooked. For example, in 2016–2017, Islamic activists successfully campaigned to have Jakarta’s Christian, ethnically Chinese, governor charged with blasphemy because of remarks he made about the possibility of Muslims being incorrectly advised to refrain from voting for a non-Muslim candidate. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama’s remarks were certainly clumsy but Islamic activists seized upon them as evidence of the governor’s danger to Islamic life and organised mass protests notable for their less than tolerant approach to perceived opponents. Not highly regarded for its independence or fearlessness, the Indonesian judiciary convicted and gaoled Ahok (as he was popularly known) with many national and international observers claiming the conviction was politically motivated (see, for example, Lindsey, 2017). It is impossible to verify the extent to which Ahok’s remarks were a convenient tool for mobilising opinion as opposed to genuinely offending Muslims. However, activist organisations (on this and other issues) continue to pressure Indonesian governments effectively narrowing their ability to frame political debate in areas that affect Islam. Indeed, Indonesian government courting of approval from those espousing a less forgiving form of Islam risks offering validation to forces that have traditionally been at the margins of political life. Intolerance of criticism of Islam also reduces the space for legitimate political and social commentary in Indonesia. Moreover, given the complex history of contestation between Islam and the Marxist left in Indonesia, organised Islam’s refusal to countenance apologies, healing, reparations, forgiveness, and open analysis of the cataclysm of the mid-1960s violence impedes the possibility of the basic and balanced history Heryanto refers to, but also entrenches and extends particular imaginaries of conflict. For our purposes, it is significant that popular cinema is a site at which an increasingly Islamic Indonesian is articulated. One of the ambitions of the Screening Violence project is to take seriously the prosaic, the everyday, the vulgar, and low culture (though we regard the distinction between low and high culture as false) ways that people make meaning about the world and their experiences in and of it. Heryanto pointedly observes that much otherwise laudable scholarship on Indonesia regards popular culture in Indonesia (and Asia more generally) as unimportant and an embarrassing imitation of the West’s (Heryanto, 2014, p.  17). As such, very

44 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

little is known of the realms in which millions take great pleasure and look to when wishing to explore the complexities of contemporary life in a rapidly changing political and social environment. A number of relatively recent commercially and critically successful Indonesian films explore complex questions arising for young Muslims but in ways that nonetheless highlight the difficulties for filmmakers seeking a critical engagement with Islam. For example, whereas during the New Order it was impossible for filmmakers to imply corruption on the part of government or military functionaries, it is now similarly unthinkable to negatively portray a Muslim protagonist (Heryanto, 2014, p. 27). Yet, at least some of these films attract audiences, including non-urban, poorly educated people and members of Islamic study groups, to the cinema for the first time (Heryanto, 2014, p. 52). Arguably, the emergence of new audiences for films that speak to them about not just what it means to be Muslim in contemporary Indonesia but what it could mean in an as yet unrealised future necessarily forms part of a wider social imaginary. This possibly includes at least some in audiences thinking as Muslims rather than simply being Muslim for the first time. By that I mean that I mean it is an open question as to what it means for social (and conflict) imaginaries when a growing number of people actively engage the world as Muslim protagonists rather than as people who happen to be Muslim. It is unknowable, as yet, whether cinematic portrayals of Muslim individuals as successful problem solvers and Islam as holding at least some of the answers to the problems of contemporary life in Indonesia provide more or less social space for alternative views. That is, is the Islam produced in such films confident and relaxed about its prospects for informing future Indonesian values, or, like its evangelical Christian counterpart in the US, might it be a crankier, less forgiving, more demanding Islam that rails against its perceived adversaries? While there is no reason to assume that committed Muslims concerned or angry about a world not to their liking will necessarily fall in behind politicians like Donald Trump in the way that evangelical Christians have in the US, the possibility, with all its consequences for an ethnically and religiously diverse fragile democracy, cannot be discounted (on Christian support for Trump, see Graham, 2020). However, the activism that facilitated Ahok’s imprisonment suggests that Muslims willing to be organised by a leadership perhaps more intolerant than individually they are, are drawn to less pluralistic, narrower, more righteous imaginaries of what it means to be a good Muslim in contemporary Indonesia.

2 CONTEXTS 

45

This short, inadequate, history attempts to provide some insight into, if not necessarily a widely shared understanding of Indonesia, then at least the battles and struggles waged at national level to establish and entrench imaginaries of Indonesia’s history. Official histories and narratives are challenged, contested, rebuked everywhere and Indonesia is no different. It is immediately obvious to us, in working with focus groups watching and commenting on films from places other than Indonesia, that almost everyone queries the history provided by the Indonesian state. Such questioning may not amount to rejection or even hostility, but people sense the gaps, the contradictions, the obfuscation, the banishing of unpleasant elements. Yet, it is that history that is a kind of starting point for negotiation about the country. Even in outright rejecting official history, as some participants in the Screening Violence project vocally do, it must first be engaged if only to dismiss it. However, as we have stated throughout this short monograph, it is not national imaginaries that are of primary interest to us, but local imaginaries of community and conflict, violence and transition. These may draw upon national histories, narratives, and mythologies but in Indonesia, as with other sites in the project, we argue that to understand conflict imaginaries, it is necessary to engage with local experiences of national events to understand how imaginaries work.

Conflict Imaginaries in Colombia Conflict plays an important role in the Colombian political imaginary, unsurprisingly given the country’s often turbulent history. While there are debates amongst historians about just how violent Colombia has been relative to other Latin American states (Carbó, 2006; Deas, 1997) there is no doubt that during the two hundred years that have gone by since this ‘country of endemic, permanent war’ (Sánchez & Peñaranda, 2007, p. 17) emerged from the ruins of the Spanish empire, violence has played a significant role in determining the political fortunes of its citizens. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that discussions about national identity have often been wrapped up in debates about how Colombians came to create such a violent legacy, and why they continue to live with it, debates that recur in the aftermath of intense periods of civil strife. In a more systematic way, recent historiography has begun to explore the imaginaries through which Colombia’s conflicts have been understood and their role in fomenting future confrontations (Jurado, 2015). As part of the current project we have begun to chart the historical development of conflict imaginaries

46 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

in our sites but we have insufficient space here to do justice to the complex universes of meaning that have marked Colombia’s two hundred years of republican history, which often have only tangential relevance to the contemporary moment. In the pages that follow, therefore, we present a brief summary of the history of conflict imaginaries in Colombia, which focuses in rather more detail on the recent past. We also note in passing that our emphasis on the local means that the naturalisation of the nation and national history is in itself problematic. While Colombia’s political trajectory during the nineteenth century leaves only a ghostly trace in today’s popular imaginaries it established important points of reference for the conflicts of the twentieth, cementing political rivalries and resentments. Like the colony before it the republic was born from violence and in its early years was also shaped by it, as frontiers, regional identities and political affiliations began to coalesce through conflict, almost all of which was internal. In fact, some historians have noted that unlike other Latin American Republics, Colombians could ‘continue to fight each other as they [were] not called upon to fight anyone else’ (Deas, 1997, p. 356), so that political antagonism was not primarily directed beyond the national frontiers but to the enemy within. Furthermore, ‘it was easy to go to war given the abundance of weapons left over from the independence wars, through the generalised habit of military service, and through the militarisation of society, which emphasised the authority of high-ranking officers over the rest of the population’ (Pardo, 2010, p. 12). The quantification of a century of conflict has produced a familiar litany, the ritual counting of the rosary of violence: fourteen years of brutal struggle against the Spanish crown, eight civil wars and more than fifty local conflicts, much of this taking place within the framework of Latin America’s longest standing democracy. Understanding how this violence was understood requires us to enter worlds very different from contemporary Colombia, yet nonetheless connected to it in significant ways. A tropical nation, characterised by high mountain chains, deep river valleys and vast expanses of rainforest and savannah, New Granada, as Colombia was known between 1830 and 1858, was poorly integrated and strongly regionalised. Today, its fifty million citizens comprise the largest Spanish speaking country by population in South America but at the time of independence the territories that constitute Colombia today had barely a million inhabitants (as a point of comparison the population of the contemporary US was between five and six million). This was ‘a weak state

2 CONTEXTS 

47

within a strong structure of social domination’ (Oquist, 1980, p.  13) a place where the ‘fortresses and earthworks’ of civil society maintained hierarchy without the help of a powerful central state (Gramsci, 1971, p.  238). Most of the population were illiterate peasants and the gulf of wealth and privilege that separated them from the creole elites were reflected in social relationships stratified in socio-racial terms. A colonial history in which the three sources of national identity were the descendants of the indigenous population, European invaders, and African slaves, left a seemingly indelible mark on social relations. Whiteness, however relative, remained an object of desire, a marker of status for those who obtained the titles that allowed them to pass as white, and a social destiny for the elites, who needed no such stratagems. The position of the poor, uneducated majority in a republic that restricted citizenship to the educated and wealthy was an uncertain one, and their words are generally found in the archive only when they petitioned elite institutions. Alongside this fundamental inequality, elite competition was a fundamental driver of nineteenth century conflict. Following the wars of independence, divisions over how the new republic should be governed took centre stage and from mid-century on these coalesced around the recently founded Liberal and Conservative parties. Much of the antagonism centred on opposing national ideals that coalesced around the polarity of tradition versus modernity, of piety versus secularism, though this is a simplification, as both parties had factions prepared to form alliances across party lines. Liberals understood their attempts to strip the Catholic Church of its lands and end its monopoly on education as modernising measures needed to bury the colonial legacy and link the country to the circuits of global trade. By and large, they also favoured a federal system, with checks on the power of the central state. In contrast, order, tradition and the Church were the watchwords of a Conservative party that defended a notion of civilization shored up by the linguistic and religious heritage of Hispanism. That said, Conservatives were often not strongly opposed to federalism, profited as much as Liberals from the appropriation of Church lands, and followed political ideals influenced by the ideals of the Bolivarian version of republicanism. Towards the end of the century, with the Conservatives and conservative sectors of the Liberals in the ascendant, the elite vision of the nation was a tripartite one: ‘One Language, One Race, One God’ (Charry, 2011, p. 59). The language was Spanish, the legacy of the colonial motherland, along with the Church. The racial ideal recognised both the inevitability

48 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

of mixing between the three ‘races’ that made up society alongside the continued desirability of whiteness, thereby denying any place in the national ideal for the tropical lowlands, territories ‘peopled by indigenous people, blacks, mulattoes or zambos, where the dominant race was not blanca mestiza, the language spoken was not necessarily Spanish, and where gods other than the Catholic god were worshipped’ (Charry, 2011, p. 59). The ideals of Catholic Hispanism were to be defended, violently if necessary, against the secularism of the Liberals and their flirtation with the demands of the dispossessed. For the Church, ‘the electoral arm of the Conservative Party’ (Deas, 1973, p. 130), Liberalism was sin. The Liberal party was more divided. In general, the Conservatives were seen as enemies of liberty but while some Liberals thought Church and democracy were incompatible others simply wanted to limit ecclesiastical power (Safford & Palacios, 2002, p.  206). Fundamental differences of interest within the party pitted radicals, influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution, against laissez-faire liberals bent on economic modernisation, and meant that urban artisans, who demanded fiscal support for small manufacturers, were increasingly at odds with the dominant sector within the party, which talked about freedom and fraternity while protecting the interests of their class. Indeed, the artisans were ultimately repressed by their own party, as the elites closed ranks to avoid a threat to their dominance (Oquist, 1980, p. 56). The case of the artisans, however, underlines the fact that the ideological divide between Liberals and Conservatives fails to account for local difference and subaltern agency. The aspirations of subaltern groups affected both parties and a growing body of scholarship suggests that republican discourse, with its appeal to liberty and citizenship, made a lasting impact far beyond the elites. As James Sanders has shown ‘[s]ubalterns would take elite republicanism and make it their own, reframing it to suit their needs and social visions’ (Sanders, 2004, p. 21). Thus while there is much we do not know about the imaginative world of subaltern groups it is important not to underestimate the antagonisms that existed during the early republic between elite groups and subaltern actors, the differences and rivalries that divided the latter, and the ties through which they negotiated their relationship with the powerful. Sanders’ work on what was at the time the state of Cauca (comprising the modern departments of Nariño, Valle, Quindío, Risaralda and Caldas) reveals the complexity of subaltern imaginaries in the second half of the nineteenth century and emphasises the fundamental social fears that

2 CONTEXTS 

49

shaped political antagonisms. Focusing on the ‘tropes’ (his own choice of term) each of these groups used to express their social identity, Sanders outlines the clear differences between settlers arriving from Antioquia to open up the rural frontier, indigenous groups, Afro-Colombians and poor mestizos. For the first of these groups, labour, community, equality, family, authority and religion were all tropes ‘now cannibalized into republican discourse’ that ‘emerged out of the colonial era’. The master trope, however, was liberty, which ‘defined male migrants’ identity as free citizens who ruled over the own families and plots of land’ (Sanders, 2004, p. 23). Land was crucial, as it ‘allowed independence from the landlord’s authority and rule’ and ‘established a migrant’s political self as an independent citizen, free to decide his own fate and participate in the governance of his village, state, and nation’. At the same time, the myths of the distinctive paisa culture, with their emphasis on self-reliance, piety, and family, were already in place, and are still significant today. In contrast, what Sanders dubs ‘popular indigenous conservatism’ focused on preserving the integrity of communally held lands, the resguardos established during the colonial period. In their petitions to authority, indigenous groups emphasised their weakness and naivety relative to those who sought to exploit and dispossess them. This imaginary casts state authorities as protectors against local predatory interests, while appealing both to a republican discourse of citizenship and the image of the nation as a family. In the process, the interplay between different scales, so important to our study, is already apparent. Sanders suggests that ‘Indians turned to regional and national authorities to counter the designs of local authority, thereby creating a new metalocal identity for themselves’ and adds that ‘Colombia, or Nueva Granada, existed in the minds of Indians when they imagined themselves as citizens of this new political entity, long before the feeble power of the national or even the regional state made its presence felt in rural areas’ (Sanders, 2004, p. 35). For antioqueños, the Other was embodied by Afro-Colombians and indigenous groups, while for the indigenous activists of the nineteenth century it was their ‘white’ neighbours and Afro-Colombians. The example of slavery remained in the indigenous imaginary long after it had been outlawed as a symbol of what was most to be feared, an abject, landless condition to be avoided at all costs. Unsurprisingly, slavery was also a crucial component of the imaginary of Afro-Colombians, underlying their ‘desire to escape from and destroy the almost all-encompassing social, political, and economic subordination of enslavement and its legacy’

50 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

(Sanders, 2004, p. 43). Yet Afro-Colombians had middle-class allies in the Democratic Societies and their emphasis on popular rights was shared with the mestizo poor, ‘with whom they often allied themselves politically’, a process helped by the fact that the long-standing imbrication of the notions of race and class meant that Conservatives ‘simply grouped all of the valley’s poor into one category of “negros”’. Thus, while the popular liberalism described by Sanders ‘did not define itself against a racial Other’ it was nonetheless linked to race, which could not be ignored when matters of class were to the fore. Slavery ‘became the identity against which Afro-Colombians defined themselves, and it was one of the most prominent tropes of popular liberalism’ (Sanders, 2004, p.  44). Avoiding the return to slavery was an overarching imperative in the imaginary of popular liberalism, the ‘magic word’ (Sanders, 2004, p. 45) against which it was defined. These insights reveal something of the highly localised, interconnected and potentially conflictive nature of political imaginaries in the nineteenth century. From a modern perspective they are striking because many of the divisions that mark contemporary conflict were present in a recognisable form in that very different world. Sanders’ analysis emphasises just how subalterns’ agency ‘affected their elite compatriots’ politics too’ (Sanders, 2004, p. 44) and the standard antagonism between conservatism and liberalism acquires very different dimensions when understood in a local context. It helps us understand why Liberal General Obando, for example, was able to mobilise both the devoutly Catholic inhabitants of Pasto in the southwest and Afro-Colombians from the Patía Valley, in the War of the Supremes (1839–1841). Similarly, the Civil War of 1851, ostensibly centred on the anti-clerical reforms carried out during a period of Liberal ascendancy, revealed the importance of local political economies that had a significant influence on both parties. In some areas, for example, the violence represented the revenge taken by the Liberal popular classes on the victors in the War of the Supremes ten years previously. The slave-­ owning landowners of the south east, in contrast, saw Liberal plans to abolish of slavery as an attack on private property, an attempt to impose ‘communism in New Granada’ (Jurado, 2015, p. 80) a declaration that reminds us of Archila’s comment that Colombian elites, aware of events in Europe, ‘generated an antisocialist ideology before that school of thought had any real base in the country’ (Mauricio Archila Neira, 1992, p. 94). Other Conservatives saw anticlerical legislation and the expulsion of the Jesuits as causes demanding an armed response. The rebels, in short, were

2 CONTEXTS 

51

obliged to present their goals in different ways, taking into account local hopes and fears. In Antioquia, for example, they advocated federalism, not generally associated with the Conservative party, because this would allow the already intensely regionalist paisas to be free from ‘the red vandalism’ of the central government (Jurado, 2015, p. 81). That said, broadly opposing visions of what the nation was or ought to be did indeed play a part in the construction of antagonism in the nineteenth century. Alongside the appeal to the national ideal, the confrontation between modernity and tradition was enough to kill and die for, as was the desire for revenge. These wars themselves ‘accentuated the progressive ossification of partisan identification’ (Oquist, 1980, p. 13), and periodic dominance by one or the other of the parties failed to establish a set of institutions capable of moulding the nation around a particular vision. The so-called ‘Regeneration’, a period of Conservative hegemony abetted by Liberals like Rafael Núñez, which began with the 1886 constitution that provided the foundation of Colombia’s institutions until 1991, only fuelled Liberal resentment, leading to the War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902), a doomed crusade that claimed over a hundred thousand deaths in a population of little more than four million. In the first half of the twentieth century inequality remained a driving factor, especially in terms of land ownership, but the increasingly entrenched divide between Liberals and Conservatives continued to dominate conflict imaginaries. Writing of the party rivalry of the 1930s and 1940s Darío Acevedo notes that ‘to be a Liberal or a Conservative was not a decision made at some point in one’s life; it was an inheritance, something passed on, a passion, a clinging to a particular uniform […] the feelings of hatred and the strength of the beliefs involved were so solid, their roots so deep, that any hope of conciliation was swept away by the overwhelming force of sectarianism’ (Acevedo Carmona, 1995, p. 61). In this intensely polarised environment, the media played a key role. In the 1930s, radio began to be broadcast nationally in Colombia, quickly becoming a major influence in political and cultural life, not least because news could be shared almost simultaneously around the country. Newspapers, in contrast, tended to be several days old before they reached many parts of the country. Radio cemented a sense of national identity that was nonetheless radically split by partisan conflict. Colombians could hear for themselves the incendiary debates in Congress, as Laureano Gómez, the great Conservative rabble rouser, recognised when he remarked that his Liberal opponent Eduardo Santos could no longer use his newspaper to spread

52 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

fake news proclaiming ‘an enormous defeat for Laureano Gómez’. ‘The farce is over’, he declared, ‘the country is listening to the debates and public opinion can no longer be deceived so easily’ (Gómez, 1990, p. 325). Even so, the intensely sectarian newspapers of the period stoked up political hatreds. For Conservatives, in their embattled defence of tradition, Liberals were communists trying to ‘tear out from the national consciousness the notions of God, fatherland and family, which have been the guiding spirits of our nationality’ (Perea Restrepo, 2009, p.  29). In January 1949 an editorial in Gómez’s newspaper El Siglo declared that, ‘today the choice between Rome or Moscow has never had such singular transcendence’; a year later the same paper proclaimed that Liberal violence was a foreign plot, financed by communists based in Havana. Liberals were vilified as freemasons, a movement associated by radical Catholics as part of a Jewish conspiracy, while the public education system, a cornerstone of Liberal policy, was excoriated as an attack on religious education (Perea Restrepo, 2009, pp. 31–32). Strikes were condemned as antidemocratic, unpatriotic and the work of a few malcontents. Conservative propaganda portrayed the ‘Liberal people’ as barbarous and animalistic. A cartoon in a Conservative newspaper in January 1948, entitled ‘The Irremovable Stain’, showed a faceless figure marked ‘Gaitanismo’, a reference to the populist wing of the Liberal party, its hands recently dipped in a bucket of blood, a bloodstained machete on the ground in front of it, and a cemetery in the background (Acevedo Carmona, 1995, p.  201). This crude propaganda conveyed to its readership everything it needed to know about the enemy, as did representations of the Liberal ‘rabble’ as simians, not so much subhuman as simply not human at all. The victories and defeats of decades of conflict were used to rally followers of both sides. Conservative leaders frequently referred to their party’s ‘martyrdom’, while Liberal president Alfonso López Pumarejo himself linked electoral politics directly to war: The Liberal banners, destroyed in the legendary sites of our civil wars, finally arrived at their destination. They were on their way to the Capitol, and to get them there we made war. (Cited in Perea Restrepo, 2009, p. 99)

The confrontation was habitually framed as a clash between different ‘feelings’ and ‘temperaments’, imagining Colombian history as a struggle between the traditionalist, Catholic sentiment of the Conservatives or the

