From “Polymorphism of Violence” to the Complexities of Peace:

Towards an Integral Dignity in Colombia

Authors:

Andrés Argüello Parra

Affiliation: Independent researcher
Email: anarpa@ustabuca.edu.oco

Priscyll Anctil Avoine

Affiliation: Université du Québec à Montreal (Canadá).
Email: priscyll.anctil@gmail.com

Abstract:
Colombia is the only country in Latin America with an internal armed conflict that has lasted
for over fifty years. Violence, extremely diversified, has reached astonishing levels of
barbarity in different sectors of urban society but, above all, in rural areas. However, a new
horizon of hope is being felt in the country with the beginning of peace talks in 2012 in
Havana (Cuba). While these talks are receiving support, they are also being contested. This
chapter presents the relationship between the “polymorphism of violence" that the South
American nation has experienced and peacebuilding as an integral process of dignifying life,
beyond the strictly political dimensions. It interrogates how, from an integral human dignity
perspective and drawing upon emerging pedagogies, new scenarios of peace can be thought.

Keywords: Violence Polymorphism, Colombia, Integral Human Dignity, Peacebuilding

INTRODUCTION
Despite the fact that it is not the only country facing critical social problems related to

inequalities, Colombia is the only one in Latin America facing an internal armed conflict that

has lasted over fifty years. Violence, extremely diversified, has reached astonishing levels of

barbarity in different sectors of urban society but, above all, in rural areas. However, a new

horizon of hope is being felt in the country with the beginning of peace talks in 2012 in

Havana (Cuba). While receiving broad national and international support, dialogues with the

FARC-EP1 are also contested as they have monopolized the overall comprehension of peace

in the country while not addressing the root causes of violence complexity. In this regard, the

over-politization of the concept of peace within the social sphere in Colombia has tackled the

multiple possibilities of national reconciliation, reducing it to dichotomizing discourses.

There is an urgent need to consider anthropo-cultural perceptions on human dignity in order

to foster peacebuilding in every sphere of the society, not only on a macro level represented

by only two of the many actors of violence in the country. This has led to an over-exposure of

the word ‘peace’, depriving it from its meaning and contributing to a general

misunderstanding of the concept in the population, tackling the possibilities of constructing

nonviolence through a reencounter with human dignity and from below.

This chapter presents the relationship between the ‘polymorphism of violence’ that

the South American nation has experienced and peacebuilding as an integral process of

dignifying life, beyond the strictly political dimensions. In order to do so, the work is divided

as such: first, we briefly contextualize the current ‘peace situation’ amidst the non-addressed

polymorphism of violence that prevent grassroots peacebuilding; secondly, we present the

theoretical framework that guides our reflections about integral human dignity and its

possibilities to overcome polymorphism of violence from a decolonial perspective and,

finally; we explore one possible response to the deep rooted violence through intercultural

peace pedagogies.

POLYMORPHISM OF VIOLENCE AND DISTORTED PEACE

Most of the narratives on the Colombian conflict have been centered on the

antagonism left/right, guerrilla/paramilitaries, government/insurgencies or state/drug

trafficking. Violence has been therefore largely understood as political while a lot of authors

now agree on the fact that we assist on a depolitization of violence, where politic and non-

politic actors are acting in intertwinement and organized and non-organized violence are

equally cooperating to increase the already numerous forms of insecurities (Martin, 1997).

Recently, research from the University of Antioquia has been insisting on the discursive

elements that fuel violence in Colombia, underlying the dominant discourse of blaming the

FARC-EP (and other groups) of being responsible for high levels of violence, as the

“enemies” of the nation (Verdad Abierta, 2015).