2 CONTEXTS 

53

modernising, populist temperament of the Liberals. There were frequent appeals to the pseudo-scientific social psychology of the period and its obsession with ‘types’, an approach closely linked to the scientific racism that was rife during these years. Appeals to both the political passions and a ‘spiritual essence’ supposedly expressed through each of the parties made meaningful dialogue between the sides impossible. As López Pumarejo put it: ‘The existence of a liberal spirit and a conservative spirit lies in fundamental aspects of the human personality, and is in no way subordinated to the occasional positions adopted by both parties in their political practice’ (Perea Restrepo, 2009, p. 85). In spite of sporadic and unsuccessful attempts at creating national unity, the two parties ultimately saw themselves as emotionally and temperamentally irreconcilable. Riots, beatings and politically motivated murders were frequent occurrences throughout the 30s and 40s and reflections on the nature of this violence became increasingly common. Writing about unrest in 1934, Liberal politician Max Grillo laments ‘murders in which the bandits finish off whole families, the old and children; acts of revenge that are reminiscent of Corsican vendettas; acts of cruel stupidity, like skinning the victims and savagely mutilating them’ (cited in Fals Borda et  al., 1962, p.  26). These incidents, understood here through a comparison with an imagined and above all external site of primitive savagery, were sporadic and geographically limited but they meant that there were many scores to be settled in different parts of the country. These pent up passions were unleashed when Liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was murdered on April the ninth, 1948, an event seared into the collective memory as the foundation of modern history. The death of the politician who declared himself ‘not a man but a people’ led to the immediate lynching of assassin Juan Roa Sierra, whose battered corpse was deposited on the steps of the presidential palace, part of an explosion of popular fury that blazed for ten hours as the ‘mob’ looted and burned entire city blocks. The radio stations broadcast the news around the country, raising tensions and causing further outbreaks of violence. The Liberal establishment had always been suspicious of Gaitán’s populist charisma. ‘El negro Gaitán’, they called him, a nickname that used the racialised code of the class system to emphasise Gaitán’s humble origins. Similarly, when faced by a popular insurrection that degenerated into looting, they condemned the ‘barbarism’ and ‘savagery’ of those who participated in what has always been referred to in Colombia as simply the ninth of April. These loaded terms subtly racialised the pueblo, casting the

54 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

violence as a self-fulfilling prophesy that reinforced what Marco Palacios has dubbed ‘the fear of the people’, a constant point of reference in the Conservative imaginary that justified the marginalisation and repression of the poor (Palacios, 2001, p. 166). Mariano Ospina Pérez, the Conservative president, adopted a different approach, refusing to imagine these events within the parameters of the ‘national character’. ‘Forces foreign to the nature of our people have tried to undermine the foundations of our nationality’, he declared, adding that ‘[t]he criminality, devastation and looting of the ninth of April […] does not and cannot have a Colombian source’, because ‘[i]t is foreign to our nature’ (Ospina Pérez, 1949). This approach expels the perpetrators of such ‘savagery’ from the nation, a process of inclusion and exclusion that goes on to this day. The response to the ninth of April was not slow in coming, as the Conservative government, appalled at what it deemed ‘an attempt to murder freedom’ (Acevedo Carmona, 1995, p. 54) and determined to ‘save the nation’, unleashed death squads, the ‘little birds’ (pajaritos) who sought out the Liberal ‘rabble’ (chusma) with the slogan ‘don’t leave even the seed’ (no dejen ni la semilla), a clear invitation to infanticide. It was not uncommon for the butchery to be accompanied by rallying cries of ‘¡Viva Cristo Rey!’(‘Long live Christ the King!’) from Conservative bands flaunting the piety that supposedly separated them from the godless Liberals, most of whom were in fact fellow Catholics. The violence that followed is most remembered for its sadistic refinement: cruelty as art form. This was the period which popularised the ‘tie cut’, the corte de corbata in which the victim’s throat is cut and the tongue pulled out through the wound, just one of dozens of techniques in a grotesque taxonomy of murder. There was, however, a meaning to be found amidst the sadism. These were exemplary atrocities designed to escarmentar, to terrify anyone who might oppose the perpetrators. The Liberals replied in kind, guerrilla fronts and self-defence forces carrying out conspicuous killings of their own, ‘showing off’ (paviando) the corpses of their victims in ways designed to make the most impact on the enemy. The nicknames assumed by or assigned to these Liberal ‘bandits’ reveal the fear they inspired in Conservative hearts: Jacinto Cruz, ‘Blackblood’ (Sangre Negra), José William Ángel Aranguren, ‘Captain Revenge’ (Capitán Desquite), Víctor Julio Ardila, ‘The Hyena’ (La Hiena). The loathing they inspired in the enemy was such that the Church forbade the burial of Teófilo Rojas, alias ‘Sparks’ (Chispas), in consecrated ground and he was finally interred in the mass grave reserved for those other sinners, suicides.

2 CONTEXTS 

55

Estimates of the number of politically motivated murders during this period, known simply as La Violencia, vary from 150,000 to over 300,000 in a country whose population at this point was about thirteen million. The violence was highly localised and driven by very specific local conditions, as Mary Roldán (2002) points out in the case of Antioquia, but in subsequent years it became common for Colombians to see the problem as somehow residing in themselves. In an echo of the typologies of the 1930s and 1940s, it was believed that there was a dark side to the ‘national character’ that led inevitably to violence. Colombia’s social scientists tried to dispel such notions, focusing instead on the impact of inequality, and in 1962 Orlando Fals Borda, Eduardo Umaña Luna and Germán Guzmán Campos published their seminal text, Violence in Colombia: A Study of a Social Process, a monumental effort to understand the multiple social factors, regional differences and ideological influences that had led to such destruction. The authors compared a wide range of local conditions and social struggles in order to reveal the plurality of violences that the popular imaginary had lumped together simply as La Violencia. In doing so they set the foundations for a wave of analyses from a generation of scholars who, by the 1980s, came to be known simply as the ‘violentologists’. This body of work, carried out by researchers like Jesús Bejarano, Gonzalo Sánchez and Álvaro Camacho, and centring on the National University’s Institute of Political Studies and International Relations (IEPRI), was developed in a period when violence remained a constant presence in Colombian politics, even though it might not have directly affected the daily lives of most of the population. In this respect, Perea notes that violence ‘endures, continuing to provide the cement for the political order’ and that ‘as long as violence is a constant presence it does not allow us to imagine a moment that can be thought of as a break’ (Perea Restrepo, 2009, p. 96). The endemic, cyclical nature of political violence has made it difficult for expert knowledge to find its way into public discourse as violence has become a kind of grotesque palimpsest, atrocity written over atrocity, each one partially obliterating previous horrors, leaving them unhealed and unmemorialised apart from by their immediate victims and perpetrators. By the early 1960s, the bipartisan dynamics of La Violencia had evolved into the insurrectionary warfare that was to dominate the second half of the twentieth century, which was partly framed by the imaginaries of the Cold War. That said, there were important continuities. Legendary ‘bandit’ leaders like Guadalupe Salcedo had been betrayed and murdered but the most famous

56 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Liberal rebel of all, Pedro Antonio Marín, alias Manuel Marulanda Vélez, alias Tirofijo, ‘Sureshot’, was a founding member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (1966). In 1964, Marulanda led a handful of guerrilla fighters in a successful rearguard action against thousands of government troops at Marquetalia, who had been sent to reclaim these ‘rebel’ territories for the nation. The resistance at Marquetalia is the founding myth of the FARC, a political moment that encapsulates the movement’s own vision of its identity, enemies and goals. The essential desire represented by this narrative is the peasants’ desire to be allowed to live in peace, free from the depredations of large landowners. Marquetalia itself was paradise lost, ‘a world without large landowners, made up of small independent landholders’ (our translation) (Uribe, 2007, p. 233), a past that heralded a future utopia where there was land to be cultivated, education for all, and the dignity of proper health care. In short, a place where peasant communities would be able to reproduce themselves and face a more prosperous future. A state that protected the beneficiaries of Colombia’s extreme inequality, especially in terms of land ownership, stood in the way. Even then, the Marquetalia narrative underlines that it was external aggression that forced the rural community to react in the shape of the invasion and indiscriminate bombing of their peaceful community by a treacherous enemy, in league with foreign interests. Violence, then, is essentially justified as self-­ defence on the part of the civilian population (Olave, 2013, p. 160) against the forces of dispossession that control the state. This was dramatised thirty-five years later when, during peace talks with the government, Marulanda asked for compensation for the cattle, pigs and chicken stolen by the armed forces during the attack (Uribe, 2007, p. 200). The moral thrust of this narrative of victimhood contrasts the greed of corrupt urban elites, who send their soldiers to take what little the peasants have, and the honesty of peasant guerrillas prepared to sacrifice themselves for their community. For all the ideological baggage that freighted the FARC’s subsequent self-representation, stories like this one provide provocative insights into the tropes through which the early generations of peasant insurgents understood their struggle. Buoyed by the success of the Cuban revolution, the Army of National Liberation (ELN, 1964) and the Maoist Army of Popular Liberation (EPL, 1967) declared their revolutionary goals, arguing that the closed nature of the National Front system justified the armed struggle. The former attracted the iconic figure of Camilo Torres, a precursor of Liberation

2 CONTEXTS 

57

theology and founder of the sociology programme at Bogotá’s National University, who left the classroom to join the rebels, only to be killed in his first action against the army in 1966. Camilo, the guerrilla priest, became a martyr to a generation of youthful activists who mythologised the ideals of the armed struggle, most powerfully embodied in the figure of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, himself ‘martyred’ the following year. Dependency theory, competing variants of revolutionary communism and pan Latin American liberatory rhetoric were the imaginative resources that drove these strands within the left, accompanied by a belief that violence was the tool that would destroy the old order and avenge the victims of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. These strands were also evident in the national-populist Nineteenth of April movement (M.19), which in the 70s brought a new kind of political violence to Colombia’s cities. The ‘Eme’, as it was known, took its name from the date in 1970 when, it was widely believed, electoral fraud denied the election to the presidency of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the candidate of the National Popular Alliance (ANAPO), thereby ‘proving’ once and for all that violence was the only way of effecting change. M.19’s specialised in daring publicity stunts designed to take the ideological war to the state, violence as part of a Gramscian war of position rather than a direct route to political power. Their first action, announced through a cryptic advertising campaign taken out in El Tiempo, was the theft of Simón Bolivar’s sword from a museum in Bogotá, accompanied by a communiqué entitled ‘Bolivar, your sword returns to the struggle’. The movement’s pan Latin Americanist project of regional emancipation is clear in the text that followed, which laid out the problem to be solved: From Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, the worker, the peasant, the labourer, the student, the woman of the people, the indian… we Latin Americans live with hunger. We wallow in poverty. We are bled dry by injustice. We feel our culture to be castrated, deformed, sold […] The Spanish chains broken by Bolivar have been replaced today by the gringo dollar. And in Bolivar’s seat, every four years the elites that murder the Colombian people have taken turns (our translation). (Herrera Villamizar, 1995, pp. 56–57)

The emergence of television as the privileged site of collective representations in the 70s and 80s meant that the group’s operations could now be seen on the news. In this case, the revolution would be televised and, in the words of the group’s leader Jaime Bateman, it would be a fiesta. M.19

58 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

ended the 70s with a raid on a military arms depot in the north of Bogota, carried out between the thirtieth of December and the first of January, which netted them nearly 6000 weapons. The operation was remembered for messages on the walls wishing the army a Happy New Year, a humiliating joke that was never forgiven by the institution’s top brass. The Dominican Embassy was taken in 1980, allowing the movement to hold fifteen ambassadors as hostages, and after two months of negotiations the guerrillas flew to Havana, to the applause of hundreds of people along the route to El Dorado airport. The commando’s leader, Rosemberg Pabón and the negotiator, Carmenza Cardona Londoño, affectionately nicknamed La Chiqui (‘Titch’) by journalists, were household names. They had not forced the release of political prisoners, as planned, nor received the huge ransom they had asked for, but they had achieved a significant publicity coup. For their part, in the 1960s the technocratic elites that managed Colombia’s limited democracy replaced the language of bipartisan competition with the ideological discourses of the Cold War and an imaginary based on the myths of modernising development. Conservatives had used the anti-Communist message to attack the Liberals in the late 40s, but now both Conservatives and Liberals were united by what was presented as the common threat of Soviet ‘subversion’. The Cold War imaginary of a world split between opposing blocs framed the development of the so-­ called national security state, during which the army was used not against foreign threats but the enemy within: trade unionists, peasant organisers, students and community activists. Conscription for military service, a burden borne essentially by the poor, had been regularised in 1945, while increased US investment produced a very different kind of institution. This emboldened army habitually referred to the insurgents not only as ‘subversives’ but as ‘bandits’ (bandoleros), thereby denying them political status and enhanced surveillance, forced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial execution were frequent occurrences during the dirty war that gathered momentum in the 1970s. In these circumstances, even the managed democracy of the National Front period was deemed an obstacle to security and for seventeen of the twenty-two years between 1958 and 1980 Colombia was governed under state of exception legislation, which allowed presidents to rule by decree but also reinforced the insurgent narrative that the political system was closed. A speech by presidential candidate Carlos Lleras Restrepo was stuffed with references to ‘factors of production’, ‘short term productive

2 CONTEXTS 

59

processes’, ‘inflationary procedures’, ‘sterile financial burdens’, and ‘price control mechanisms’, a technical language that suggested only specialists could be trusted to guide the economic fortunes of the nation. At the same time, the Lleras administration (1966–1970) made the last serious effort at land reform, though this too ended up favouring capitalist development over peasant rights. A series of major events during the 1980s became significant points of reference within opposing political imaginaries. One of these was the storming of the Palace of Justice by M.19  in 1985, in an operation designed to take the country’s most senior lawyers hostage and orchestrate a media trial of the president in exchange for their release. With the guerrillas holed up in the building the military side-lined president Belisario Betancur and mounted a frontal assault on the building. The botched operation provided one of the most iconic images of Colombia’s conflicts, an armoured car entering the main doors of the building beneath the words of independence hero Francisco de Paula Santander: ‘Colombians, arms have given you independence, laws will give you freedom’. Both relentless and inept, the assault continued to the bitter end. None of the hostages survived and only one guerrillera, Clara Elena Enciso, escaped. The few who made it through the initial inferno were taken from the building to be interrogated by the military in the nearby Casa del Florero de Llorente. Then, they were simply ‘disappeared’. The burnt-out hulk of a building presiding over one side of Bogotá’s Plaza Bolívar stood as an unofficial monument to political violence until it was rebuilt in 1990, the year after M.19 demobilised after a peace deal with the state. For the guerrillas and their supporters, the taking of the Palace of Justice was a failed attempt at dispensing revolutionary justice. For the state, it was the criminal act of narco-guerrillas acting on behalf of drugs cartels seeking to pressure the government into outlawing extradition to the US.  For many Colombians, it was an example of a kind of confused and tragic pointlessness in the stalemate between an illegitimate state unable to impose its monopoly on the use of force and guerrilla movements that had neither the popular support nor the military muscle to defeat them. The image of the narcoguerrilla, supposedly coined by US ambassador Lewis Tambs, gained traction as a way of discrediting the insurgencies whose relationship with drugs production was to increase dramatically in the following decade. As coca production boomed, the FARC became protectors of the raspachines, the peasant farmers who grew the crop and

60 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

began to process the base, taxing production and thereby funding the movement’s dramatic expansion in the 90s. The guerrilla movements had always extorted ‘revolutionary taxes’ through what were in effect protection rackets. They established their authority in rural areas lacking state presence, dispensing revolutionary justice and providing parallel institutions. Increased involvement in narcotrafficking, however, led to a narrative that focused on the ‘degradation of the conflict’, a phrase that suggested that while the guerrillas may once have been motivated by a desire for justice they had since become violent political entrepreneurs, more interested in profit. Such perceptions were amplified when the FARC initiated a vigorous campaign of kidnapping, referred to as ‘political detentions’ (retenciones políticas), a tactic that gained them money from the payment of ransom, bargaining chips for negotiations with the state, and an increased popular awareness of the guerrilla presence, even close to major cities. This approach was linked to the strategy of attempting to strangle Bogotá by establishing a military presence ever closer to the capital. By the mid-1990s, guerrilla roadblocks were not uncommon an hour and a half outside Bogotá as the insurgents took to indiscriminate ‘miraculous fishing’ (pesca milagrosa), stopping buses and cars to see who might fall into their hands. The urban middle classes were rattled by the emboldened guerrilla presence and the awareness of social identity, already acute in a country with a culture of deference, was heightened, as urban Colombians began to feel a small part of what people in many rural areas experienced on a daily basis. Yet the kidnapping campaign was a propaganda disaster for the FARC as the state and the private media corporations used it as a demonstration of the cruelty and criminality of the insurgents. Video messages from desperate, often ill captives, imprisoned in Colombia’s mountains and forests, did little to enhance the guerrillas’ reputation and much to support the claim that the conflict was a matter of criminality rather than political principle. This narrative was related to other significant shifts. As the FARC moved towards greater military confrontation in the 1990s, large landowners, narcotraffickers and sectors within the army promoted the formation of ‘self-defence’ forces, known more generally simply as ‘paramilitaries’. These groups were particularly active from the end of the 90s onwards, carrying out thousands of murders across both rural and urban Colombia, establishing control over entire regions and their populations, often entirely displacing peasant communities in what was soon to become the

2 CONTEXTS 

61

biggest agrarian counter-reform in Colombian history. If the population left the guerrillas lost their support base, while their land could be taken over by large landowners or bought up cheaply. The exemplary violence of La Violencia was used by these groups to intimidate local organisers and persuade peasant communities to leave. The weapon most clearly associated with them in popular imaginaries was the chainsaw, lending them their name as the ‘head cutters’ (los mochacabezas), or more often simply as paracos, a pejorative term for paramilitary. The image of paracos playing football with the severed head of one of their victims is one of the best known representations of conflict in contemporary popular imaginaries. The fact that the exact events underlying this event are hard to pin down does nothing to detract from the work of representation performed by the central image, which elicits disgust and above all fear. Estimates vary but the report by the National Centre for Historic memory (CNMH) suggests that nearly six million people were victims of ‘forced displacement’, close to 15% of the population, meaning that by 2013 Colombia had one of the worst refugee problems in the world (Anonymous, 2013). During the period of the insurgencies, hundreds of thousands of people have died (Anonymous, 2013, p. 20; Richani, 2002, p. 1) and there were 80,000 cases of forced disappearance (Anonymous, 2013), more than all the victims of the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships combined. Paramilitary violence was frequently used against political actors in urban settings. The Patriotic Union (UP), for a time the FARC’s political wing, had had some successes in the 1980s but was almost completely wiped out in a dirty war during the late 80s and early 90s, in which the state colluded with narcotraffickers to murder three and a half thousand party activists, including presidential candidates Jaime Pardo Leal and Bernardo Jaramillo, in what is commonly referred to in Colombia as the ‘genocide of the UP’. The severing of the party’s ties with the FARC did nothing to stop the slaughter. The response, largely speaking, was a silence that spoke volumes about the changing place of political violence in popular imaginaries and the role of radio and television in the construction of what passes for public space. In the era of bipartisan conflict, much of the population was linked to one or other of the parties, read Liberal or Conservative newspapers, and thought of the confrontation as between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yet in spite of the guerrillas’ ability to avoid defeat, in the process becoming the longest running insurgency in the Americas, their revolutionary rhetoric failed to forge the kind of cross-class popular front that might have achieved power.

62 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Though they made inroads in certain strategic rural areas and controlled a few urban neighbourhoods, the regionalisation of the violence allowed enough of the urban population to shut out, much of the time, a conflict that was largely fought in the countryside (Pécaut, 2013, p.  117). Furthermore, the insurgencies’ access to the national media was extremely limited, whereas the influential groups that dominated the state had a far wider range of levers available to them and were able to set the political agenda both through public channels and those belonging to the private business conglomerates that increasingly dominate the mediascape. Politics itself was habitually imagined as a problem in a polity in which the institutions have low levels of public credibility, and where electoral politics is frequently understood as an entrepreneurial activity. Sayings such as ‘the bad thing about cliques is not being in them’ (lo malo de las roscas es no estar en ellas), ‘the law is for people who wear ponchos (i.e. the poor)’ (la ley es para los de ruana), ‘the world belongs to the cunning’ (el mundo es de los vivos), ‘the cunning live off the stupid’ (el vivo vive del bobo), and ‘as soon as a law is made so is the way of getting round it’ (hecha la ley, hecha la trampa) suggest an embattled view of social life as dominated by inequality, corruption and the overwhelming importance of self interest. While Colombia is hardly unique in this sense, these sayings are part of a broad political imaginary whose cynicism militates against political involvement and at times diverts attention from the victims of violence. Turning away from violence may mean refusing to recognise it explicitly even when it is conspicuously displayed or even blaming the victims of violence by suggesting that they have somehow brought it on themselves by getting mixed up in things they should have avoided. ‘Algo debía’, ‘he or she owed something’, continues to be a common response, though by no means a universal one, to a forced disappearance or murder. It is based on the fantasy that, in a world governed by rational choices, social actors can guarantee their own survival by choosing to avoid anything to do with politics, armed actors or criminals. Alongside this widely shared political culture, another factor influencing understandings of the conflict was the adoption of a new constitution in 1991, a move promoted by the Liberal government of Cesar Gaviria partly in a bid for legitimacy, which involved an emphasis on citizen rights, and partly as a way of ‘modernising’ the state, which in effect implied the neoliberalisation of social relations. The result of a negotiation in the constituent assembly of 1990 in which the biggest groups were the demobilised guerrillas of M.19, Álvaro Gómez Hurtado’s right-wing Movement

2 CONTEXTS 

63

of National Salvation and the Liberal Party, this complex and contradictory document declared Colombia a Social State of Law, with a duty to provide public services. Housing, employment and healthcare were all declared fundamental rights. Similarly, the constitutional right of all Colombians to participate of ‘in the decisions that affect them’ would open up dozens of participatory spaces in the years to come. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities rights were also recognised, including the authority of traditional authorities within their designated territories, leading to a raft of legislation whose impact would reach its zenith in the 2000s, with a third of the national territory designated collectively held land. On paper, at least, a social hierarchy based on race and class was no longer recognised as the natural order of things. The progressive nature of what was framed as a new social contract meant that the left was split between a sector that maintained its support for the guerrillas and continued to focus on class struggle, and another that developed a rights based and identity politics inflected approach to social change. One of the key shifts in this period, then, took place in the left’s understanding of the solution to the problem of inequality. While the FARC and the ELN continued to imagine a radical social and economic transformation, the so-called democratic left focused on popular front politics, agglutinating a range of demands within a single platform in the hope of making electoral gains. Political actors involved in struggles against structural inequality, such as the peasant movement, found themselves having to negotiate a path between these positions. Over a million peasants were involved in drug production by the 90s (Richani, 2002, p. 75) and the FARC’s taxation of expanding coca and poppy cultivation gave the movement a material boost, as the organisation’s ranks swelled to a peak of over 20,000 combatants, a third of whom were women. In a dramatic change of tactic the movement began to concentrate its forces, carrying out operations against isolated military outposts that provided both weapons and hostages. During this period, the idea of Colombia as a ‘failed state’ became common currency and academic conferences were full of references to ‘Colombianisation’, understood as a process of societal collapse in which armed actors vie for power, unchecked by a weak state. This was not how most people lived their daily lives, however. In spite of the violence, daily life continued as normal in most urban and many rural areas. Some neighbourhoods in a few localities were controlled by guerrilla militias but these were exceptional sites even within Colombia’s overcrowded popular barriadas, where drug gangs and