As Ospina (2013) argues, violence has represented the whole narrative of the

Colombian nation; elites, music, literature have all been invisibilizing the people, reinforcing

the violence lived daily throughout the country. Violence has become an interpretative frame,

historically and collectively:

Levels of violence reached unprecedent proportions, corroding all aspects of social life and
threatening the integrity of the nation itself. If the crisis still had its roots in history, it seemed
to have taken on a life of its own, feeding on itself, enveloping society in a vicious circle of
violence with no end in sight. (Sánchez, Bergquist & Peñaranda, 2001, p.vii)
Therefore, we argue that violence in Colombia is not only part of the armed conflict that has

persisted for more than 60 years now; instead, the country has been and is currently marked

by the polymorphism of violence where violence is socially diffuse and is difficult to capture,

and therefore cannot be reduced to armed actors and must also include an international

perspective.
 Elites have undoubtedly played a serious role in the construction of a fragmented

society and high levels of violence. In some place of the country, powerful men – caudillos –

have been representing the state in itself, filling the gap left by the State which has had drastic

consequences on the livelihood of people, especially in the rural areas (Robinson, 2013). This

has largely favored a culture of smuggling and “assistentialism2”, where people expect

money and markets in exchange for votes, eroding the political capacities on a grassroots

level.

This fragmentation of society and the absence of a coherent national narrative to

foster reconciliation have further exacerbated what can be called “generalized violence”

following Pécaut (Martin, 1997). The frontiers between armed conflict violence,

institutionalized violence, social violence and cultural violence are blurred and almost

impossible to distinguish; the society lives within the oldest democratic state in Latin

American while also accepting high levels of normalized violence, where indifference and

evasion has become part of daily life (GMH, 2013). It is crucial to denote that most of the

violence Colombians are suffering is not related directly to the armed conflict. On the

contrary, it can be sustained that cultural, symbolic and everyday violence are the most

common. As it has been recently exposed, 4 out of 10 homicides committed in 2013 were

associated with personal fights and quarrels while each day, 15 people die out of intolerance

and it appears that battles and street fights are creating 5 times more deaths than the armed

conflict. Most of the experts agree on the weight of a machismo culture in fostering high level

of cultural violence, insisting that it is also reflected in domestic violence (El Tiempo, 2014).

As such, the over-politization and mercatilization of peace have conducted to a

disenchantment of the population with regards to the word; it seems that nobody wants to

hear about it anymore. This has to do with the imposition of peace from above and presenting

peace agreements as bilateral: it is peace by and for the elites, increasing the disconnection
with civil society even though some efforts have been made to make the peace processes

more horizontal. The peace paradigm is mistaken; it does not reach the global population,

creating a hierarchy of human beings (Fontan, 2012, p.50). Far from being an experience

from below, the conception of peace imposed by the State and leaders of the FARC-EP has

reinforced the idea of ‘inclusion’ of the rest of civil society within an existing vertical frame,

despite the historical and active implication of populations in peacebuilding. The complexity

of violence and its ‘fluidity’ between a wide range of actors must be accepted as to re-dignify

human beings in Colombia (Sánchez, Bergquist & Peñaranda, 2001, p.11).

It seems that, in Colombia, ‘peace’ is reduced nowadays to how the government could

‘sign it’ and how we can manage to ‘not be killed’. The concept of human dignity is

distorted; it tends to be reduced to endurance – el aguante – reinforcing a very comfortable

view where consciousness of humanity is negatively represented ‘avoiding high levels of

violence on a daily basis’. There is a necessity to reconceptualize this vision and propose an

integral human dignity in order to construct a nonviolent society beyond political ideologies.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: TOWARDS AN INTEGRAL HUMAN DIGNITY

This section aims at questioning the usual ‘light’ comprehension on human dignity; it

appears that ‘dignity’ has been overstated and misused in numerous social and judicial

spheres. We therefore want to consider a wider theoretical framework with regards to human

dignity. To do so, we address three important moments in the conceptualization of human

dignity from which we want to establish the link between the socio-historical dimension of

violence in the Colombian conflict and the possibility to construct a polymorphism of peace

drawing upon emerging pedagogies.

Human dignity has been a key philosophical category to understand why Ethics must

generally be accepted as a principle to live with others in community. In the past, “human
dignity” was established mainly as a metaphysical foundation while currently we need to

appreciate also “integrality” on the basis of emerging Ethics. This implies moving theoretical

paradigms towards new fields of knowledge and action.

The paradoxes of the stage of modernity related to “human dignity” begin with the

idea of main values passed down by ancient Greeks, Romans and, later, by scholastics (from

Christian religion) during the Middle Age. The starting point of Ethics, based on natural law,

manifests established visions of humanity, which could have pretentions of universal interest.