64 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

paramilitary forces were much more likely to hold sway than the armed left. Yet urban Colombians were bombarded by images of violence through the media, to the point that it became common for news bulletins to be described as one third violence, one third football and one third celebrity gossip, a scathing critique of the media’s normalisation of violence in everyday life. Images of dead guerrillas and gutted police stations flickered briefly on the screen but the reports were almost always devoid of any explanatory context, part of a context that seemingly defied analysis and explanation. This was part of a process of banalisation of violence (Pécaut, 2013, p. 117) which both decried and normalised violence while ignoring its causes. The levels of violence intensified at the end of the century, especially during the period of peace negotiations between the Conservative government of Andres Pastrana and the FARC, which took place in a demilitarised zone centred on the village of San Vicente del Caguán. The negotiations, however, were doomed. Pastrana had proposed to negotiate ‘a peace with which we can build a new Colombia, fairer, more democratic, more developed and equitable’, ‘a country in which we can all find a place’ (Pastrana Arango, 1998, p. 89, our translation). This was fanciful rhetoric, given the historic intransigence of Colombia’s elites. In response, Marulanda demanded that ‘you tell us what you are willing to negotiate with a view to achieving a peace with social justice in this country’ (Leguizamo, 2002). In fact, Pastrana’s government had started out by offering to negotiate a wide range of issues, without cross sector political support, a factor which stymied the official effort from the outset. The failure of the negotiations amidst ongoing violence signalled the meteoric rise to power of the most significant figure in recent Colombian politics, Álvaro Uribe Velez, a Liberal senator who had previously been mayor of Medellín, head of the civil aviation authority, and governor of Antioquia. A minor figure within the party, with no chance of being its official candidate, Uribe won the first round of the 2002 elections as an independent, with 54% of the vote. This heralded a dramatic shift in electoral politics as neither of the traditional parties has won the presidency since. Uribe was re-elected as a representative of Primero Colombia (Colombia First), before joining the Partido de la U (Party of Unity) and then founding the Centro Democrático (Democratic Centre). His electoral success ushered in an administration that was authoritarian, populist and rhetorically neoliberal. Above all, however, it was determined to prosecute the war vigorously on both the military and propaganda fronts. The deal

2 CONTEXTS 

65

that Pastrana had been given by the Clinton administration, known as Plan Colombia, poured US money and equipment into the country, ostensibly to fight narcotrafficking and poverty but in practice used mostly against the guerrillas. Over the next thirteen years Colombia received nearly seven billion dollars under this scheme, becoming for a time the largest recipient of US military aid after Israel and Egypt. Using state of the art equipment, the Colombian army began to harry the guerrillas as never before. Alongside these offensives, the army was used to make an impact on public opinion, ostentatiously lining the roads during the many holiday weekends, every soldier raising a thumb in greeting to passing motorists. This detail is indicative of uribismo’s extraordinary impact on the propaganda front. Behind the campaign slogan ‘A firm hand, a big heart’ (Mano firme, corazón grande), Uribe’s campaign had offered a tripartite route towards a reimagining of the relationship between state and citizens through what was sometimes called the communitarian state: democratic security, institutional transparency and a renewal of social policy. The first of these promised to ‘restore’ the state’s legitimate monopoly on violence by taking the war to the FARC. The first of the manifesto points was the need to construct ‘a Colombia with legitimate authority and zero power for the violent’. Coupling the ideas of security and democratic legitimacy was an astute move, as appeals to the former had come to symbolise the human rights abuses of the national security era. The emphasis on democracy, however, implied the president had a mandate to impose authoritarian measures in what were to all intents and purposes free fire zones where democratic rights were curtailed and informers received regular payments from the state. The other two strands of the platform were quietly abandoned. For all the president’s railing against ‘politicking’ (politiquería), he was an inveterate politiquero himself, using patronage to buy support and reward loyalists, and deploying the resources of the state to pursue enemies, both real and imagined. The promised meritocracy never came into being and while social programmes such as Families in Action included subsidies for the poor, these were also used to guarantee votes amongst the poor (González, 2011). The neoliberal reforms imposed during Uribe’s two terms eroded workers’ rights and increased privatisations, deepening already existing inequalities, while tacit support for the paramilitaries (in spite of strenuous public declarations to the contrary) showed the state’s complicity in the

66 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

massive concentration of land in the hands of latifundistas, narcotraffickers and corrupt local politicians. Uribismo, however, struck a chord in a wide range of demographics, deploying a range of images of identity and community. The desire for a strong paternal figure who would solve all the problems of the nation was an obvious point of departure. In the Hundred Points, Uribe’s personalised campaign manifesto, he openly declares that ‘I look at my compatriots today more with the eyes of a father than a politician’ and representations of the nation as a family are scattered liberally throughout the document. The uribista PR machine manufactured others. Uribe frequently appeared on horseback, a light cotton poncho over his shoulder, the embodiment of a rural hacienda owner from the paisa region, a shrewd, no-nonsense patrón who looks after the best interests of his family and his ranch. For critics, this was part of the problem, as the landowning classes were accused of treating Colombia as their own private finca. Sometimes Uribe was the patriarch defending religious values, a priest delivering a sermon. At the turn of the century, religion was making a comeback as a significant political force, this time through the rapid growth of evangelical churches, which count a fifth of the population amongst their adepts. Uribe, himself close to the radical Catholic sect Opus Dei, had no problem courting evangelicals. Even when talking about religion and its associated values, however, the colloquial language of the paisa region was part of his repertoire, giving his listeners the sense that he spoke their language. During a breakfast with evangelical pastors, he suggested that young Colombians should put off having sex and ‘dejar el gustico para después’, ‘leave pleasure for later’, the use of the diminutive ‘gustico’ having both a demotic and a prudish quality. But Uribe was also the violent father, a macho president ‘with trousers’ (con pantalones), not so far removed from another paisa stereotype, the mafia boss. This was certainly the image advanced with the deliberate leaking of a phone conversation with an ex-employee accused of taking cash for favours. The president did not mince his words: ‘I’m fucking furious with you, and if I see you I’ll punch you in the face, you jerk’ (estoy muy verraco y si lo veo le voy a dar en la cara, marica). Uribe’s antipathy to the FARC is legendary, a longstanding personal grudge against the group that killed his father. However, if the nation was the family, then even the guerrillas were sometimes recognised as part of it. In the euphoria following his first election victory, he offered an olive branch in precisely these terms: ‘the violent groups, all of us, we are all

2 CONTEXTS 

67

made of this flesh and these bones of the Colombian soul’. More often, however, ‘bad’ Colombians were symbolically expelled from the nation. In the wake of the FARC bombing of the elite Nogal social club in Bogotá, one of the few terrorist attacks carried out by this group in the city, the president declared that ‘Colombia weeps but it does not give in’, a phrase reproduced on billboards around the country. The nation is imagined as a whole, with the forces that cause its pain on the outside, a vision that chimes with the commonplace view that it is a violent and criminal minority that damages a society of decent people. Here, though, it was attached to a brash patriotism that demanded blind allegiance to the nation. Anything else was treason, and all those who criticised the state in its struggle against the insurgency, people like human rights defenders and NGOs, were ‘useful idiots’ or ‘scribblers in the service of terror’ (tinterillos al servicio del terror). The appeal to nationalism was a constant throughout this process. Tricolour bracelets were sold on every street corner and revellers in the chic clubs of north Bogotá waved the national flag. In this context, even a figure as sinister as Carlos Castaño, head of the United Defence Forces of Colombia, could be interviewed on prime-time TV by glamorous right wing journalist Claudia Gurisatti and pose as a patriot who was doing the dirty work that needed to be done to save the nation. The uribista imaginary, thriving in a period of increasing activity on social networks, adapted the language of the US War on Terror to its own designs, emphasising the ‘you’re either with us or against’ ethic and adding home-grown elements. A concerted campaign to undermine the guerrillas’ status as political combatants categorised them as both ‘terrorists’ and ‘bandits’, emptying the conflict of political content and even denying that there had ever been a conflict at all. The real problem in the country, it suggested, was the insurgency, which stood in the way of peace, progress, development, personal success, whatever it was that any given Colombian thought was holding them back. If it could be defeated, then all such desires would be fulfilled. As part of this process the image of the guerrilla was utterly demonised and dehumanised; these were narco-­ guerrillas, kidnappers, murderers, humiliated in death as their corpses were flashed up on the news as a sign of military success. Large demonstrations were organised, ostensibly for peace but essentially against the FARC and in favour of the regime. The hatred stoked against the insurgency was transferred to anyone who had any links with them or tried to put their struggle into context. Alongside the guerrillas, the other absolute

68 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

antagonist was Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, represented as a dictatorial buffoon who provided a safe haven for the guerrillas. In short, Uribe has been one of the most successful and polarising figures in Colombian history, idolised and demonised in almost equal measure. Uribe liberator, Uribe patriarch, Uribe saviour. Uribe oppressor, Uribe paraco, Uribe devil. Just as the insurgency became the ultimate figure of hatred for the uribistas, the president himself was the embodiment of everything the left, liberals and self-styled ‘progressives’ despised, a figure who made everything he touched toxic. At street protests and marches organised by social movements, it was common to hear the chant, ‘Uribe paraco, el pueblo está verraco’, ‘Uribe, paramilitary scumbag, the people are angry!’ A joke imagined him being expelled from heaven for accusing archangels of being guerrilla sympathisers. After an ominous period of silence from Hell, God rings down and a minor demon answers. ‘The Devil, please’, says God. ‘Which one?’, asks the demon. ‘The red guy with horns or the fucking paisa?’ Yet for all the vitriol poured upon him by his opponents, their rage seemingly a function of their impotence, his supporters have always put the blame for any wrongdoing on others. This was the president, the national saviour, the man who defeated the guerrillas, the ‘eternal president’. Both Uribe administrations accrued political capital for their significant successes in the war against the guerrillas. A continuation of this hard-line approach seemed inevitable as Uribe’s anointed successor, Juan Manuel Santos, his Minister of Defence, won the 2010 elections with ease. In certain respects, the predictions were correct, as the Santos administration continued to take the war to the FARC, killing Jorge Briceño Suárez in 2010 and in the following year delivering the most brutal blow yet with the killing of Alfonso Cano, who had taken over as leader of the insurgency after Marulanda died of a heart attack just three years previously. Santos, however, had a different style and a different agenda. On the day of his inauguration he talked of ‘sowing the seeds of a real reconciliation’ (Irene Larraz Elorriaga, 2017, p.  258) and openly spoke of the ‘armed conflict’, a term banished from official discourse during the previous eight years. When Cano was killed his words were relatively measured, inviting the guerrillas to demobilise, and telling Colombians that ‘this is a marvellous country […] we are going to achieve the peace that has escaped us for so long, for so many decades […] Let us unite’ (NTN24, 2011). Santos was quickly portrayed by uribistas as a traitor, especially after the public announcement of the ongoing talks with the guerrillas, something known

2 CONTEXTS 

69

to the president but not his generals at the time of Cano’s death. The Colombian political scene became increasingly polarised, as Santos tried to sell the peace process and the notion of post conflict to Colombians, while the uribistas did everything in their power to sabotage it. Having been an enthusiastic member of a regime famous for its incendiary rhetoric, the president had to explain why he was talking to opponents that he too had recently referred to as bandits and terrorists. Why was negotiation now the route to peace rather than the extermination of the enemy, which sought to impose the paramilitary paz de las tumbas, the ‘peace of the graveyard’? The solution was to present peace as a historic opportunity not to be missed, an opportunity for all Colombians. Aspects of the process, and in particular of the transitional justice model, the special jurisdiction for peace (JEP), gave this claim some credibility. Unusually in a negotiation in which the state had the upper hand, the JEP recognised that agents of the state had also committed crimes and therefore had to face justice. The acceptance that everyone involved was in some measure responsible for the violence, a striking break with the previous regime’s approach, was used to cover up the failure to address Colombia’s deeper problems. For uribismo on the other hand, the challenge was to find a way of attacking the notion of peace itself, not an easy task in a country that has suffered so much from violence but one that was achieved through another inspired piece of discursive trickery. What was being offered, it was claimed, was not really peace at all but ‘Santos’ peace’ (Caicedo-Atehortúa, 2016). While Uribe’s war had brought peace to most of the country, the argument went, Santos’ peace was likely to bring back the war by strengthening the guerrillas. Social media was awash with memes showing atrocities with the question, ‘Is this Santos’ peace?’ At this point, uribismo had become the mirror image of those who had criticised the process with the paramilitaries, claiming that the proposals were too lax, that they offered too much impunity, too many political privileges, and not enough reparation for victims. These struggles to shape popular imaginaries took place throughout the negotiations (2012–2016), and often threatened to sour them. However, this was not 1999 and not everything was up for grabs. The talks in Havana covered ‘chapters’ on land reform, political participation, narcotrafficking, victims, and the mechanisms through which the agreement would be endorsed. There would be no restructuring of the armed forces and no debate about the underlying political and economic inequalities of Colombian society. In effect, the FARC had renounced revolution

70 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

and come round to the rights based, gradualist position of the rest of the Colombian left. They, too, were now committed to ‘peace with social justice’; the limits of what can be imagined as oppositional politics were once more defined in terms of current institutional arrangements. Yet if Colombian history has anything to tell us in this respect, it is that events constantly overflow the institutional arrangements which seek to challenge political passions.

References Acevedo Carmona, D. (1995). La mentalidad de la élites sobre la Violencia en Colombia. El Ancora. Anonymous. (2013). Basta ya! Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. Aspinall, E., & Berger, M. T. (2001). The Break-up of Indonesia? Nationalisms after Decolonisation and the Limits of the Nation-State in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia. Third World Quarterly, 22(6), 1003–1024. http://www.jstor. org/stable/3993459 Caicedo Atehortúa, J. M. (2016). ¿Ésta es la paz de Santos?’: el Centro Democrático y su construcción de significados alrededor de las negociaciones de paz. Revista CS, 19, 15–37. Carbó, E.  P. (2006). La nación soñada: violencia, liberalismo y democracia en Colombia. Norma. Charry, C. A. (2011). Los intelectuales colombianos y el dilema de la construcción de la identidad nacional (1850–1930). European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 90, 55–70. Cribb, R. (2001). Genocide in Indonesia, 1965–1966. Journal of Genocide Research, 3(2), 219–239. Deas, M. (1973). Algunas notas sobre el Caciquismo en Colombia. Revista de Occidente, 127, 118–140. Deas, M. (1997). Reflections on Political Violence in Colombia. In D.  Apter (Ed.), The Legitimization of Violence. Macmillan. Dibley, T. (1999, April 1). Tapol Troubles: When Will They End? Inside Indonesia, 58. https://www.insideindonesia.org/tapol-­troubles Elson, R. E. (2009). Another Look at the Jakarta Charter Controversy of 1945. Indonesia, 88(October), 105–130. Fals Borda, O., Luna, E. U., & Guzmán, G. (1962). La violencia en Colombia: estudio de un proceso social. Tercer Mundo. Formichi, C. (2012). Islam and the Making of the Nation: Kartosuwiryo and Political Islam in 20th Century Indonesia. KITLV Press.

2 CONTEXTS 

71

Formichi, C. (2015). (Re)Writing the History of Political Islam in Indonesia. Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 30(1), 105–140. https://doi. org/10.1355/sj30-­ld Gómez, L. (1990). Obra completa (Vol. 4). Instituto Caro y Cuervo. González, M. B. (2011). Clientelismo y Familias en Acción: una mirada desde lo local. Revista Opera, 11, 147–164. Graham, D.  A. (2020). Jeff Sessions Explains Why Christians Support Trump. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/ why-christians-­support-­trump/613669/ Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Trans.). Lawrence and Wishart. Herrera Villamizar, D. (1995). Aquel 19 será. Planeta. Heryanto, A. (2006). State Terrorism and Political Identity in Indonesia: Fatally Belonging. Routledge. Heryanto, A. (2014). Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture (Vol. 13). NUS Press. Irene Larraz Elorriaga. (2017). La construcción de legitimidad a través del capital simbólico. El caso del proceso de paz de Colombia. Estudios Políticos, 50, 257–280. Jurado, J.  C. J. (2015). Región y violencia en la guerra civil de 1851. Análisis político, 84, 76–101. Leguizamo, C. (2002). Reflexiones sobre el proceso de paz del gobierno de Andrés Pastrana y las FARC-Ep1998–2002. Dirección de estudios económicos. Lindsey, T. (2017). Conviction Politics: The Jailing of Ahok. https://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/conviction-­politics-­the-­jailing-­of-­ahok/ Mauricio Archila Neira. (1992). Cultura e identidad obrera. CINEP. Nawawi, M.  A. (1971). Punitive Colonialism: The Dutch and the Indonesian National Integration. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2(2), 159–168. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463400018580 NTN24. (2011). Presidente de Colombia se pronuncia sobre abatimiento de alias “Alfonso Cano”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI0CJzJLsxU&t=163s Olave, G. (2013). El eterno retorno de Marquetalia: sobre el mito fundacional de las Farc-EP. Folios, 37(Primer semestre), 149–166. Oquist, P. (1980). Violence, Conflict and Politics in Colombia. Academic. Ospina Pérez, M. (1949). New Year’s Speech. El Tiempo. Palacios, M. (2001). De populistas, mandarines y violencias. Luchas por el poder. Editorial Planeta. Pardo, R. (2010). La Historia de las Guerras. Ediciones B. Pastrana Arango, A. (1998). Hechos de paz. Oficina del Alto Comisionado para la Paz. Pécaut, D. (2013). La experiencia de la Violencia: Los desafíos del relato y de la memoria. La carreta histórica.

72 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Perea Restrepo, C. M. (2009). Cultura política y violencia en Colombia: porque la sangre es espíritu. La Carreta Política. Richani, N. (2002). Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia. SUNY Press. Rieffer, B.-A.  J. (2003). Religion and Nationalism: Understanding the Consequences of a Complex Relationship. Ethnicities, 3(2), 215–242. Roldán, M. (2002). Blood and Fire. Duke University Press. Safford, F., & Palacios, M. (2002). Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society. Oxford University Press. Sánchez, G., & Peñaranda, R. (2007). Introducción. In G. Sánchez & R. Peñaranda (Eds.), Pasado y presente de la violencia en Colombia. Medellín. Sanders, J. (2004). Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Duke University Press. Schwarz, A. (1994). A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia in the 1990s. Allen & Unwin. Sen, K., & Hill, D. T. (2000). Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia. Oxford University Press. Sidel, J. T. (2017, October 9). What Killed the Promise of Muslim Communism? New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/opinion/muslim-­ communism.html Tickell, P. (1993). Writing the Past: The Limits of Realism in Contemporary Indonesian Literature. In D. M. Roskies (Ed.), Text/Politics in Island Southeast Asia: Essays in Interpretation (pp.  257–287). Ohio University Center for International Studies. Uribe, M.  V. (2007). Salvo el poder, todo es ilusión. Mitos de origen de los Tigres Tamiles de Sri Lanka (LTTE), las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) y el Provisional Irish Republican Army de Irlanda del Norte (IRA). Editorial Pontifica Universidad Javeriana. Vatikiotis, M. (2015, September 30). Indonesia’s Forgotten Genocide. Asia Sentinel. https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/indonesia-­forgotten-­genocide Weatherbee, D.  E. (1985). Indonesia in 1984: Pancasila, Politics, and Power. Asian Survey, 25(2), 187–197. Zurbuchen, M. (2002). History, Memory, and the ‘1965 Incident’ in Indonesia. Asian Survey, 42(4), 564–582.

CHAPTER 3

Encounters

Abstract  In this section, we set out the methodology for the research we have carried out noting the use of film showings about the conflicts of other polities to engage project participants. In Colombia, audiences watched, commented upon, and discussed Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (called Jagal in Indonesia which translates as Butcher), which focuses on the lives of a small number of perpetrators of mass killing in Indonesia who live in impunity and openly brag about their crimes. Indonesian audiences watched, commented upon, and discussed Simone Bruno’s and Dado Carrillo’s film False Positives (Falsos Positivos) which examines the history of Colombian military and paramilitaries murdering civilians for financial reward. We analyse the commentary of project participants noting how participants highlighted similarities and differences with events in their own countries and exploring the ways that existing imaginaries informed analysis and the ways that the films provoked musings on possible futures. We note the preliminary nature of our findings in framing them as provocations. Keywords  Affect • Bystanders • Buenaventura • False positives • Guerrillas • Paramilitaries • State violence • Empathy • Documentary • Falsos Positivos • The Act of Killing • Methodology • Conflict imaginaries • Stigma • Survivors • Victims

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Philpott, N. Morgan, Understanding Conflict Imaginaries, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03976-8_3

73

74 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

In this final section we present some of the findings from our exploratory work in Indonesia and Colombia. As we approach this material we encounter the challenge of how to systematise the material and thereby make it susceptible to comparison. At this point we need to relinquish structuralist fantasies that would reify the imaginaries we ‘uncover’ as if they were carefully guarded secrets, unknown even to those who inhabit them, thereby permitting us to take them apart by applying set categories that can then conveniently be transferred to other contexts. To think in this is way is to miss the point about the kind of signifying processes with which we are engaged, and the ‘work of representation’, in Hall’s words, that is done through them (Hall, 2013, p. 1). We are, after all, involved in a set of collective acts of interpretation, discussed and examined, negotiated, and sometimes flatly refused by groups of people at specific places at particular moments. As Geertz puts it so eloquently: if you construct accounts of how somebody or other […] glosses experience and then draw from those accounts of those glosses some conclusion about expression, power, identity ,or justice, you feel at each stage fairly well away from the standard styles of demonstration. One makes detours, goes by side roads, as I quote Wittgenstein below; one sees the straight highway before one, ‘but of course […] cannot use it, because it is permanently closed’. (Geertz, 1983, p. 6)

Nearly forty years have passed since those words were written but the problem remains. Every qualitative study has to engage with the words and actions of others on their own terms, and our emphasis on understanding the experiences of the focus groups ‘by placing them in  local frames of awareness’ have certainly led us ‘to exchange a set of well-charted difficulties for a set of largely uncharted ones’ (Geertz, 1983, p. 6). Yet such is the challenge, especially when we are engaged, as Geertz often was, in comparative work. How, then, to systematise something so slippery? Our intuition was that our project would begin to coalesce around particular images and metaphors that would give us clues about the characteristic ways in which each conflict is imagined by those who live with them, as participants or bystanders. However, to follow the implications of tropes and symbols acquires a logic of its own, which defies the application of a standard method. To embark on this process we need to begin somewhere, however, and in the pages that follow we start by exploring how our

3 ENCOUNTERS 

75

participants represented conflict in time and space, how they identified actors and responsibilities, and how they expressed affects and identifications. In the process, however, we set out to foreground the importance of symbols and tropes, and also provide some account of the story of the events themselves, which in itself is an important part of understanding how these representations emerged. As we develop our interpretation though our tentative categories, therefore, we also attempt to explain something of the development of these fascinating encounters. A key feature of the project is its innovative, mixed-method, interdisciplinary and participatory approach to knowledge production. Piloted in 2015–2016, our methodology involves screening moving image representations of conflict from each of our sites in the others, thereby allowing participants to explore their understandings of conflict and reconciliation through their engagement with a range of different contexts. We work with local film practitioners and communities to co-create audio-visual resources that capture and preserve these reflections, allowing further opportunities for analysis and discussion both within the project’s timeframe and beyond. As we map these encounters, we follow up on our initial observations through ethnographic work with participants in order to understand the importance of local imaginaries in shaping the experience of daily life in situations of conflict and transition from conflict. Our research recognises that film is a powerful medium of meaning-­ making and has an important part to play in interrogating the imaginaries of our audiences, particularly in situations of conflict or transition. Thus, it is through film that we seek to chart the social imaginaries that structure popular understandings of local conflicts, and to encourage (via reception study) participants to reflect on conflict. By screening films from other contexts, we fostered a network of transnational dialogues between films and viewing experiences, facilitating a critical distance such that film-­ viewers reflect on different types of conflict. Our methodology—using film to explore the conflicts of other communities and to identify local imaginaries of conflict for critical examination—is to our knowledge an innovative approach. The precise details of our approach to focus group work will be outlined in greater detail for both the Colombian and Indonesian case studies in the pages that follow.

76 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Screening Violence in Indonesia We showed films varying between traditional full-length documentaries, a factually based fictional film, and short animated films (one blended live action with animation), from each of the other four sites to Indonesian audiences prior to the forced suspension of the project with the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic. The groups that watched films did so under similar conditions. That is, we organised showings in spaces large enough to accommodate audiences of up to 40 people (although our preference was for smaller groups where possible). These included university lecture theatres, cafes, and spaces provided by organisations. The format was the same in each case: a brief introduction of the research project, an even briefer introduction to the film, the showing itself, followed by discussion in one large group afterwards. Unlike some other sites, we did not use questionnaires in Indonesia as they seemed to make people uncomfortable. This may be because people were uncomfortable making individual declarative statements about the film just watched. At each showing, our primary academic collaborators and at least one research assistant were present. We all participated in setting up the film showing equipment, organised the seating to ensure comfortable viewing, and facilitated the delivery of the soft drinks and snacks for film audiences. The research assistant(s), native speakers of standard Indonesian, made close notes of the film discussion although no attempt was made to produce verbatim transcripts. We translated notes as soon as possible after the film showings to capture as much of the nuance in discussion as possible. Advice or clarification was frequently sought from our Indonesian collaborators with regard to the use of slang or when standard translations of words seemed inadequate to capture the intended meaning of participants. Filmmakers were present in some, but not all, of the settings. Our aim with the film showings was to encourage people to share their thoughts and reflections on the film shown, but with no expectation that they would necessarily attempt to relate the material to Indonesia or, indeed, their own experiences of conflict and violence. We do not know, do not ask, and cannot readily ascertain our interlocutors’ background knowledge about the other polities about which we show films. However, none of our audiences knew anything of the false positives scandal in Colombia and none knew of the 1970s Argentinian policy of kidnapping the new-born infants of leftists and adopting them out to military families. Northern Ireland’s Troubles were little known to project participants and,

3 ENCOUNTERS 

77

indeed, for many the existence of a separate Northern Irish polity was a surprise. However, some viewers are familiar with Colombia’s history of and reputation for drugs and narcotics and this coloured their views of the film we showed, particularly the absence of analysis of cartel activity which left some wondering about the neglect of an issue they regard as central to Colombia’s problems. Unsurprisingly, audiences responded to the films in different ways. For example, an audience of university students gasped and called out during a showing of Five Minutes of Heaven (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009) with several participants moved to tears in post-film discussion. The film, loosely based on factual events, recounts the murder of a young Catholic man by an Ulster loyalist, the trauma suffered by the younger brother who stood helplessly while the killing occurred, and the media contrived meeting between the two 33  years later. While the murderer, convicted and gaoled for the killing, is ready to confront not just the surviving brother, but publicly acknowledge the heinous crime he has committed, the other man arrives at the meeting armed and with intent to kill. The film’s climax is indeed gripping viewing, but we were surprised by how deeply it affected the student audience. ‘The power of fiction’ noted our filmmaking partner as we discussed the showing after the event. Yet, as much as the film moved and upset an audience of younger Indonesians, an audience comprised largely of septuagenarians who have directly experienced political persecution, were quite unimpressed by the film, largely dismissing it as unrealistic and not especially interesting. This same group of older project participants are also impassive when shown animated film, regarding animation as something for children and incapable of dealing with serious political issues. However, we are not surprised that some films ‘work’ better than others in covering particular political issues with specific audiences. For example, the Argentinian documentary, Who Am I? (¿Quién soy yo?) (Estela Bravo, 2007) deals with young people discovering that they are the abducted children of murdered leftists and not the sons and daughters of Argentinian military families as they grew up believing. This film spoke directly to the lived experiences of some of the older Indonesian participants we work with and left them shaken, angry and ready to reflect upon and compare the lives of those that supported the defeated left in both countries. However, in Indonesia the film we have shown to more audiences, in more places, than any other is Falsos Positivos (False Positives) (Simone

78 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Bruno & Dado Carillo, 2009). Colombia’s troubled political history is long, complex, and multidimensional. This film charts one among many perplexing episodes, the murder by paramilitaries, for reward, of civilians presented in death as members of leftist guerrilla organisations such as the FARC. The film, a documentary, makes clear its sympathies lie with those murdered and their surviving families. The film presents the national dimensions of the crisis that rocked the Colombian government but also lays much of the blame for Colombia’s instability at the feet of the United States given its policy of overt interference in this and other South American nations. Noam Chomsky, a vocal and persistent critic of US foreign policy, comments at length on the deleterious effects US policy has had on Colombian politics. The film contains a short, animated political history of Colombia that details assassinations of liberals and leftists, the repeated defeat of their ambitions, and a sense of the directors’ political sympathies. As such, audiences can readily interpret the film as a politically left analysis of Colombia’s problems. Elements of the film are traditionally documentary with, for example, several interviewees occupying positions of authority and/or expertise, speaking to camera to share their views of Colombian politics and its problems including the false positives scandal. These aspects of the film, while powerful, are a less blatant appeal to the emotions than the interviews with surviving families and others involved peripherally with the disappearances explored in the film. Survivors movingly recount their despair at not knowing what happened to disappeared family members and later learning of their suspicious deaths. However, when two of the families track down the bodies of the missing, found stowed in unmarked makeshift crypts, viewers are subjected to taxing imagery. Anxiety builds as the bricked in coffins are extracted and, finally, opened to reveal corpses in advanced decay and crawling with maggots. The scenes, a gruesome reminder of the power of the state to bring about premature, violent, anonymous death, are the more difficult to negotiate as the affected families, their last shreds of hope for loved ones dashed, acknowledge their pain. Elsewhere in the film, a distraught family member and bystanders hushed perhaps by fear, look upon the body of a small-­ scale farmer, yet another victim of violent death. These graphic scenes underpin the exposé of agents of the state, and their paramilitary allies, engaged in extra-judicial murder. Human rights and other activists accused then President Álvaro Uribe of cooperation with paramilitaries, a charge he denies. However, authorities implicated political allies of Uribe while

3 ENCOUNTERS 

79

the convictions and dismissal of armed services personnel, confirms collaboration between state and paramilitary actors. Falsos Positivos is a classic expository documentary that powerfully and persuasively makes its case through the combination of personal testimony, expert comment and opinion, and grisly footage presented as evidence of the claims of extra-­ judicial murder. The film was the focus of our 2019 research activities in Indonesia. In Yogyakarta, we showed the film to students and an older audience of survivors of Indonesia’s mid-60s turmoil. We showed the film to another group of students in Ambon city and to a gathering of mixed religious affiliation, though primarily Christians, in Piru, on the island of Seram (near Ambon). In Jakarta, an audience partly comprised of members of a foundation focused on the study religion and democracy watched and commented at length on the film. In Solo in Central Java, we showed the film to an audience of older and younger people with at least some of the subsequent commentary about contemporary Indonesia focused on the different impressions across the generations. Given the diversity of the audiences, we anticipated their different responses to the film. Yet there are themes and points of comparison between Colombia and Indonesia that were in common across the groups. As noted elsewhere, Indonesians discussed the mass killings of the 1960s at their peril during the Suharto era. However, despite this dreadful period of Indonesia’s history remaining raw, painful, and contested, people are increasingly willing to at least remark upon what happened. Participants frequently referenced the events of 1965–1966 by noting practices of arbitrary murder and disappearances of people in Colombia and Indonesia. The conflict imaginaries of the older group we work with are profoundly shaped by their own experiences of the great conflagration that consumed Indonesia in the mid-1960s. Despite the partial opening that facilitated some critical examination of the mass killings and the ongoing persecution of survivors after Suharto’s fall in 1998, New Order imaginaries poison efforts on the part of survivors to find acceptance. For example, as the coronavirus pandemic set in, graffiti appeared in the immediate environs of one project participant, warning other residents of the equally dangerous virus of communism. The discursive framing of communism as a virus, an illness or infection that preys upon weak and gullible polities, is a familiar and persistent Cold War trope. It implies diseased bodies (politic) and unclean, degenerate, corrupted political processes. The reference to the double dangers of Coronavirus and communism in graffiti near the

80 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

home of someone who has endured decades of persecution for their political views, is a knowing deployment of a powerful rhetorical device to implant fear into the local community and to ensure the ongoing stigmatisation of the individual targeted by the graffiti. To date, there has been no apology to survivors of the purge, no criminal prosecutions of perpetrators, no reparations, and only partial, ad hoc, reintegration of survivors into their communities. Their daily lives are lived in the shadow of community suspicion, surveillance, and enduring ostracism. A sense of powerlessness is one aspect of the conflict imaginaries articulated by this older group. While the use of the passive voice is common in Indonesian, it is particularly notable in the post-film discussion of Falsos Positivos. Participants speak of: ‘being taken’; ‘there being similarities with what happened here’; how ‘many innocent people became victims’; how ‘the event (the mass killings) is still denied in Indonesia’;

Moreover, there is a reluctance on the part of the survivor group to identify the agents of their past and present persecution. For example, participants observed: ‘we have not received death certificates’; or ‘that sound (of a radio during a prison sentence) could not be heard (by prison guards)’; ‘we are silenced, watched’; ‘similar to the propaganda process that said’; ‘the data here is always considered to be false.’

In none of these simple utterances do participants identify those who persecuted and continue to deny them the justice and recognition they seek. It may be in a group with the shared experience of the last half century there is no longer any need to articulate the identity of their tormentors or it may be that self-interest motivates people not to outwardly identify or name them. This group of aged survivors, as noted above, continue to live uneasily in communities that do not wholly accept their presence. The Yogyakarta student group provided a more expansive reading of the film than their older counterparts, noting factors including US involvement in Colombia’s politics, relationships between government policy and

3 ENCOUNTERS 

81

opportunities for criminality, that violence is a policy choice, and that the humanity of both victims and perpetrators is compromised. In drawing parallels with Indonesian politics, comments tended to reflect upon contemporary and potential future problems rather than focusing on past events (though the students did mention past disappearances and killings). Also notable is the use of active voice: ‘I find this strange because the whole mess was sponsored by the US’; ‘I remembered the issue of Petrus’ [state sponsored murder of criminal gangs]; ‘I am wondering if there are big actors who made these things happen…’; ‘I am reminded of the film Song of Grass Roots’;1

Yet, to the extent that students refer to murders and disappearances in Indonesia, they too refrain from identifying agents of violence in Indonesia. Students noted: ‘…cases of the disappearances of Udin (a journalist murdered in 1996), and Wiji Thukul (a poet and staunch critic of the government who disappeared in 1998), and Munir’s murder (a human rights activist poisoned on a Garuda flight in 2004), all of them key people trying to change New Order arrangements’; ‘…my mother came across unidentified corpses which were suddenly lying around the village’; ‘…if this happens in Indonesia, the victims may be a minority.’

Contemporary Indonesia is a democracy, but students (and their lecturers) know that intelligence operatives are present on campuses and so their unwillingness to identify agents of violence may indicate a safety-first kind of approach to public discussion of who is and has been responsible for mass violence in Indonesia. It is, though, noteworthy that the group of students framed their interpretation of disappearances in Colombia with anecdotes about similar events in Indonesia, suggesting points of reference for political violence that transcend the earlier New Order period of 1  Song of Grassroots (Nyanyian Akar Rumput) is a 2018 Indonesian documentary about Fajar Merah, the son of Wiji Thukul, a poet and activist who disappeared in the last days of the Suharto regime and is presumed murdered. Fajar Merah’s band Merah Bercerita, puts Wiji Thukul’s poems to music to keep memory of him alive and in the hope that the regime of Joko Widodo will provide answers as to the fate of Wiji Thukul and others disappeared by the Suharto regime.

82 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

mass violence and recognition of forced disappearances and murder as part of a global political continuum. People’s unwillingness or inability to clearly articulate who or which organisations are responsible for violence in Indonesia may also illustrate an important aspect of shared conflict imaginaries. For example, during the Suharto years, simple terms such as tata (order), tertib (orderly), aman (safe/secure) and keamanan (security), became highly politicised, even ominous (see Pemberton, 1994, p. 15). Indeed, New Order references to partai politik (political parties) spark anxiety among some Indonesians because ‘…the word politik is marked by a sinister tonality acquired after the political killings of the mid-1960s…’ (Pemberton, 1994, p. 4). John Pemberton’s research was carried out during a period of intensive authoritarianism and heightened anxieties among many Indonesians. However, that it remains difficult, even among friends and peers, for individuals to openly raise questions of responsibility for the great acts of violence that underpinned Suharto’s regime suggests imposed state narratives shape, limit, conflict imaginaries. It may be that the New Order’s framing of politics as sinister, dangerous, dirty, ominous, and corrupting, endures and continues to deter many from active engagement in the political realm. Despite Suharto’s toppling preceding the births of most of the student group, their caution may be illustrative of the old regime’s influence on the contours of their conflict imaginaries. These silences, aversions to open disclosure, and the careful figuring of the inexpressible also highlight, for us, the profound difficulties of engaging with the content of conflict imaginaries. The formation of imaginaries through lived experience, shared family stories, and learned state history, emerged in interesting ways. For example, many viewers noted the stigma and shame attached to the families of the disappeared in Colombia. Asked what the memorable scenes in the film were, one participant commented on their sympathy for the families who ‘had to endure the shame because his family members were killed, and his family members were labelled rebels.’ For 1965 survivors, shame and stigma profoundly shape their lives and are deeply felt. One revealed: ‘I have never told my wife I had been arrested. And my family still doesn’t know. I still worry that if people know, they will stigmatise me.’

3 ENCOUNTERS 

83

This participant recognised that widespread knowledge of his past posed a direct threat to the well-being and happiness of his family. Another from the same group agreed she felt for the families when asked about the most memorable moments of the film: ‘the scene when the community pins stigma on the victims’ family. That also happened in Indonesia.’

Stigma and shame also featured for attendees at the Jakarta-based foundation studying religion and democracy. One observed: ‘For me the most memorable is the scene where families of the victims exhume corpses, then how they are stigmatized or branded as enemies by the communities around them. For me, this is very much like what happened in Indonesia.’

Another commented on the intolerable burden on families, noting: ‘it’s hard to imagine the family enduring the stigma until they are old or even dead.’

Another participant noted the political possibilities of stigmatising opponents: ‘the stigmatization of the guerrillas as enemies of the state such that ongoing killing becomes heroic and inspires pride. Conditions where ongoing killing is legalized as defence of the state.’

In yet another group, an older viewer lamented the lack of understanding and interest in the suffering of those from the 1965 generation, including the shame and pain they live with. For this participant, the lack of empathy for those who suffered risked history repeating itself and in such a way that there was little understanding of why. The repeated references to shame and stigma strongly suggest a state-­ generated and enduring element of Indonesian conflict imaginaries, namely, the corrupting, sickening, influence of the Indonesian left on an otherwise healthy body politic. Not only has this element of the imaginary successfully defined hundreds of thousands of Indonesians in the minds of millions of others, it also semi-successfully obscures the causes, agents, and

84 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

consequences of different kinds of violence in Indonesia. Viruses recede, disappear for periods of time, but also mutate, grow stronger and roar back through communities, laying waste to what had been restored to good health. In this framing, the Indonesian left, while currently latent, remains a great danger to the body politic and is the root cause of all Indonesia’s political ills. To the extent that the state and other opponents of the left police and reinforce this element of conflict imaginaries, other problems and causes of conflict are overwritten, downplayed, or simply denied. The practices of disappearing opponents and enemies is familiar in Indonesia and many of our interlocutors made explicit comparisons between Colombia and Indonesia. Participants repeatedly returned to the mass disappearances of the mid-1960s with several members of the older Yogyakarta group sharing information about family that disappeared without trace. Decades on, not knowing the fate or whereabouts of the remains of lost family contributes to feelings of powerlessness, grief, and injustice. Survivors, tarnished by real or alleged association with the PKI, are necessarily resilient. Nonetheless, on a first visit to a minimally marked mass grave site near Semarang, many of the Yogyakarta group were visibly moved and upset with some perhaps troubled by the thought that their missing relatives may rest similarly. The survivors treated the understated site with great reverence and spoke only minimally and quietly in contrast to a visit on the same day to the ruins of a prison where some had served time. People described their experiences and shared memories but, unlike the mass grave site, here there was an abundance of self-deprecating black humour. Such black humour and defiance in the face of decades of adversity is a notable difference between older and younger groups in discussions of the violence canvassed in Falsos Positivos. Democratic consolidation is an ongoing process in Indonesia with a range of interests suspicious of or simply opposed to the transparency and accountability that comes with functioning democratic institutions. Yet, for many younger Indonesians, despite what Gerry van Klinken describes as the deep state’s continuing commitment to the violent suppression of dissident views, direct experience of political violence is far rarer than is the case for preceding generations (van Klinken, 2014, p.  177). For my Indonesian academic collaborators who are either old enough to recall, for example, state-­ sponsored violence on university campuses, or who are engaged in activism to push back against the structural violence of the Indonesian state, or both, the diffidence of younger people is a source of immense frustration. Their stories, from well within living memory, of students and academics

3 ENCOUNTERS 

85

disappearing from campuses are, at times, met with incredulity by contemporary students for whom state terror seems remote, even implausible. Whereas members of the group of older people we work with had ready reserves of empathy for the families of Colombian victims based on their own experiences of political violence and alienation, younger people in the student groups, while sympathetic to the victims and families, discussed the violence and its affects in more detached fashion. Older project participants sometimes drew direct comparisons between their own persecution and experiences and those of the Colombian families in the film. For example, one commented upon her persecution being a vehicle for the advancement of the military careers of her tormentors just as Colombian military figures disappeared and murdered people to boost their prospects. That people could not readily understand how it felt to be a tool of career development pained her deeply. One older participant in the Solo group summed up his frustrations by saying: …the younger generation must also understand this generation that is bitter. Those who feel for knowing the detailed stories of our friends. Most don’t know the direct story of 65. So they imagine the killings of 65 are just historical stories. We, the murdered, the imprisoned, the exiled. The father of our friend on Buru Island. We know the story, our children do not.

Perhaps it is reasonable to expect and assume that students undertaking peace studies, politics, and international politics focused degrees will analyse and interpret films differently to older people without as much formal education. No one in the Yogyakarta student group had any basis for direct comparison between their lives and those of the Colombians depicted in the film. While some made reference to arbitrary killings and stigmatisation in Indonesia, students addressed their remarks to the past, to things that had happened. As young Indonesians, the significance of the mass killings of the 1960s, or the state-sponsored so-called mysterious killings of the 1980s, is not wholly lost on them, but students spoke of the events in Colombia through the prisms of US involvement, the nature of the Colombian state, the effectiveness or otherwise of the killings as a deterrent to guerrilla activity, and the part that narcotics may play in fomenting political violence in Colombia. One participant argued that the killings in Colombia could only be possible if there is: ‘a structure or system that encourages soldiers to do these things.’

86 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Two others in a short exchange of views ruminated on the relationship between permissible state violence and the maintenance of human rights. The discussion among students, limited in depth of analysis by the to and fro of the group dynamic, was nonetheless thoughtful on the underlying causes of violence in Colombia and the consequences for the rule of law. The Jakarta group which was primarily comprised of people older than the student groups but considerably younger than the survivors of the mid-60s violence, had a more developed analysis of the structural factors underpinning Colombian violence and expressed feelings of anger and frustration on behalf of Colombian victims, often without reference to Indonesian issues. This group discussed the film at greatest length and, while tending to identify the recovery of the corpses as its most visually arresting aspect in keeping with other groups, ranged widely over the matters raised. This was the one group that made at least some allusion to published research including Indonesian, Thai, and European work. These participants also spoke of a wide range of concepts such as non-violence, transnational justice, structural violence, patriarchy, human rights, accountability, and impunity and at times did so in the context of institutions and legislation. Group members discussed Indonesian legislation that troubled them, institutions that functioned well, poorly, not at all, or that need reform. They discussed the similarities and differences of political trouble in different parts of Indonesia including Papua, Sampit, Aceh, the 1965–1966 killings, yo-yoing between what the film revealed about Indonesia and about both countries and their respective histories of violence. Interestingly, while some participants expressed anger at what the film revealed about Colombia, others used the term sesak to describe their response. The term means deflated or having the air sucked out of one. It is the only time, so far as the transcripts show, that participants so described their feelings, and we can only speculate as to why. One wonders, if people expressing feelings of deflation upon seeing a failure of institutions to prevent extra-judicial murder are more acute among members of a group committed to studying the torturous relationship between religion and democracy in Indonesia. That is, does a film like Falsos Positivos create a despairing response as it reveals similar faltering struggles for justice in other countries and other contexts? Perhaps the explanation is no more complex than the term forming part of the lexicon of a particular demographic or one used in (south) Jakarta more frequently than elsewhere. However, the repeated use sesak in this group is a subtle reminder of the ambitions of this research: to understand how conflict is understood,

3 ENCOUNTERS 

87

experienced, and described in localised settings. It is also a timely reminder of the affective dimensions of political experience in that the viewing of a difficult film implicates mind and body in complex responses that contribute to a wider structure of feeling. Across the groups, people raised infamous cases of deaths and disappearances including the mysterious killings of the early 1980s (a secretive government campaign of mass murder of criminals and gang members with thousands killed), Marsinah (a factory labour activist killed during interrogation in 1994), Udin, Wiji Thukul, and Munir. These deaths seemingly helped Indonesian participants to contextualise the Colombian killings and highlighted what some saw as shared problems of impunity and states that resorted to extreme violence to silence opposition. As one attendee commented: ‘There is no accountability in law enforcement in Colombia or Indonesia.’

Indeed, conversation about state sponsored violence ranged widely and included commentary about problems in the criminal justice system (corruption), and inability to reform the state such that it moved away from the use of violence, the production of fake evidence or the ignoring of data that incriminated state actors in illicit acts. One participant noted that in some ways despite its problems, Colombia was better placed than Indonesia, noting: ‘we need to emulate the Colombians: there are courts, there are prosecutions.’

Imaginaries also appeared in ways suggestive of how interpretation and analysis is influenced and limited by localised experience or knowledge of political turmoil. In two of the film showings, participants referred to Colombian guerrillas as separatists. Whatever demands the FARC and other rebels in Colombia may make, a separate state is not one of them. That is, rebels are not seeking to split up Colombia into distinct political units. Yet, in an Indonesian nation-state in which nationalism remains a potent force, the spectre of separatism resonates strongly. Historian Anthony Reid argues that ordinary Indonesians have paid a terrible price in welding together a unitary republic from a former Dutch colony. “State rituals and state museums were designed to remind that this idea was

88 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

conceived in blood, and further blood was permitted in its name” (Reid, 2010, p. 212). As Reid observes, a great deal of blood, much of it perpetrated or encouraged by the state, flowed in Indonesia. Some of that spilled blood is a consequence of the Indonesian state resisting separatism. Since the inception of the unitary republic, successive Indonesian governments have been profoundly hostile to groups that have sought to break away from Indonesia. Some rebellions, such as the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia and the so-called Permesta rebellion, both of the 1950s, were more expressions of dissatisfaction with the structure and policies of the Jakarta based government than outright movements for separate states. However, covert US support for and provision of materiel to the rebels only hardened Jakarta’s determination to defeat them. However, in Aceh, in East Timor, and in contemporary Papua/West Papua political discontent crystallised in specific demands for full independence from Indonesia. A political solution was found to the long-running dispute in Aceh with the province now enjoying a special autonomous relationship with Jakarta. After Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in late 1975, a persistent, if sporadic, guerrilla struggle ended with interim President, Jusuf Habibie, granting the East Timorese a referendum on their future in 1999. Despite considerable Indonesian security and paramilitary interference in the process, the East Timorese overwhelmingly voted for independence with the new nation formally established in 2002. Similar demands for a referendum animate separatist activities in Papua and West Papua which, combined, represent some 22% of the Indonesian landmass. Activists claim that Papuan self-determination, as promised by the Dutch and guaranteed by the New York Agreement of 1962 (promising Papuans a referendum on their future), were betrayed by what they argue was an illegal incorporation of the provinces into Indonesian via deeply flawed and extremely limited consultative process. However, it is noteworthy that for two participants in the film showings, separatism is the most readily available and perhaps most comprehensible framing of events in Colombia. While neither participant expressed obvious hostility to the victims and their families, such is the anathema of the Indonesian state to separatism, the description of rebel activity as separatist may colour their views of the legitimacy of the struggle. With Colombian political actors’ seemingly expressing irreconcilable views on modes of governance, resource distribution, and questions of accountability and justice, one wonders if for these two participants at least,

3 ENCOUNTERS 

89

separatism is the only conceptually meaningful framing of Colombia’s problems. Might separatism be shorthand for entrenched disputes with no obvious political solution other than the dissolution of a given polity? If so, then it is possible that the horizons of such conflict imaginaries preclude negotiated settlements, transitions to peace, reconciliation between contending parties. While the two participants were engaged in commentary about Colombia, to what extent do their remarks suggest an inability to imagine negotiated settlement of Indonesia’s own complex, multidimensional problems? Audiences were alert to the scenes of street protest in Falsos Positivos with participants in one group likening the protests depicted in the film to those commemorating victims of human rights abuses that happen every Thursday outside the presidential palace in Jakarta and in another noting that Indonesian and Colombian demonstrators alike are often dealt with in heavy-handed fashion by security forces. Across the groups, some participants drew attention to the unhealthy outcomes of covert collaboration between government, capital, and paramilitaries. Indeed, some participants recognised riches in natural resources is at best a mixed blessing where there is not sufficient institutional transparency and integrity to prevent corrupt dealings between agents of the state and capital. Participants that raised these matters were well aware that the prospects of resolving conflict, establishing peace, are greatly narrowed by the entanglement of state, capital, military, landed elites, and paramilitaries. The international dimensions of such relationships were also noted with commentary on the ways the US destabilises countries when the interests of capital are threatened by leftist forces. People generally noted that in Indonesia achieving reform of police, the security apparatus, and entrenching a responsible, accountable parliamentary system is extraordinarily difficult and remains very much a work in progress. A range of remarks from across the groups illustrate the challenges participants identify: ‘…for the state to become nonviolent, it is not enough for NGOs to teach the police.’ ‘We never completed security sector reform. Who knows why? We got distracted, or simply did not do the work. Our army did not stage a coup because its material base was secure even after reformation. They still own businesses that make them incredibly rich. Now the police have many sources of income.’

90 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

‘What makes this dangerous is the marriage between military and capital.’ ‘The background is very different from Colombia, but in Indonesia the story is hereditary. It’s become the norm.’ ‘Conflicts of interests because Colombia is resource rich. There are certain groups, it could be big trading groups, mining, oil. A small analogy with Papua at present. The geographic contours are almost the same. What are the outsiders eyeing off in Papua, mining?’ ‘When the government fails to encourage conflict resolution, the process depends upon and is encouraged by grassroots movements.’ ‘I think the message is very relevant to Indonesia, especially during this election year. There is a tendency to polarise society.’

Striking in these comments and in the more extensive notes taken in focus groups is the absence of optimism about Indonesia’s future. Yes, there were thankful comments about, for example, the absence of death squads such as those depicted in the film, but there was no widespread invocation of Indonesian exceptionalism, or any remarks suggesting such events would simply be impossible in Indonesia. Indeed, some felt that despite the shocking nature of the killings in Colombia, the country’s institutions functioned to bring perpetrators to justice in ways Indonesia’s would not and had not with respect to past human rights abuses. Such views are likely consolidated with news of murder charges for his part in the false positives scandal brought against former General Mario Montoya in August 2021. Rather than optimism, the film invoked a sense of foreboding about Indonesia’s future as exemplified by participant discussion at the Jakarta NGO. Yet, if optimism is lacking in the discussions, there is an abundance of empathy for the plight of the families victimised in Colombia. Empathy, the capacity to put oneself in another’s shoes, is critical not just to reconciliation after violence but also to preventing its outbreak. In a tense situation, empathy for the other and their grievances may help contending parties pull back from the brink of conflict. In its aftermath, empathy is what enables those involved to analyse events that may have laid a polity low and to learn lessons such that reoccurrence is less likely. The presence of empathy in transitional situations may facilitate progress in restoring fractured or broken relationships. Questions also arise about distance between the two countries (physical and cultural), the absence of interwoven histories, and the general lack of knowledge about Colombia many Indonesian participants professed. Empathy may be easier to cultivate when there is little at stake in understanding the pain of the other. With no shared history or reasons to

3 ENCOUNTERS 

91

nurture negative feelings or grievance about others, generosity in the face of their pain and loss may not simply be a more readily accessible, human response, but one that is safe to publicly share given one does not need to consider the experiences and sympathies of others in the room. Indeed, even when discussions turned to violence occurring in parts of Indonesia participants considered outside their own realm of experience, there is little in the transcripts to suggest that Indonesians felt anything but empathy. However, for the older group we work with, the survivors of the 1965 atrocities, comments focus on themselves and their experiences. Given that their lives have been so dramatically curtailed by their youthful support for what was a legal political movement, it is of little surprise that empathy for their others is in short supply. Having led long lives and been offered no official remorse or apology for their sufferings, been extended no forgiveness for their supposed crimes, an absence of empathy in this group should, perhaps, be expected. One final reflection on the discussions is that participants often laid responsibility for violence within communities at the feet of those seeking to exploit divisions for political or economic gain. However, film viewers’ arguing that conflict is caused by outsiders including military and paramilitary actors, rapacious capitalists, or because of overt or covert US support for practices of violence against supposed opponents of US interests, also implies a transference of responsibility away from members of communities that lapse into violence. One Jakarta participant noted: ‘The film made me think about conflict entrepreneurs. Conflicts are created to achieve certain interests and the state will choose the cheapest way, namely false positives, to get community compliance.’

In our view, assigning blame for conflict in this fashion is significant. On the one hand, Indonesians know that weak or non-existent institutions, a lack of transparency and accountability in the operations of government and the state facilitate opportunities for illicit enrichment and corruption, which, at times, requires violence for its achievement. On the other hand, so-called conflict entrepreneurs, sometimes identifiable, sometimes not, are convenient vessels into which to deposit responsibility for outbreaks of violence. One Indonesian academic collaborator who has researched the conflict that rocked Ambon 1999–2002 notes, disapprovingly, the ways that people now blame external provocateurs for the serious breakdown there. Migration patterns did alter the composition of the

92 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Ambonese polity but that does not readily explain why people who resided together in relative harmony responded to rumour and misinformation and set upon each other in extreme acts of violence. For my colleague, apportioning the bulk of responsibility to provocateurs simply means individuals and communities avoid painful reflection upon their own actions, perceptions, and opinions and defer, perhaps indefinitely, the possibility of meaningful reconciliation. An important aspect of the Screening Violence project is to assess the extent to which films facilitate reflection on practices of conflict and violence. We are in no way surprised that many participants used Falsos Positivos to reflect upon events in Indonesia and their similarities and differences with what the film shows of Colombian politics. However, the extent of reflection and the areas that the film helped pry open for discussion suggest that there is indeed a particular utility to the use of film in exploration of conflict and violence.

Screening Violence in Colombia For the pilot work, we chose Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2013). This documentary focuses on the genocide carried out against the Indonesian Communist party, the PKI, and others, particularly ethnic Chinese, which took place between 1965 and 1966, at a cost of between 500,000 and a million lives, though some sources have estimated that the number of victims might be far higher. The consequences of this genocide have never been directly confronted in the public sphere, since the perpetrators and their allies have been in power ever since, in spite of a relative opening of the political system at the end of the Suharto regime. The search for legitimacy on the part of successive governments means that several generations of school children learnt that the bloodthirsty communists and their allies were humanely removed from power, which is framed as an act of extraordinary generosity given their alleged involvement in multiple atrocities. Indeed, rather than as perpetrators of mass slaughter, the victors have posed as patriots who selflessly saved the nation from a mortal threat. Oppenheimer spent six years in Indonesia, learning Indonesian and working on a documentary about the events of fifty years previously. In particular, he established close relationships with some of the perpetrators, gaining their confidence in order to document an extraordinary series of testimonies. He carried out intense work with one particular group

3 ENCOUNTERS 

93

through the ruse of providing them with the means to represent their own story and thereby explain their version of events. At the same time, he interviewed regional political bosses, especially leaders of paramilitary groups like the Pancasila Youth, one of the semi-official organisations involved in the genocide that later played an important role in propping up Suharto’s New Order. Oppenheimer’s film is a strange and sometimes surreal mixture of documentary and fictionalised history, as it includes some of the work made by the killers. Many of the scenes were carefully staged and this mise en scène produces a disturbing beauty of its own, in striking contrast to the grotesque nature of the protagonists’ crimes. Anwar Congo, the most important figure in the film, holds a particular fascination in this regard. A petty criminal and hustler before the genocide, his constant attempts to represent himself as a charismatic and even heroic figure are the narcissistic fantasies of a small man who did the dirty work for the real perpetrators. Jagal, the Indonesian title of the film, simply means “butcher” and it is clear that Congo played this brutal role without any real grasp of the political meaning of his acts. Nonetheless, for all his limitations, he is also the character to whom Oppenheimer and the audience get closest in the film. He offers his testimony to a person who has gained his trust, and his terrifying account is juxtaposed with scenes in which he speaks of his liking for 40s and 50s gangster films and nonchalantly dances the Cha-Cha Cha. He performs an extraordinary act of remorse for the camera, retching and gagging as if trying to literally disgorge the memories of his crimes, but ultimately we never know whether this is anything more than the posturing of a psychopath giving his audience what he thinks they want. This uncertainty about the sincerity of the participants in the documentary is enhanced by their problematic relationship with the filmmaker, who they see as a friend or at the very least as a sympathetic observer. It is a troubling characteristic of a film that veers between closeness and distance, at times creating a sense of intimacy, at others using long shots and clandestine audio recording create the impression that we are eavesdropping on the everyday lives of psychopaths. Whatever one thinks of this complex, fascinating and in many respects problematic film, it is unlikely to leave audiences unmoved. There was a level of risk in showing it in Colombia, given the savagery of the acts described, which could potentially re-traumatise people with their own experience of violence. At the same time, the protagonists’ search for words through which to express almost unimaginable horrors, set

94 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

alongside the surreal clips recreating their crimes, underlines the importance of the imaginary in dealing with the consequences of mass violence, both on a societal and a personal level. We suspected that the ingenious way the film documents those crimes would have a particular resonance in Colombia, where the ‘charisma’ of the killer who proclaims himself saviour of the fatherland is not unfamiliar. Furthermore, although the context is in many respects very different, the relationship between the killers and local political leaders, and the relationship between the latter and the central government, have similarities with what has come to be known as ‘parapolitics’ scandal. Indeed, this parallel was noted by journalist Catalina Holguín, who notes that ‘less that ten years ago a large sector of the urban population and president Alvaro Uribe himself openly defended the paramilitaries’, adding that, ‘in Indonesia, decades ago, they won the war and are still in power’ (Holguín, 2014). In fact, the screening of the film in Colombia in 2014 elicited a certain amount of comment, some of which focused on local audience’s reaction to the film. Nubia Rojas, for example, notes that ‘a lot of the audience laughed or made some joke during the most sordid or climactic moments of the film’, something she explains by the claim that ‘they are used to seeing violence every day’ and ‘to gangsters and thugs being national heroes, appearing on TV all the time, and being shown as role models’ (Rojas, 2013). Hyperbole apart, such comments recognise important parallels between the Indonesian and Colombian cases, highlighting the visual and verbal clues that hint at shared logics and interpretative strategies. The pilot study began in November 2015, in Bogota. The first reception study took place in the Universidad Gran Colombia, with a group of thirteen men and eight women, aged between twenty and forty-five. The second focus group, made up of twenty-five students at the Universidad del Pacífico (fifteen women and ten men, between nineteen and twenty-­ two years of age), took place in Buenaventura. We visited the ‘humanitarian zone’ at the Puente Nayero, site of the notorious ‘casas de pique’ (“chopping houses”), where we had a discussion with community leader Orlando Castillo about the notion of postconflict, and we carried out a series of vox pops about peace, which we filmed in the streets of the city. On the second visit, in March and April 2014, we travelled to Chocó department where we worked with two focus groups, the first made up of thirteen representatives of the Mesa de Víctimas in Tutunendo, who met in the village casa de la cultura, and the second by twenty students at the Universidad Tecnológica del Chocó. As in Buenaventura, we visited other

3 ENCOUNTERS 

95

localities to interview community leaders. We showed the film in a barber’s shop in the centre of Quibdó and we filmed the reactions of customers as they talked about it with the barber. Finally, in an outdoor event organised by youth activists we projected the film against the wall of the church in La Perseverancia in Bogotá, inviting residents to a canelazo, a traditional event at which aguardiente spirit mulled with cinnamon is served. Around 30 people turned up at this event and we interviewed five of them. In most cases we only showed the first forty-five minutes of the film, as it was not practical to work with a group after showing the full two hours. This, of course, affects the way the film is understood but nonetheless allowed us to engage with some of its most significant themes. We filmed part of the screening and all of the discussions that emerged afterwards. At the end of the session we handed round a questionnaire, which participants filled in anonymously, before beginning a debate which started out in each cases by asking how the participants understood what they had just seen. Initial Findings The open discussions were extremely rich, characterised by vigorous but well regulated exchanges of ideas. That said, the two university groups were too big for everyone to express themselves in a satisfactory fashion in a two hour meeting. As far as the relationships established between the participants were concerned, the controversial themes of the project made tension likely, especially in the more heterogeneous groups. In fact, even in the more homogeneous groups, such as the victims’ group in Tutunendo, we found notable divergences of opinion, generally grounded in the different ways participants interpreted local conflicts. However, throughout the pilot our groups maintained a respectful dialogue, in spite of the heightened emotion apparent in some of the interventions. In the midst of these exchanges of views, in which each contribution invited further comment, we also witnessed the construction of an embryonic collective vision, a negotiated interpretation which emerged from the process of debate. Using questionnaires allowed for the expression of a wide and perhaps more autonomous range of interpretations, given the anonymity maintained by this approach, though standards of literacy were uneven. We invited participants to answer only the questions they thought were relevant. In this

96 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

respect, we note that those that explored their emotional response to the documentary produced most responses and were also most revealing in identifying different approaches to the Indonesian case, the Colombian context, and the more general notion of conflict. In the ethnographic work, which was intended to be developed over the life of the project, we approached specific local conflicts for the first time. The project allowed us to return to the sites since and begin to understand more deeply the ways in which these actors understand local conflict and the implication of these imaginaries, a process that was frozen by the arrival of the pandemic. The responses reveal both the similarities and the contrasts in the response in groups that were not only strongly dissimilar in geographical, ethnic and social terms, but also in terms of their proximity to the conflict. The first group from Bogotá was made up of middle class students studying English as part of a university degree and the second by inhabitants of a working class neighbourhood with a strong sense of local identity. That said, the first Bogotá group was heterogeneous in other ways, since two of the participants had lived through part of the conflict during extended periods of stay in the Eastern Plains region. The participants from Buenaventura and Quibdó, in contrast, were Afro-Colombians from places which had experienced the violence of the conflict much more immediately than the capital. In what follows, then, we will sketch out some of the most common interpretative tendencies. Confronting an unknown context forces participants to engage in an imaginative exercise that implies making connections and drawing parallels with the known, as well as an ability to put oneself in the place of others. Let us begin by considering the reaction of our groups to the representation of the Indonesian conflict of the 60s, and its aftermath, in The Act of Killing. Here it is readily apparent that the interpretative strategies deployed by our groups were made possible by a spatial imaginary within which we can perceive dynamics of universalisation and differentiation, of closeness and distance. Indeed, as one reads the transcripts, an image emerges of a world inhabited by communities situated in different spaces of power, with different national cultures but sharing a common human nature. Our participants may not have known much about Indonesia, and focus very much on their own state, but nonetheless they are able to place it somewhere in a global imaginary of powerful and less powerful states, of ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ ones. Both in the questionnaires and in the group discussions, a system of nation states and national differences is naturalised, as is Colombia’s place as a state that is

3 ENCOUNTERS 

97

historically underdeveloped, ‘folkloric’ and in an endless race to catch up with developed others, both in economic and institutional terms. At the same time, what viewers see in The Act of Killing was often interpreted as revealing something fundamental about human nature. Comments on the Film None of our participants had prior knowledge of the Indonesian genocide, and the film’s failure to provide sufficient context was noted by several participants, as they found themselves struggling to fill in the gaps. The documentary provides a very brief historical frame at the outset and goes on to add little to this. It was not surprising, therefore, to hear comments such as ‘you can’t tell what lies behind this or is being justified’ (male participant, Bogotá group 1, P4);2 ‘what little I could grasp of the film is that there is a context of conflict, two groups, one of which wants to stand out above the other, I’m not sure whether it’s a matter of occupying territory’ (male participant, Buenaventura, P2); ‘they [the perpetrators] supposedly have some ideals, but we haven’t seen them yet’ (male participant, Quibdó, P5). In both the questionnaires and discussions most participants focused on their personal response to the atrocities described by Anwar Congo and others, but a small number of participants found the very notion of inviting perpetrators to re-enact their deeds, and glorify them, as unethical, in one case noting that in the Colombian case ‘it would show lack of respect for perpetrators to be the leading characters and laugh about what they did, because that would offend the memory of the victims […] If I were a victim I would be furious’ (male participant, Bogotá 1, P6). Beyond these comments, however, we received few remarks on the film’s approach, though there were observations about the media’s role in conflict that we will deal with in the discussion of representation below. Conflict in Indonesia The lack of contextualisation within The Act of Killing meant that participants had to rely on their own resources to interpret what they were seeing. The political stakes of the Indonesian conflict were rarely mentioned, and then only in tentative and speculative terms, as viewers did not have 2  P2 here refers to participant 2, as our participants in the focus groups were identified by the order in which they intervened in the discussion.

98 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

sufficient contextual knowledge to engage in a discussion of that sort. Instead, the obvious horrors described by Congo and his cronies provided the start of our discussions, alongside expressions of shock at how bad things had been in Indonesia. As one of the students in Quibdó noted, ‘I had no idea that such heavy conflicts existed in other countries, yeah? I was amazed at the way he [Congo] could talk about how he killed people and then went out dancing at night, without a care’, (Quibdó, P1). Beyond these universal reactions to the brazenness of the perpetrators, the first Bogotá group, in keeping with local suspicions about politics, tended to interpret the Indonesian case as an example of political intolerance in a rather abstract sense. In the questionnaires, participants suggested that the documentary shows ‘the blindness that justifies killing someone systematically for their beliefs’, underlining that ‘they killed them because they were communists, not bad people’, and claiming that the film represents ‘systems of government based on terror and the annihilation of opposition as an example to others’. These and similar comments showed a concern for the fanaticism that is supposedly related to ‘radical’ political ideas. One anonymous participant claimed that ‘as a result of the ideals of a lot of people, people’s rights are violated for no good reason’, while another noted that ‘radical changes bring death’. Politics, for a large number of our participants across the different locations, was something to be avoided, something that brought trouble from powerful forces within society but which also led people to do terrible things. As noted, one of the film’s strengths is its ability to move its audience, provoking a visceral response. The emotions felt by the first Bogotá group were ‘indignation’, ‘disgust’, ‘pain’, and ‘rage’, a range of feeling that goes from moral outrage and empathy with the suffering of the victims to the desire to avenge them. These reactions were accompanied by an emphasis on human beings’ capacity for committing violent acts. Exemplary comments include ‘it shows how cruel humans can be’, ‘the consequences of violence are the same everywhere’, regardless of the country, the culture, conflicts are always going to be the same’, ‘perversion joins perversion and perversion is justified’, and ‘feeling powerful always leads to bad things.’ This interpretative strategy suggests that the propensity to such actions is a fundamental and inevitable human trait. At the same time, the process of universalisation tends to distance the speaking subject from violence, which is framed as something real, to be sure, but whose realisation of merely hypothetical and latent.

3 ENCOUNTERS 

99

In short, there is a fear in the face of political ideas coupled with a kind of fatalism about political violence (atrocities are part of human nature). Such notions occurred frequently in the first Bogotá and the Buenaventura groups and seem in keeping with the naturalisation of political violence that has been a constant part of Colombian history. However, the complexities attendant on this supposed ‘naturalisation’ are something to which we shall return below. Closely linked these interpretations was a horrified fascination at what was seen as the state’s capacity to create a fantasy that elides past atrocities. In Buenaventura, for example, the first participant in the discussion noted her strong reaction to the idea that this was: something very well planned and thought through so that it would sit well with the rest of society, in the chip that people have in their heads, that they [the victims] rebelled and were communists and thus had to be exterminated […] I was amazed at how the government back then, the kind of military dictatorship, got what they themselves had set up in the heads of the people.

The reference to the ‘chip’ people have in their heads is a cliché in institutional discourse in Colombia, typically used as a way of urging a general change of outlook. Here, however, it is used to signify a sinister form of social engineering. Similar comments noted the impact of state propaganda on younger generations Thus: ‘it’s pernicious, why?, because they teach hate, something that kids make part of themselves, and they see how people were killed’ (male participant, Buenaventura, P2); ‘I still don’t get how, let’s say, the government tries to show children and young people, when they went to see those films […], that the communists were the scum of that nation,[…] so that those kids growing up […] hate for no reason’ (male participant, Quibdó, P4). Linked to these interpretations was the understanding of just how strong historical stigma was, exemplified for the second participant cited here by the fact that a woman who was invited to play the role of a communist in one of the re-enactments was loath to do so for fear that others might actually brand her a subversive (Quibdó, P4). Other than noting that the murdered were communists, none of our participants attempted to identify the different actors in the conflict in ideological terms. What stood out instead was an emotional response to

100 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

the scale of the genocide, as exemplified by this comment from a male student in Quibdó: They wanted to impose their ideals, anyone who thought different had no place in that place and had to be eliminated, yes? That’s what struck me, just for thinking differently you can’t be there, that’s what they did, ‘he thinks differently, we have to eliminate him’, or ‘kill them all!’, as if that was a great thing to do. (male participant, Quibdó, P1)

We noted some significant differences in emotional responses to the documentary, particularly with the regard to the way participants experienced their own relative proximity to violence, and therefore their relative sense of vulnerability. These are apparent when we compare the first Bogotá group with the Buenaventura group. The documentary notes at the outset that the genocide took place fifty years ago, in a distant place, for the most part entirely unknown to local audiences. In Bogotá, the most frequently reported emotion (six times) was sadness. Only two participants mentioned fear, and another two felt that an effort had to be made to understand ‘how horrible it was to live in that country where they kill for killing’s sake’ (questionnaire). In Buenaventura, in contrast, there was also an indignant reaction at the way that ‘death is used as a tool in the name of freedom’ (questionnaire). Unlike Bogotá, however, the Indonesian case was interpreted as ‘a context of discrimination’ (questionnaire) in which there was a ‘territorial conflict’ (questionnaire), a view that understands the Indonesian genocide in terms of local struggles over territory, from the paramilitary terror used to displace urban communities from neighbourhoods earmarked for the development of the port to the disputes between violent actors over drug production areas and transhipment routes. Above all, however, there was an emphasis on the details of the genocidal violence, and a feeling of horror in the face of the idea that there are people capable of ‘killing or murdering people practically as an art form’ (five responses, questionnaires). Furthermore, the expressions of fear were more frequent and the buffer between the violence described in the documentary and the participants was less solid in Buenaventura. Five participants noted that today’s violence has its roots in the past, and seven spoke of their ‘anguish’ and ‘fear’ at the thought of being victims of similar violent acts. One of the participants dramatized those feelings very clearly, declaring that they had felt ‘fear of that happening in my neighbourhood’, while another noted the psychological impact of the film,

3 ENCOUNTERS 

101

noting that they were left feeling ‘vulnerable inside’. Similarly, in answer to a question that invited participants to choose the scenes that made most of an impression on them, the responses revealed significant differences. In Bogotá, nine participants chose the chilling scene in which Anwar Congo shows how he strangled his victims with a wire to avoid making a mess. In Buenaventura, in contrast, more than half of those who answered this question (eleven participants, questionnaires) picked the scenes in which the perpetrators represented the eviction of a family or the attack on a village. That large scale paramilitary actions had a greater resonance in this group is, to say the least, intriguing, reinforcing the notion that in this context acts of violence against whole communities were felt more closely. Comparisons As the conversations explored the groups’ understandings of the Indonesian context, comparisons with Colombia emerged spontaneously, without need for prompts, though we asked the question directly at some point in all of the focus groups. The most obvious of these comparisons revolves around our participants’ assessment of the relative levels of violence and atrocity in the two places. In this respect, we can distinguish between those who saw the Indonesian violence as more extreme, those who saw them as similar, and those who saw Colombia’s armed conflict as ‘worse’. While there is something invidious in comparisons of this sort, the vast majority of our participants made this kind of assessment, with only two participants noting that the cases were similar but different, without adding the evaluative notions of ‘better’ or ‘worse’. In effect, this approach centres on the speaker comparing the context described in the documentary and comparing it to their own knowledge of the worst excesses of the Colombian conflict. Indonesia is ‘worse’: I’ve never seen anything so cruel, yes, there is drugs trafficking, corruption, guerrillas, but something like that, no. (female participant, Bogotá 1, P1) On the other hand the parallel that you can see is that in Indonesia it’s organised by the top levels of government, something that isn’t seen so much in Colombia […] it was something well planned and in Colombia we haven’t got to the point of teaching kids to think that ‘we have to exterminate these people’, they do it really openly. (Buenaventura, P1)

102 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

The second speaker’s reference to the ideological aspect of the Indonesian violence was followed up by another participant in the same group who noted that children learn to be violent through the processes of socialisation that take place in the city’s poor neighbourhoods. Thus ‘you go to Lleras, to Alfonso López [popular neighbourhoods] and you see kids playing war and they have to kill the people from the other neighbourhood because they don’t belong to our group’. The same participant, however, immediately added that ‘that stuff happens but it’s not so direct, they’re not things that they’re told to do at school or by the state—it’s stuff they pick up from their environment’ (female participant, Buenaventura, P3). Indonesia and Colombia are similar: So, very similar to the reality of this country, as well as, the simple fact of belonging to a particular family, or having helped a guerrilla because otherwise you’d get shot in the head […] People got tortured and all that. It’s the same. (Bogotá 1, P4) So the link I want to make is with the perpetrators who have brought tears to Colombia for more than 50 years, no? uhm, they [the government] are making a peace deal with people [the guerrillas, here equated with Anwar Congo] who are really unforgivable. (Buenaventura, P5) I was struck that it should be almost… very, very similar or the same to what is lived everywhere; like extorting money from a business just to get money for your parties or whatever you want, the effort a small business owner makes to get some cash together and then someone else turns up who get to take it all simply because they have a gun. (Quibdó, P2) Many of the stories we can see are related to what happens today in Colombia, the groups, who has the power, who doesn’t, right? (Quibdó, P6) Sure, yes, it’s like the guerrillas, yes. Maybe, that, yes, of course, they are things that I think that all over the world we have that kind of life, that kind of state. (Bogotá 2, P1) You feel an identification with what is going on in Colombia, that’s been hidden. (Bogotá 1, anonymous, questionnaire)

3 ENCOUNTERS 

103

[The documentary is] the reflection of what our country is going through with the FARC and paramilitarism, drugs trafficking. (Bogotá 1, anonymous, questionnaire) The same things happen here, the thing is we look the other way. I mean, everywhere you find the dark hand of the government, and that sector of the left that also has its dark side. But here in Colombia it’s exactly the same situation. (female participant, Bogotá 2, P2)

Similar but also different in some ways: We all know that since the fifties Colombia has carried out acts of violence similar to or worse than the things we’ve seen in the documentary, yes?, [in Indonesia] it’s obviously about being a communist or politics, here in Colombia there have been many more reasons, appropriation of land, political ideals too, issues around social class, but let’s say that the common denominator is violence, let’s say in the countries where we’ve been involved in violent acts, we’ve lost our sensitivity to it, yes? (male participant, Bogotá 1, P7)

Colombia is ‘worse’: To think that things that are just as bad don’t happen here is just part of the alienation we get from the media. Far worse things have happened here. (female participant, Bogotá 1, P3) Well, I can relate that very directly to what’s going on in this country, and especially in our city, right? It’s kind of the same, except that there’s one difference I pick up on, […] in that conflict there was a political ideology, they wanted to oppose communism, and that’s why they did that stuff, the slaughter and so on… Not here, here it’s very different, they kill people for the sake of it here, there are people who pull the trigger without knowing why they do it, not there, there was an ideology, there was a war against the communists. (male participant, Buenaventura, P3)

In the second comment, the implication seems to be that the perceived senselessness of the Colombian conflict makes it worse, that however awful the Indonesian slaughter was at least it had a perverse logic, though that point was not fully developed. At either extreme of these views were two characteristic approaches to discussions about violence in Colombia, on the one hand, the desire to

104 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

protect the national image from its own ‘black legend’, and on the other, the critique of what is often perceived as a tendency to ignore or minimise the role of violence in the country. The first position can be understood through the metaphor of the nation as family. From this perspective, the conflict is the fault of a minority that has to be controlled by a paternalistic state. Publicising the problems of the country breaks the injunction that ‘dirty linen is washed at home’ and is essentially unpatriotic, even seditious. The second position, in contrast, underlines social divisions, refusing the demands of right wing nationalism. From this vantage point, violence is seen as a continuum and the causes of the conflict are located not in aberrant political subjects but in the country’s social structure. These positions can roughly be correlated with participants’ political affiliation with the right or the left of the political spectrum, and represent one of the key dividing lines that differentiate the conflict imaginaries expressed in our focus groups. The Colombian Conflict: Actors, Causes and Outcomes Comparisons with Colombia led naturally to the discussion of local understandings of the armed conflict. In these early pilot sessions it is striking that there were relatively few discussions of its multiple causes. One of the people we interviewed in La Perseverancia, a middle-aged community leader, focused on injustice and inequality, emphasising the role of the ‘oligarchy’, and noted the structural violence that characterises Colombian society: We can vote, we can do lots of things for the country, but here, unfortunately, someone steals a pound of rice because they have no food, and they end up in jail for thirty or forty years […] but a politician steals and they get rewarded, they get house arrest […] Oppression, just the case of public transport is the example of, of how the people, for example, in the south of Bogotá [where the poor live, in the city’s urban imaginary] have to live, standing in massive queues, not being able to get to appointments on time, they are forced to live through that daily tragedy, meeting the demands of being a domestic worker, for example. (male participant, Bogotá 2, P2)

The example of long jail terms for petty crimes would be more appropriate in the US than in Colombia, where a frequent complaint is that the police arrest criminals only for the liberal justice system to release them,

3 ENCOUNTERS 

105

but the speaker’s aim here was clearly to underline the favourable treatment received by the rich and influential in a system stacked against the poor. For this participant, peace would only come when people had enough to eat and the prospect of their children having a better life, something that required the kind of transformative change he considered unlikely in the present circumstances. Similar opinions were mentioned in the discussions about the nature of peace, and are discussed below. In contexts where violence was a constant or recent presence, such as Tutunendo or Buenaventura, a certain reticence was unsurprising, and there is a familiarity in references to violence as something that simply happens, almost as if it were a natural phenomenon (e.g. ‘the violence which has generated itself over time’, female participant, Tutunendo, P1). Nonetheless it was striking that narratives of origin were absent in these early discussions and history was never used as an explanatory device. This may have some relation to the film’s emphasis on the personal responsibility of perpetrators, which clearly played a role in shaping the conversations, though these were very open, and most of the participants focused on the actors directly involved in the conflict who were contrasted to the majority of the population who were not. In the first instance, we should point out that in general all violent actors were not only repudiated but frequently equated with each other, regardless of ideology, as this comment from a victim of forced displacement in Quibdó makes clear: I think that with regard to the different groups that exist each group has its laws and what they want is that their law be the one that prevails or exists, I mean, they want everyone to believe in that law. (female participant, Quibdó, P7)

That said, there were nuances in the way our participants imagined different armed actors, which we now exemplify briefly. Paramilitaries The right-wing paramilitaries unsurprisingly occupied a key role in the conflict imaginary of many of our participants. None of them expressed positive views of these groups but focused instead on their use of extreme forms of exemplary violence. The claim that paramilitaries had played football with the heads of their victims was a key anecdote summing up their brutality and lack of empathy as they dehumanise their victims.

106 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Alongside this widespread image, referenced in the first Bogotá group, were other anecdotes representing the use of exemplary violence. For example, a female participant in Bogotá (Bogotá 1, P3) recounted a key anecdote in which guerrillas supposedly stole sixty head of cattle from Carlos Castaño, at one time leader of the AUC, in the Montes de María region. In response, this story claims, Castaño ordered the roasting alive of sixty peasants. We have been unable to find evidence for this event, either in the archive or during our visit to the Montes de María in 2019, but the role played by the anecdote is clearly to exemplify the paramilitaries’ ruthlessness. Another female participant in the same group had previously mentioned a well-documented case, the 1997 Mapiripán massacre in the department of Meta, in which paramilitary forces killed at least thirty people, noting that ‘they cut people’s throats, threw them in the river, they orphaned their children, people were terrified to go out as they knew that… [the pause accompanied by a facial gesture making it clear that going our would have led to the death of the local people]’ (Bogotá 1, P2). Another woman in the same group spoke of the security forces as victims, too, adding that there are ‘people who get cooked [a reference to the previous claim], people who get sent heads [another anecdote for which we have been unable to find evidence], people who are sent people’s keys, to say “look, if you don’t do this”, the same as the police, lots of them are sent heads’. Though this point remains to be explored it struck us that once a rhetoric of fear took hold it elicited a hyperbolic imaginary marked by descriptions of exemplary violence of the most grotesque kind. A young man in the same session told a story to underline his idea that people see the paramilitaries as more fearsome than the guerrillas. On this account, a female friend of the speaker was in an unspecified area where there was conflict between the state, the paramilitaries and the guerrillas: ‘they could see that, well, the guerrillas were coming and they got a bit scared, but when they saw the paras coming they ran away, in other words, it’s just a reflex, people see the paras as a whole other thing’. Reflected here is the paras’ fearsome reputation, amplified by media accounts, rumour and gossip. This anecdote was backed up by another contradictory claim on the part of the same speaker (Bogotá 1, P8) that in Medellín a man had dressed up as a serial killer, holding a chainsaw, and had subsequently been lynched by a crowd who associated the image with paramilitaries. Again, we have found no corroborating evidence in the media archive for this claim, which paradoxically frames the community at large as violent, while suggesting that fear may be a fundamental driver of violence.

3 ENCOUNTERS 

107

Paramilitaries were also discussed in the Tutunendo group, whose members had first hand experience of living with these violent actors. Here the focus was unsurprisingly on what the local community experienced during the conflict rather than what might be myths and rumours. Even when participants depended on second hand information, the source of that information was not far away. In effect, therefore, these were testimonies rather than anecdotes. However, there is a significant difference between the types of narrative articulated by these participants: The paracos arrived and that was terrifying, I mean, they arrived and everyone was shut up at home, we were shut up in the house all the time, because, just one example, young women sometimes went out to dance at a bar and a paraco would arrive with his gun at his side ‘dance with me or get lost’, or when they weren’t killing people in front of you they brought people from other places and killed them and buried them. (female participant, Tutunendo, P1) When the paramilitaries were in Tutunendo, at four pm people had to be shut up in their homes. Listen, a man came from Ichó to do some bamboo work, and as they knew he’d arrived they chased him, must have been an 8th of September because they were in the religious procession, they came and they had him on the run, and he hid in someone’s house and the paramilitaries killed him right there. They killed him right there. (female participant, Tutunendo, P2)

The first example is a familiar one, used in a variety of contexts in Colombia, which shows how the power of armed actors is expressed through coercive and abusive sexual behaviour, in itself linked to the broader issue of the instrumentalisation of sexual violence in the conflict. The second is a much more specific example of a brutal act of violence. Both types of anecdote, however, vividly bring to life the sense of terrified paralysis the paramilitaries brought to Tutunendo. Guerrillas In the first group in Bogotá the emphasis was on the role of paramilitaries. But there were also references in this group to the FARC’s negotiation of a peace deal that would provide them with impunity, a view widely reported in the press and promoted by political leaders opposed to the peace deal. Thus one young man responded that: ‘it isn’t easy to know that the

108 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

guerrillas right now are asking for certain conditions for a supposed surrender, because they still haven’t surrendered, certain conditions that will allow them to live better than their victims’ (Bogotá 1, P10). We saw this view repeated in Buenaventura, where a participant noted that the guerrillas are ‘unforgiveable’ (literally ‘people who don’t have God’s pardon’, male participant, Buenaventura, P5, cited in full above). These, however, were minor interventions in longer debates about the armed conflict and the peace process. In Quibdó, in contrast, the guerrilla groups were a central theme in the discussions. Here one of the participants reflected on his own uncertainty about what the guerrillas represented: We don’t know what the illegal groups stand for, for example, the FARC, we don’t know them, but we can see that they are well organised […] they are fighting for something, they are not doing it right, but […] we get told that ‘they are the bad guys’ but we can’t say why they are doing it, but they are fighting for specific goals, and they do it by killing. (male participant, Quibdó, P1)

In the same group, we found an example of a common thread which suggests sympathy for the initial goals professed by the guerrilla groups only to criticise their current position more strongly: For me, at the start well, they might have ideals that would be good for the country, yeah?, but I think that over time, I think they lost their way […] doing stuff that doesn’t get the community onside, not like in the beginning, because they commit acts that are really bad for the country, unless I’m mistaken, killing, extorting money. (male participant, Quibdó, P5)

In spite of ambivalence about what the guerrilla movement represented, they were nonetheless the actors most immediately associated by this group with the crimes portrayed in the documentary, and in particular the ability to live with the knowledge of the atrocities they had committed: The FARC talk about the peace process and all that, but at the same time they generate mistrust, yes? because I can’t understand what those people are capable of, I mean, so many dead, and all of the stuff we don’t know yet […] and they have those images in their heads, and yet they go on without, like you see in the film, going on but knowing what they did. (male participant, Quibdó, P8)

3 ENCOUNTERS 

109

Indeed, the emerging consensus in this discussion was that the potential impunity being negotiated in Havana was a fundamental injustice. On the one hand, the generalised nature of this view reflects the inroads made by the far right’s insistence that the offer of impunity made the peace process illegitimate but a further key factor was the testimony of a young woman who had seen family members killed by guerrillas. Her first hand account of the violence of both guerrillas and paramilitaries made any debate about the differences between armed actors impossible to sustain. Yet while she spoke powerfully of the violence of both armed groups, for the other participants the atrocities of Anwar Congo and his like were clearly assimilated to the activities of the guerrillas. In Tutunendo, in contrast, one participant suggested that ‘in one sense the guerrillas are better, and not what’s going on now’ as the insurgents had provided a form of authority and order, now replaced by a kind of anarchy in the area, particular with regard to the occupation of peasant lands. Across this group, however, the main emphasis was on the lack of agency of the local community in the face of violence, and the damning indifference of the state. Beyond these ambiguous but unanimously critical understandings of the role of the guerrillas in the conflict, one participant in Bogotá outlined the role played by the idea of the insurgency in what he described as the dominant social imaginary: in this country social protest is criminalised, so when the peasants protested and the whole country was indignant at their treatment […], when you went out to protest they said to you, ‘no, you’re a guerrilla’ even my dad said, ‘no, when you protest, you throw stones at the police, you damage buildings, you’re just one more guerrilla in the city’, so if I protest for some rights that affect me directly, I’m one more criminal […] Students protest and they’re guerrillas, peasants protest and they’re guerrillas, anyone who protests about anything is a guerrilla, and they need to be put on trial, people look down on them and in the social imaginary anyone who protests is a guerrilla. (male participant, Bogotá 1, P8)

The emphasis here is on the role played by the guerrillas in the uribista imaginary as the absolute enemy. This did not imply a complete rejection of uribista rhetoric, however, nor a positive assessment of the insurgents. There were certainly participants who saw the guerrillas as the main or at least the immediate problem for the nation. Throughout the groups, then,

110 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

while participants varied somewhat in the relative vehemence of their critique of the armed actors, all of these were condemned. The State The discussion of the role of armed actors took different directions, with most of the focus on armed groups ‘beyond the law’, but there were also occasions when state actors came in for robust criticism. Overwhelmingly, the participants saw themselves are failed or abandoned by the state, even in the case of those who broadly supported institutional actors. In the first group in Bogotá, for example, a woman condemned the state’s role in the Mapiripán massacre, ‘where the state’s failure to act, the armed forces […] allowed and provided transport for […] the AUC [Colombia’s main paramilitary command], so they could get into that town in Meta […] It’s more serious because the state is the guarantor of our rights’ (Bogotá 1, P2). In the same group, however, members of the police and the armed forces were also presented as victims, unsurprisingly, as some of the participants had family members in the former: People in the police, let’s say, are one of, are some of the people who tend to be most affected by the war too, yes? Because they are the ones they send out there, they send soldiers out into the jungle, […] to fight the FARC, and they are affected, too. (female participant, Bogotá 1, P5)

In Tutunendo, in contrast, the emphasis was entirely on connivance between the police and the paramilitaries, which meant that this group of participants had no faith at all in state actors: Even the law [police] here, because of the way they are, they joined forces with the paramilitaries to hurt people, I for one put no trust in them, not me, I pass by without looking at them, seriously, I don’t look at them, because of the bad stuff they’ve done that you find out about. (female participant, Tutunendo, P1)

An account of several murders carried out by the police also emerged: Wasn’t it in 88 that they massacred that whole family, where they killed the father and the son and the son’s daughter? They killed the old man here, with an axe, and the wife was shot but she survived, but the kid […] the bullet that hit her split her head open here, her brains [shows impact point],

3 ENCOUNTERS 

111

the husband was killed straight off. They trained kids, it was the cops themselves that trained them here, and then they killed those kids too, the Fiscalía came then, they dug up several of those kids’ bones, because they [the police] used to get them to dig a hole in the ground and then they gave them the coup de grâce, and the bodies tumbled on top of each other […]. And sometimes they just scare you for the hell of it, they let loose a few volleys and say, ‘no, it’s the conflict’ and… (female participant, Tutunendo, P3)

Here the agents of the state are unequivocally represented as perpetrators of atrocities, untrustworthy actors who share the goals of the right-­ wing paramilitary groups. “Civilians”, “Society” Emergent in these accounts is a sense of an embattled general population, deprived of agency and caught up in violence in which it has no immediate part. As one participant in Bogotá put it, ‘we put up with it because we have to, and if there is a conflict we need to stay out of it because it we get involved things might turn out worse for us’ (male participant, Bogotá 1, P9). Two other participants in the same focus group expressed the idea that people become desensitised to violence, thereby deepening a tendency to be passive in political terms. With respect to the atrocities shown in the documentary the first of these noted that a possible reaction on the part of Colombians was ‘“ah, well, we’ve lived through that”, and maybe we might not be so shocked at what we hear because in some way we’ve lived it’. He also used the case of the recent Bataclan terrorist attack in Paris to drive home the point, claiming that a common reaction might be ‘that’s become everyday stuff’ and adding that ‘given that the topic has now become death, death, death, well, while we get used to that we don’t care about anything, we don’t say “hey, what’s going on, what are we going to do about it?”’ (Bogotֵá 1, P7). Another member of this group added ‘it ends up seeming normal that to attach another person is a daily occurrence, stuff which happens all the time, so why worry about it, if that is something that happens in society all the time […] that is to normalise a fact that isn’t normal at all’ (male participant, Bogotá 1, P8). These comments raise questions about how political agency in Colombia’s democracy is imagined, and the role of those who are not directly involved in the conflict, questions which make the idea of passivity difficult to sustain. In the case of those who had lived closely with the

112 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

conflict, the key sensation in these discussions was undoubtedly one of fear and powerlessness in the face of violence. In Tutunendo, members of the victims’ group expressed this sensation eloquently: Lots of people left. The went to Quibdó, Medellín, lots of places, some left and some stayed […] the whole thing is overwhelming, because we live with so much fear, today a tyre blew up there or something […] a massive bang, I was in the river with my kids, my kids ran like crazy and I called them but nothing […] The river emptied just like that,3 because we thought they’d blown something up. (female participant, Tutunendo, P1)

However, that the victims in Tutunendo had organised themselves in order to lobby national institutions was in itself a form of political agency. Indeed, in several instances the peace process was imagined as providing agency to the victims of the conflict, even if it was the negative agency of refusal. Thus: The families of the victims have a feeling they will never really lose, and even though the state might look for peace, they are never going to agree, they are going to say ‘sure, because that didn’t happen to you directly, you are going to say, yes, let’s have peace, but you weren’t affected and what happened to other people doesn’t matter to you’. (male participant, Bogotá 1, P10)

The point made here is that the victims constitute a fundamental part of the process of peace building, with a kind ethical veto over potential accords. Furthermore, in the context of the peace process, the idea of acceptance and reconciliation within a plural society was in itself sometimes understood as a problem, both explicitly and implicitly, in relation to the questions of impunity raised by the film: Well, if we’re talking about post conflict, imagining that peace is going to come […] I always wonder, is the country ready of these people? Is the country ready to take in the people who belonged to these groups [violent actors]? […] Are the people who were affected by them, by their actions, are they ready to forgive? (female participant, Buenaventura, P6)

3

 In Tutunendo there are usually people washing clothes, fishing or swimming in the river.

3 ENCOUNTERS 

113

Victims, in other words, were generally seen as political agents in the political context of the peace negotiations. However, beyond the notion of the victim, there were also comments that recognised the effect of the conflict on all Colombians, such as the claim that ‘although we weren’t directly affected we do feel, to some extent, what they [the victims] had to live through’ (male participant, Bogotá 1, P10). Nonetheless, such a view continues to draw a line between both perpetrators and victims, on the one hand, and the rest of society, on the other. It is part of an imaginary that in effect separates the conflict from the reality of lived experience for most Colombians. Furthermore, while for the most part our participants rightly felt that they were not responsible for the conflict, to blame violence on a minority of aberrant subjects ignores the structural causes of the conflict, and stands in contrast to the broad criticisms made by most of our participants. It also fails to chime with the Santos regime’s tendency to present postconflict as a personal, psychological responsibility, centring on tolerance and good citizenship. However, on the one occasion when this did emerge it did so in a complex way that undermined the notion of personal responsibility: We should use everything so that the space of peace comes into being, and one begins to feel part of peace, ‘I’m going to be more tolerant, I’m going to be more understanding’, why?, because I’m involved in peace, but if my environment tells me something different then I’m going to behave in accordance with what I see around me. (female participant, Quibdó, P6)

Here the officially promoted discourse of personal responsibility is undermined by the weight of broader collective practices. The weight of a particular kind of political culture, in other words, is seen as a determining and potentially negative factor. Another way of imagining the conflict, however, expressed by a small minority of participants, questioned the imaginary of separation, passivity and even indifference, and claimed that ultimately all Colombians play a part in the situation of conflict: We have a little paramilitary or little guerrilla in our hearts because we necessarily identify with one of the two sides, ideologically, because we want to protest, or whatever […] even if we don’t carry weapons, we identify ourselves with one way of thinking, and whoever doesn’t doesn’t know what

114 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

country they are in, it’s really difficult here to make the other side understand, it’s always ‘YOU are the one who’s wrong’. (female participant, Bogotá 1, P3) Violence includes the social aspect, here in Colombia we can see that if we look at the most significant forms of violence, we organise it according to BACRIM, criminal groups, illegal actors, to murders, but everything revolves around the fact that the people themselves are complicit. (female participant, Buenaventura, P1)

From this perspective, political polarisation makes peace difficult to achieve. As the first of the participants cited above noted: The two groups of Colombians are convinced that what they are doing or supporting is correct, so telling a paramilitary that what he did was wrong, he’s not going to understand that, because he killed, and risked his life for that. And telling the guerrillas, who don‘t have the economic advantages of the paramilitaries, and didn’t act in cahoots with the state, that they, who risked their families, because they [the families] were tortured, massacred, raped, and who have been confronting a country that they want to change for everyone, something other people don’t understand, that they are wrong, that’s difficult. (female participant, Bogotá 1, P3)

In fact, pessimism about the prospects for peace was widespread at this moment in spite of the administration’s efforts to promote a sense of hope. For some, peace was only thinkable in the future, ‘two or three generations away’, as the last speaker quoted above put it. In Tutunendo, scepticism about peace was based on experience: They are deceiving us by saying that the FARC are going to hand over their weapons and we’re going to be free, but you just wait, the FARC will turn in their guns and another group will turn up, like when M.19 demobilised and then we had the FARC, now the FARC do a deal and we get, what are they called?, the Úsuga Clan4 (female participant, Tutunendo, P2)

Indeed, a significant minority of participants across the survey saw peace as a mirage. In La Perseverancia, a middle-aged male resident noted that ‘peace, for me, is a big lie […] There can be no peace with hunger; 4

 The Úsuga clan, and alias for the Gulf Clan, one of the right wing neo-paramilitary groups.

3 ENCOUNTERS 

115

the more hunger the more war’ (Bogotá 2, P2), while in Buenaventura, a female student asked How can we talk of peace is there is racism, if there is poverty, if there is exclusion? It’s not an integral peace, it’s a half-way peace. (Buenaventura, P1)

By focusing on the conditions of historic exclusion that persist in Colombia, those who share this perspective saw violence as a continuum rather than linking it to the so-called armed conflict or even organised crime. This position was the majority view in all of the groups in the Pacific and it was also expressed in the focus groups in Bogotá, though less insistently. Rhetorical questions were frequently used in discussing this issue as in Quibdó, where one of the students asked Peace, isn’t that just an ephemeral thing that is not so easy to achieve because when we are denied the right to have drinking water at home, the right to electricity at home […], to health care, education, that stops there being peace? (male participant, Quibdó, P4)

For this participant, peace is synonymous with ‘social justice’, an often repeated slogan from social movements which constantly demanded ‘peace with social justice’. That said, the use of the passive voice, ‘we are denied’, makes it impossible to identify who it is that is denying people their rights. Other interventions focused on the limitations of the peace process, and the problem of impunity. They are ending one [period of] violence to start others. Maybe they can make a truce with some groups—because they’re not talking to all of them— but after the shooting violence is over there will a psychological violence because, who is going to help those families that were directly affected by those situations, […] when we know they are seeing those responsible for their misfortune living like kings, living in peace, living it up while they are still immersed in poverty, suffering hunger, suffering need? (female participant, Tutunendo, P5)

This participant imagines conflicts as multiple. The construction of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ is ambiguous, since two types of ‘them’ emerge, namely, the state, or at least those who are in power, and the perpetrators, amongst whom one can find agents of the state. However, neither group is

116 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

presented as an ideological enemy. The perpetrators are condemned as destroyers of community life, and for the conflict to end there needs to be justice. In the Tutunendo group as a whole the reaction to the film was one of anger at the impunity of the perpetrators, the lack of reparations or of any justice at all. The Media A significant aspect of these emergent conflict imaginaries was the recognition of the problem of representation and the role of the media. In Tutunendo, to speak of conflict, at least in this first encounter, was overwhelmingly a matter of recounting either personal experiences or those that the speakers knew as part of the local community. In the other groups, however, a recurring theme was uncertainty about the framing of the conflict, particularly in the media. The conversations were marked by a strong belief that people are regularly taken in by what they see or read both in news media and in fictional representations of the conflict (social media was not a focus in these early discussions). In this sense, a hermeneutic of suspicion, which questioned the motives behind particular forms of representation, existed alongside the repetition of myths and rumours. Several of our participants noted that they did not really feel informed about the conflict, a recognition that suggests that further sessions need to focus on how people come to know what they know about both conflict and peace. In some cases, the emphasis was on the stigmatising effect of certain modes of representation, such as the misrepresentation of Buenaventura, which had been in the news as the site of the casas de pique: Of course, that’s what happens when, for example, you talk about Buenaventura, they say ‘no, in Buenaventura’, I mean, what the papers do, the press, TV, they sell a false image, yes?, so sure, what they are doing is, anyone who comes down here must think, ‘Buenaventura, better be careful, because anything can happen down here’. The press sell an image of Buenaventura abroad that is false, just, just wrong, they only talk about the bad stuff, for example, that stuff about the casas de pique, that’s gone all over the world, I expect you can hear about that everywhere. (female participant, Buenaventura, P4)

These familiar complaints compare the lived experience of our participants with particular forms of representation. In the first Bogotá group

3 ENCOUNTERS 

117

and in Quibdó such discussions were foregrounded in response to a question we asked about the role of cinema in the representation of conflict. Here the conversations turned in particular to the fictional representations of violent aspects of Colombia’s recent past, particularly through telenovelas, one of the most important products of popular culture in Colombia: here in the media, I think representation has been used recently making a series of telenovelas and stuff that try and emphasise that period in the 80s which affected us so much and damaged our image, women’s image and that of a range of towns as well, we’re talking all of Antioquia and Valle, which were under siege from that drug trafficking, and today the younger generation who maybe don’t know that reality are turning all those narcos into idols, so Pablo Escobar became an icon, a point of reference, and women are shown as prepagos.5 So here, well, yeah, this is a great country, with beautiful women, umm, very friendly people, but obviously that has served to stigmatise our society, so the role of cinema should be moderate and respectful. (male participant, Bogotá 1, P6)

As well as mobilising a set of stereotypical tropes about Colombia, this participant related the hyperbolic aspect of The Act of Killing, especially the perpetrators’ re-enactments of their crimes, to the sensationalist fictions that currently filled the TV schedules. Another participant immediately brought the conversation back to the documentaries, however, suggesting that ‘it’s contradictory because it’s thanks to these documentaries that we can see the reality of a country’ (female participant, Bogotá 1, P1), thereby raising the question of how representations both reveal and conceal. In Quibdó, the point about the fictionalisation of violence emerged again: The same thing happens with the press, I mean, with the media, they are the channel that communicates all of the things we are going through and makes them, I don’t know, get us all involved, anyway, I don’t think they do it in a positive way […] sometimes the opposite happens, because when it comes to telenovelas and films it’s all war, violence. I mean, it all gets dramatised, that ends up reaching all of us, every child, […] because all those films, they reach our homes and the whole family watches, they work on our minds, and they have an effect, you can see it, that’s what I think, anyway. (female participant, Quibdó, P6) 5

 A term used to refer to a sex worker.

118 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

These concerns partly overlap with the need to preserve the nation’s image, though there was not enough information for us to relate these examples either to nationalism or to a deeper social conservatism. However, while fragmentary, these conversations show that, unsurprisingly, the imaginaries drawn upon in these sessions went far beyond the details of the struggle between the state and the insurgency to include deeper reflections on the nature of the polity. In this respect, some participants emphasised the role or representation as ideological fantasy, which includes the selective management of information. Thus in response to the claim that Indonesia was ‘worse’ than Colombia, one participant noted that ‘to think that equally serious things don’t happen here is part of the alienation generated by the media’ (female participant, Bogotá 1, P3). The same participant commented that paramilitary atrocities found no representation in the media: it wasn’t in the press, it didn’t come out in Caracol or RCN, they’ve played football with the heads of people they’ve mutilated and it didn’t come out in the news […] and it didn’t come out to avoid panic… we are alienated, we live in a country of lies, we’re like Alice in Wonderland and we say Colombian are amazing, that we have the best country in the world, and it’s not like that. They’ve committed crimes against human rights here every day and we carry on believing that we are the best.

Another participant in the group spoke of ‘the violence that has been generated, that happens, and the way people are manipulated’ (male participant, Bogotá 1, P4), while in direct reference to P3’s interventions another claimed that ‘Caracol and RCN, they belong to the government, and they show what they want to show, they don’t show what is really happening, and in many places […], small towns and departments that are affected [by conflict] but the media never get there the way they should’ (female participant, Bogotá 1, P5). The claims that media representations of the conflict skew understandings of the conflict was, then, a common one. In the second Bogotá group, however, one of the people interviewed during the open-air showing of The Act of Killing suggested that the power of such representations was waning. Commenting on the use of religion as a form of control, he claimed that ‘right now not even religion as culture is any use, because everyone realises that that is also a way of manipulating the population’ (male participant, Bogotá 2, P2). Taken together, these remarks suggested the need for follow up sessions to explore how Colombians see themselves as both cynical and gullible, as clear sighted and blind, and how this feeds into their understandings of local political dynamics.

3 ENCOUNTERS 

119

Initial Conclusions In this first approximation we are unable to provide ethnographic depth for which the project strives but we can reflect on the implications of some general interpretative tendencies. While there are clear differences between our groups, most obviously between those who have had personal experience of violence and those who have not, none were supportive of any of the actors in the conflict. Instead, our participants tended to talk about politics in neutral ways, never identifying themselves overtly as belonging to a particular position on the political spectrum. Thus the views of both the far right and the political left were not expressed openly in any of them and the ideological differences that we presumed to be just beneath the surface did not emerge in open disagreement. Rather, we encountered groups trying to work towards collective understandings of local circumstances, using familiar points of reference alongside more obscure anecdotes as they sought to position themselves in the face of political violence. That said, many of these points of reference showed the impact of familiar political discourses of both left and right, discourses which provide important parts of conflict imaginaries, both emergent and residual. It seemed evident that the both the focus group method and the context of the peace process played a part here. We were engaged in a project about conflict and post conflict, a notion promoted heavily by the current administration and the open and scrutinised nature of the process meant that participants were more likely to choose their words carefully, though we note that the anonymous questionnaires did not produce significantly different results. In the broadest terms, conflict was understood as a complex phenomenon with both structural and conjunctural causes, a fundamental part of political life in a polity that understands itself as underdeveloped and unequal. Though we did not encounter closely articulated structural analyses in these first focus groups, the social world was conceived of as unfair, duplicitous, corrupt and potentially dangerous. That change was seen as unlikely made the prospects for peace fragile. Furthermore, in a social world fraught with threat, political action was understood as inherently dangerous and the notion of a generalised passivity was a central part of imaginaries that presented the vast majority of Colombians as bystanders. In fact, passivity itself was seen by a small number of participants as a form of complicity, which implies an attenuated form of agency, implying a self-lacerating moral critique that suggests ‘we’ get what ‘we’ deserve, precisely as the imaginer distances themselves from the majority of their compatriots. These

120 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

considerations suggest the need for follow up questions about the nature of democracy and the need for a deeper investigation of how our participants understand collective action and collective responsibility. With this in mind, the state emerges as a fundamental problem. The state does not protect ‘us’, indeed it sometimes persecutes ‘us’ and colludes with some of ‘them’, the paramilitaries. While not all our participants were equally critical of the state, not one of them suggested that the state fulfilled its obligations to its citizens. If the republic is in principle the space for thinking and acting collectively, in practice it is materialised through corrupt institutions that do not belong to its citizens. Its agents collude with violent actors, and it became clear during these sessions that an area demanding future exploration was how participants understand the role of the state in both promoting and regulating violence. Finally, it was apparent that there was a reflexive aspect to the focus group discussions, as participants questioned how people come to know what they think they know about conflict, at times questioning their own perspectives. Alongside such doubts, there is also certainty that what ‘we’ are told by official sources is suspect. ‘We’ lack information yet tend to distrust sources of information, an area for further exploration. Blindness, in other words, may be wilful, as people preserve themselves by looking the other way, but it may also be orchestrated. The suspicion that there were many atrocities hidden from view existed in tension with what ‘everyone knows’ about violence, expressed through a number of key anecdotes.

References Geertz, C. (1983). Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. Basic Books. Hall, S. (2013). The Work of Representation. In S. Hall, J. Evans, & S. Nixon (Eds.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (2nd ed.). Sage. Holguín, Catalina. (2014). La felicidad de los asesinos. Semana, 27.02.2014, accessed online: https://www.semana.com/impresa/cine/articulo/la-felicidadde-los-asesinos/35752/ Klinken, G. v. (2014). No, The Act of Killing Is Not Unethical. Critical Asian Studies, 46(1), 176–178. Pemberton, J. (1994). On the Subject of ‘Java’. Cornell University Press. Reid, A. (2010). Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia. Cambridge University Press. Rojas, Nubia. (2013). El acto de matar... y ver morir. Semana 11.08.2013, accessed online https://www.semana.com/opinion/articulo/el-acto-matar-ver-morir/ 353939-3/

CHAPTER 4

Concluding Thoughts

Abstract  The Covid-19 pandemic forced a temporary lull in our fieldwork activities but provided us with the opportunity to pause and take stock of the data we had gathered to date, our conceptual framework, and methodological approach. We note the particular challenge of systematising the contributions of project participants, but that responses are rich, varied, and promising in developing a more sophisticated account of conflict imaginaries. Keywords  Conflict imaginaries • Bearing witness • Project participants • Methodology

This short monograph is the product of work that extends back to 2015 through both pilot and project phases. Just as our work gained momentum, the unexpected onset of the coronavirus pandemic had profound consequences for the research we are embarked upon. A key aspect of our activity is regular engagement with project participants who so generously agreed to work with us over an extended period. Across the five sites we have met hundreds of interlocutors, shown films tens of times, reflected on the comments and ideas shared by project participants, and constantly © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Philpott, N. Morgan, Understanding Conflict Imaginaries, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03976-8_4

121

122 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

pondered on the central notion of conflict imaginaries. Frequent film showings, we hoped, would create continuity in the exchange in that our interlocutors might compare films still relatively fresh in their memories. In the work we have done so far, we begin to see the emergence of a set of images and metaphors that structure the understanding of conflict in each site. Nonetheless, the generalisations we make at this point raise further questions and require further exploration. The arrival of the pandemic, then, means that the findings shared here are partial, provocations, and, for us, revealing of potential areas of further inquiry when fieldwork can resume. However, the enforced lay-off from fieldwork has afforded us the opportunity to undertake further research on the social imaginary. We are fortunate to have such a rich, if incomplete, set of reflections from project participants in Colombia and Indonesia and to be able to consider them in the light of the conceptual and theoretical literature that addresses the concerns of this research most directly. Despite the setbacks imposed by the pandemic, we have enjoyed the opportunity to take stock of our findings to date, and ponder upon what we may have learned. We commenced this project arguing that the social imaginary is an underdeveloped concept and that its empirical application left much unanswered about its usefulness. We have, we hope, contributed to an understanding of how social imaginaries both represent and fuel discord and rupture, an aspect of the imaginary under-researched by those whose focus is on what holds communities together rather than what drives them apart. For example, while there is no ‘we’ without ‘them’, even in the articulation of Taylor’s legends, images, and stories that legitimise shared social practices, it is clear that these notions take on very different dimensions in the context of civil conflict. In these circumstances, questions about who are perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and who is complicit with violent actors acquire particular resonance. And while issues of looking, seeing, bearing witness, remembering and assigning responsibility may play a role in the beliefs and practices that bind all communities, they assume a central role in the formation and articulation of what we call conflict imaginaries. We also recognise, however, that the attempt to refer to a specific ‘conflict’ imaginary is an artificial device, as what drives people’s understanding of conflict cannot be separated from basic suppositions about the nature of the social world. Without doubt, the most challenging aspect of presenting these findings has been the systematisation of the contribution of the participants, a process which has led us to assess the implications of our methodology.

4  CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 

123

Bringing groups of people together to watch and comment upon films creates a dynamic that potentially affects the kinds of comments and observations they are willing to share. For example, it may be that people ‘pull their punches’ to a certain extent so as not to alarm or offend other focus group participants. It is possible that individuals resiled from expressing extremely strongly held views lest they be exposed to criticism or ridicule by other participants. In Colombia, the timing of the pilot fieldwork is such that at least some project interlocutors wished to appear well disposed towards a post-conflict settlement being negotiated by government and guerrillas. For some Javanese, it is important that disagreements between individuals are not sharply expressed such that group coherence is maintained. We also recognise that project participants may attempt to second-guess what it is that we researchers wish to find and either try and please us or seek to disappoint. At the same time, we note the constant interplay between the imaginative power of individual attempts to make sense of extremely complex and deeply emotional issues and the development of collective, negotiated understandings of violence capable of expressing a basic level of agreement. We therefore remain deeply interested in how the experience of viewing the films elicited a range of responses to local conflict, down to the most granular level. Conflict imaginaries may centre on matters of broad societal import, but they may equally well be intensely local. In this respect, we recognise that the history of a street, neighbourhood, village, or town is partly hidden under layers of meaning built upon the ruins of past events. Our local collaborators enabled the archaeological work necessary to expose these signifying practices and taught us a great deal about the histories of particular places. Without them we would otherwise be blind to sites of great significance for residents and might fail to appreciate the sensitivity and difficulty of some discussions. The opportunity to conduct the intimate ethnographic work with a small number of participants in the project to further explore individual articulations of conflict imaginaries remains in the future because of the obstacles to travel which stopped us from working at close quarters with people in their homes. For now, unable to carry out the ethnographic work necessary to get to know our groups better, we remain largely unaware of the individual histories of those who offer up their interpretations of films and the events they depict in countries about which they know little. Instead, it is through the interactions of our interlocutors in the group sessions that elements of these histories began to emerge, giving us the opportunity to piece together

124 

S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

how local experiences of conflict inform the conflict imaginaries of individuals both in their relationship to the small groups (some of whom are known to each other) in which these exploratory screenings took place, and to the wider communities they inhabit. They also helped us reflect on some of our own suppositions, and consider how our experiences in the field produce particular imaginative responses in response. That, of course, brings us back to both theoretical and practical matters that revolve around the researcher’s ability to move between interpretive worlds. In this regard, we recognise that much will depend, as a later stage in the project, on the reflexive processes through which we invite our participants to reflect on our findings. At this point, however, we nonetheless suspect that some of our most fundamental initial intuitions are beginning to be confirmed. We make the uncontroversial claim that the way our participants position themselves with regard to the idea of conflict is linked to deep underlying understandings of the social world. At the same time, however, we note that these discussions of civil strife elicit a range of images, metaphors and anecdotes which suggest specific approaches to violence. We suggest that these particular signifying practices do not necessarily mesh into a coherent whole. Yet while they tend to be idiosyncratic, piecemeal and often problematic, they nonetheless appear to reveal deep truths about the nature of violence. The deep affective investments our participants often have in these tropes and micronarratives is undeniable. Yet a great deal of work remains to be done to be done before we can show how they relate to underlying structures of feeling about violence, and the political more generally. We cannot, therefore, claim with any confidence that we have achieved anything like a sufficiently grounded account of a specific set of conflict imaginaries. Nor are we in a position of make any general suggestions about the role played by these imaginaries in reproducing conflict, or the part they might play in helping to understand what would constitute peace. We do however, claim that we have begun to describe the dynamics through which violence acquires meaning in two very different polities.

References

Acevedo Carmona, D. (1995). La mentalidad de la élites sobre la Violencia en Colombia. El Ancora. Althusser, L., & Balibar, E. (1972). Reading Capital. NLB. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso. Anonymous. (2013). Basta ya! Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. Archila Neira, Mauricio. (1992). Cultura e identidad obrera. CINEP. Aspinall, E., & Berger, M. T. (2001). The Break-up of Indonesia? Nationalisms after Decolonisation and the Limits of the Nation-State in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia. Third World Quarterly, 22(6), 1003–1024. http://www.jstor. org/stable/3993459 Bartov, O. (2020, February 12). The Anatomy of a Genocide. Simon & Schuster. Bourdieu, P. (1972). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1980). Le Sens Pratique. Les Editions de Minuit. Brubaker, R. (2006). Ethnicity Without Groups. Harvard University Press. Caicedo Atehortúa, J. M. (2016). ¿Ésta es la paz de Santos?’: el Centro Democrático y su construcción de significados alrededor de las negociaciones de paz. Revista CS, 19, 15–37. Campbell, D. (1998). National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia. University of Minnesota Press. Castoriadis, C. (2007). Figures of the Thinkable (H.  Arnold, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Cegarra, J. (2012). Fundamentos teórico-epistemológicos de los imaginarios sociales. Cinta Moebio, 43, 1–13. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Philpott, N. Morgan, Understanding Conflict Imaginaries, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03976-8

125

126 

REFERENCES

Charry, C. A. (2011). Los intelectuales colombianos y el dilema de la construcción de la identidad nacional (1850–1930). European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 90, 55–70. Crehan, K. (2016). Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives. Duke University Press. Cribb, R. (2001). Genocide in Indonesia, 1965–1966. Journal of Genocide Research, 3(2), 219–239. Cruvellier, T. (2019). Philip Gourevitch: Living in Rwanda with the Genocide (Somewhat) Behind  – Part 1. Retrieved June 2, 2020, from Fondation Hirondelle https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/justiceinfo-­comment-­and-­ debate/in-­depth-­interviews/40830-­philip-­gourevitch-­living-­in-­r wanda-­with-­ the-­genocide-­somewhat-­behind-­part-­1.html Davoudi, S., & Brooks, E. (2021). City-Regional Imaginaries and Politics of Rescaling. Regional Studies, 55(1), 52–62. Deas, M. (1973). Algunas notas sobre el Caciquismo en Colombia. Revista de Occidente, 127, 118–140. Deas, M. (1997). Reflections on Political Violence in Colombia. In D.  Apter (Ed.), The Legitimization of Violence. Macmillan. Dibley, T. (1999, April 1). Tapol Troubles: When Will They End? Inside Indonesia, 58. https://www.insideindonesia.org/tapol-­troubles Dragolović, A. (2018). Knowing the Past Affectively: Screen Media and the Evocation of Intergenerational Trauma. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 17(1), 119–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022217732870 Duffield, M. (2007). Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples. Polity. Elson, R. E. (2009). Another Look at the Jakarta Charter Controversy of 1945. Indonesia, 88(October), 105–130. Fals Borda, O., Umaña Luna, E., & Guzmán, G. (1962). La violencia en Colombia: estudio de un proceso social. Tercer Mundo. Formichi, C. (2012). Islam and the Making of the Nation: Kartosuwiryo and Political Islam in 20th Century Indonesia. KITLV Press. Formichi, C. (2015). (Re)Writing the History of Political Islam in Indonesia. Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 30(1), 105–140. https://doi. org/10.1355/sj30-­ld Foucault, M. (1980). Two Lectures (C.  Gordon, L.  Marshall, J.  Mepham, & K. Soper, Trans.). In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Pantheon. Foucault, M. (2001). Dits et écrits. Gallimard. Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, Peace and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/002234336900600301 Gaonkar, D.  P. (2002). Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction. Public Culture, 14(1), 1–19.

 REFERENCES 

127

Geertz, C. (1983). Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. Basic Books. Gómez, L. (1990). Obra completa (Vol. 4). Instituto Caro y Cuervo. González, M. B. (2011). Clientelismo y Familias en Acción: una mirada desde lo local. Revista Opera, 11, 147–164. Gourevitch, P. (1999). We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. Picador. Graham, D.  A. (2020). Jeff Sessions Explains Why Christians Support Trump. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/why-­ christians-­support-­trump/613669/ Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Trans.). Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S. (2013). The Work of Representation. In S. Hall, J. Evans, & S. Nixon (Eds.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (2nd ed.). Sage. Herrera Villamizar, D. (1995). Aquel 19 será. Planeta. Heryanto, A. (2006). State Terrorism and Political Identity in Indonesia: Fatally Belonging. Routledge. Heryanto, A. (2012). Screening the 1965 Violence. In J. T. Brink & J. Oppenheimer (Eds.), Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence (pp. 224–240). Wallflower Press. Heryanto, A. (2014). Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture (Vol. 13). NUS Press. Holguín, Catalina. (2014). La felicidad de los asesinos. Semana, 27.02.2014, accessed online: https://www.semana.com/impresa/cine/articulo/lafelicidad-de-los-asesinos/35752/ ICTY. (1995). The Prosecutor v. Dusko Tadic, Decision on the Defence Motion for Interlocutory Appeal on Jurisdiction, IT-94-1-A, 2. Accessible at https://casebook.icrc.org/case-study/icty-prosecutor-v-tadic Irene Larraz Elorriaga. (2017). La construcción de legitimidad a través del capital simbólico. El caso del proceso de paz de Colombia. Estudios Políticos, 50, 257–280. Jurado, J.  C. J. (2015). Región y violencia en la guerra civil de 1851. Análisis político, 84, 76–101. Klinken, G. v. (2014). No, The Act of Killing Is Not Unethical. Critical Asian Studies, 46(1), 176–178. Klinken, G. v. (2017). Ale Rasa Beta Rasa – What You Feel, I Feel: Compiling History Together in Ambon (H.  Syaranamual, Trans.). In J.  Manuputty, Z. Salampessy, I. Ali-Fauzi, & I. Rafsadi (Eds.), Basudara Stories of Peace from Maluku: Working Together for Reconciliation (pp. xv–xxiv). Monash University Publishing.

128 

REFERENCES

Leguizamo, C. (2002). Reflexiones sobre el proceso de paz del gobierno de Andrés Pastrana y las FARC-Ep1998–2002. Dirección de estudios económicos. Lindsey, T. (2017). Conviction Politics: The Jailing of Ahok. https://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/conviction-­politics-­the-­jailing-­of-­ahok/ Marx, K. (1978). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Foreign Language Press. McCargo, D., & Taylor, R. H. (1996). Politics. In M. Halib & T. Huxley (Eds.), An Introduction to Southeast Asian Studies. I.B. Tauris. McNally, D. (2011). Monsters of the Market: Zombie, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Vol. 30). Haymarket Books. Morag, R. (2012). Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. I.B. Tauris. Nawawi, M.  A. (1971). Punitive Colonialism: The Dutch and the Indonesian National Integration. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2(2), 159–168. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463400018580 Nichols, B. (2014). Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. Studies in Documentary Film, 8(1), 81–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280. 2014.900954 NTN24. (2011). Presidente de Colombia se pronuncia sobre abatimiento de alias “Alfonso Cano”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI0CJzJLsxU&t=163s Olave, G. (2013). El eterno retorno de Marquetalia: sobre el mito fundacional de las Farc-EP. Folios, 37(Primer semestre), 149–166. Oquist, P. (1980). Violence, Conflict and Politics in Colombia. Academic. Ospina Pérez, M. (1949). New Year’s Speech. El Tiempo. Palacios, M. (2001). De populistas, mandarines y violencias. Luchas por el poder. Editorial Planeta. Pardo, R. (2010). La Historia de las Guerras. Ediciones B. Pastrana Arango, A. (1998). Hechos de paz. Oficina del Alto Comisionado para la Paz. Pécaut, D. (2013). La experiencia de la Violencia: Los desafíos del relato y de la memoria. La carreta histórica. Pemberton, J. (1994). On the Subject of ‘Java’. Cornell University Press. Perea Restrepo, C. M. (2009). Cultura política y violencia en Colombia: porque la sangre es espíritu. La Carreta Política. Posada Carbó, E. (2006). La nación soñada: violencia, liberalismo y democracia en Colombia. Norma. Pugh, M. (2005). The Political Economy of Peace-Building: A Critical Theory Perspective. International Journal of Peace Studies, 10(2), 23–42. Reid, A. (2010). Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia. Cambridge University Press. Restrepo, E. (2013). Etnización de la negridad: la invención de las ‘comunidades negras’ como grupo étnico en Colombia. Universidad del Cauca.

 REFERENCES 

129

Richani, N. (2002). Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia. SUNY Press. Richmond, O. (2010). A Genealogy of Peace and Conflict Theory. In O. Richmond (Ed.), Palgrave Advances in Peace-Building: Critical Developments and Approaches (pp. 14–38). Palgrave. Rieffer, B.-A. J. (2003). Religion and Nationalism: Understanding the Consequences of a Complex Relationship. Ethnicities, 3(2), 215–242. Rojas, Nubia. (2013). El acto de matar... y ver morir. Semana 11.08.2013, accessed online https://www.semana.com/opinion/articulo/el-acto-matarver-morir/353939-3/ Roldán, M. (2002). Blood and Fire. Duke University Press. Safford, F., & Palacios, M. (2002). Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society. Oxford University Press. Sánchez, G., & Peñaranda, R. (2007). Introducción. In G. Sánchez & R. Peñaranda (Eds.), Pasado y presente de la violencia en Colombia. Medellín. Sanders, J. (2004). Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Duke University Press. Schmidt, B., & Schroeder, I. (2001). Anthropology of Violence and Conflict. Routledge. Schwarz, A. (1994). A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia in the 1990s. Allen & Unwin. Searle, J. R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. The Free Press. Selby, J. (2013). The Myth of Liberal Peace-Building. Conflict, Security & Development, 13(1), 57–86. Sen, K., & Hill, D. T. (2000). Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia. Oxford University Press. Sidel, J. T. (2017, October 9). What Killed the Promise of Muslim Communism? New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/opinion/muslim-­ communism.html Strauss, C. (2006). The Imaginary. Anthropological Theory, 6(3), 322–344. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499606066891 Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press. Taylor, R. H. (1993). Political Science and South East Asian Studies. South East Asia Research, 1(1), 5–26. Tickell, P. (1993). Writing the Past: The Limits of Realism in Contemporary Indonesian Literature. In D. M. Roskies (Ed.), Text/Politics in Island Southeast Asia: Essays in Interpretation (pp.  257–287). Ohio University Center for International Studies. Uribe, M.  V. (2007). Salvo el poder, todo es ilusión. Mitos de origen de los Tigres Tamiles de Sri Lanka (LTTE), las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) y el Provisional Irish Republican Army de Irlanda del Norte (IRA). Editorial Pontifica Universidad Javeriana.

130 

References

Vatikiotis, M. (2015, September 30). Indonesia’s Forgotten Genocide. Asia Sentinel. https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/indonesia-­forgotten-­genocide Weatherbee, D.  E. (1985). Indonesia in 1984: Pancasila, Politics, and Power. Asian Survey, 25(2), 187–197. Weber, M. (1946). Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions. In H. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds.), Essays in Sociology. Oxford University Press. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press. Zurbuchen, M. (2002). History, Memory, and the ‘1965 Incident’ in Indonesia. Asian Survey, 42(4), 564–582.

Index1

A Affect, affective, 9, 12, 13, 22, 23, 75, 85, 123 Algeria, 2 Anderson, Benedict, 10, 43 Antagonists, 13, 14, 21 Argentina, 2 B Bourdieu, Pierre, 8–10 Bystanders, 2, 4, 13, 15, 78, 119 C Capitalism, 18 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 6–7, 10 Cinema, 2, 20, 42 Cold War, 18 Colombia Bogota, 57, 58, 94

Buenaventura, 94–102, 112–114 capitalism, 57 Catholicism, 47, 48, 50, 52, 54, 66 cinema, 117 civil war, 46, 50, 52 Cold War, 55, 58 conservatism, 49, 50, 118 Conservative Party, 47, 48, 50 democracy, 46, 48, 58, 65, 111 disappearance, 58, 61, 62, 78 elites, 47, 48, 50, 56–58, 64 false positives, 76, 90 guerrillas, 56–69, 87, 102, 104–108, 114 La Violencia, 55, 61 Liberal Party, 47, 48, 52, 63 liberals, 47, 48, 50–54, 56, 58, 64, 78 murder, 53–57, 60–62, 67, 78, 85–87, 114 nationalism, 67, 104, 118

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Philpott, N. Morgan, Understanding Conflict Imaginaries, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03976-8

131

132 

INDEX

Colombia (cont.) neoliberalism, 62, 64, 65 paramilitary, 60, 61, 64, 68, 69, 78, 107, 110, 114, 114n4, 118 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC), 56, 59–70 Uribe Vélez, Álvaro, 64–69, 78, 94 Uribismo, 65–69 Common sense, 5, 10, 11 Arendt, Hannah, 7, 10 Gramsci, Antonio, 10, 11 Communism, 18 Colombia, 50, 57 Indonesia, 31, 37, 40, 41, 77 D Democracy, 18, 120 Disappearance, 17, 78, 79 E Empathy, 83, 90, 91, 98, 105 F Film, 2, 22, 23 documentary, 2, 40, 76–80, 81n1, 92, 93, 97, 98, 100, 108 Falsos Positivos, 77–80, 86, 92 fictional, 2, 76, 117 Indonesia, 38–41, 44, 45 methodology, 74–75, 92–95 The Act of Killing, 15, 22, 41, 92, 96, 97, 117, 118 Foucault, Michel, 8, 10, 39 G Galtung, Johan, 4 Geertz, Clifford, 74

H Hegel, G.W.F., 9 Heryanto, Ariel, 21, 32–44 I Ideology, 7, 36, 50, 103, 105 Imaginaries conflict, 2–5, 11–16, 18, 22–23, 27–29, 42, 44–46, 51, 75, 79–82, 89, 104, 105, 113, 119–120, 122 social, 4–12, 19, 22, 41, 44, 75, 109, 119 Indonesia Budi Utomo, 28, 29 capitalism, 30 cinema, 42–44 Cold War, 79 democracy, 29, 33, 35, 44, 79, 81, 86 disappearance, 79, 81, 82, 87 Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), 31–34, 36, 37, 40, 84, 92 Islam, 29–38, 41–44 liberalism, 29 Maluku, 19–20 Marxism, 29, 30, 41 mass killings, 21, 37, 79, 80, 85 Muslims, 20, 29–36, 41–44 nationalism, 28–36, 42, 87 nationalists, 28, 29, 31–36 New Order, 33–44, 79, 81, 93 Pancasila, 36, 93 Sarekat Islam, 30, 31 Suharto, 21, 31–37, 40–42, 79, 82, 92, 93 Sukarno, 29, 32–36 Yogyakarta, 79, 84, 85 Ireland, Northern, 2, 19, 20, 76 Islam, 5

 INDEX 

L Liberal neoliberalism, 18 newspaper, Colombia, 61 Party, Colombia, 47, 48, 50–54 peace-building, 3, 4 social science, 4 M Mac Ginty, Roger, 3 Marx, Karl, 7–10 Marxism, 6 Memory, 18, 20–23, 53, 61, 84, 97 N Netherlands Indies, 28, 29, 31, 36

133

S Searle, John, 7 Selby, Jan, 3, 4 Stigma, 37, 82, 83, 99, 117 Survivors, 2, 21, 74–80, 82, 84, 91 T Taylor, Charles, 6–10 V Victim(s), 4, 14, 15, 17, 20, 21, 41, 53–55, 57, 61, 62, 69, 78, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 88, 92, 95–101, 105, 106, 108, 110, 112, 113 Victimhood, 14, 56 W Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7