It is a philosophical stage especially devoted to understanding the ontological nature of

human being. Nevertheless, most of those concepts were thought merely from ontology, as

universally accepted by everyone, because there was a “pure concept” sustaining the

rationality around God, the State or the governor.

When Modernity arises adopting the legacy of the ancients, “human dignity” was

strongly linked to freedom, autonomy, self-government and justice, among other key ethical

values. Due to rationalism and post-Enlightenment, Western society traces its ethical

foundations to individuals as subjects able to make their own laws. In this regard, the subject

would not conduct his/her life under God's law or political law, but under the conviction that

there is no moral life subjected to external interests. Therefore, human beings, in order to be

dignified, must develop their own abilities to break politico-ethical dependencies; this means

to release themselves from the laws implemented by others.

One of the most remarkable philosophical trends to convey self-government

integrated to a social contract is the Kantian thought. According to Kant, it is not sufficient to

establish an autonomous law, but it is also necessary to obligate oneself to fulfill it (sense of

moral duty). Moreover, the nature of an autonomous law is a key point: it is not related to any
kind of “own law” according to individual features but laws that could become humankind

laws. That is why ethical law cannot be individual, but universal and generally extended.

Therefore, one of the most relevant philosophical values of Modern Ethics is the right

of being yourself. A person’s autonomy makes his/her worthy itself. According to Kant,

rational human beings should be treated as an end in themselves and never be used merely as

a resource to other purposes. So that moral freedom and autonomy are the base for

unalienable rights. Even law, as we mentioned before, must be subordinated under these

principles of Modern-Kantian human dignity.

Thus Kant thought that human dignity was a liberal issue involving different fields of

democracy. It is an ethical law affecting the social spheres. A political society is a sovereign

community integrated by free individuals attached to universal moral law as a social contract

(world citizenship). It represents the context for one of his most acknowledged political

writings, named Perpetual Peace, published in 1795. After exposing the liberal path to

establish a modern democratic peace theory, the key Kantian inference is that the worst thing

about war is that “it makes more evil people than it can take away”.

Nonetheless, according to current world wide context, human dignity shall not be

understood just as a category of political philosophy nor of the classical Ethics itself. For

instance, if we consider the “Ethics from the South”, which means not from main power

centers of globalization but from local emerging societies, we need to take into account not

just the modern reason and the logic argumentation, but decolonial subjective valuations as

well. This perspective implies to move the main rational paradigm based on anthropo-

centrism towards a new horizon that involves both human beings and cosmic entities. All of

them are not only objects of the rational discourse but interconnected life in movement, vital

thinking. It is therefore necessary to go beyond liberal and westernized vision of Ethics; we

need to take into account the growing impacts and specific approaches of “Global Ethics”

(Küng) or “Decolonizing Ethics” (Dussel) for the comprehension of violent settings.

On the one hand, according to Küng (2014, p.444), a new global trans-modern

paradigm is conveyed by new position about war and dismantling, gender relations, links

between economy and ecology, and religious peacebuilding. All of these fields are key

dimensions for a new civilizational project. That is why, polymorphism of violence demands

a polymorphism of peace; the latter should be understood beyond the modern paradigm and

on the basis of common ethical values and the vital complexity. In fact, “linking Ethics”

(ética vinculante in Spanish) is a basic agreement on values, criteria and common attitudes,

needed to understand democracy, human rights and rule of law in a global world (Küng,

2014, p.447). It is the level of binding values, irrevocable standards and interior

fundamental attitudes that the author mentions. As such, “positive peace” is not enough as a

determination of the State but rather as a way of life for every citizen, in his/her public and

private sphere, and of all life beings as a part of earth system.

Global Ethics contributes to establish both a responsible global citizenship and a

moral action into a specific society which preserves integral human dignity3. The starting

point is the emergency of a world Ethos. It means seeking for a fundamental ethos able to

preserve the common fate of humankind; that is the imperative of a global Ethics. Either

everybody gets saved or everybody will know the incommensurable desolation which

destroyed a lot of species in the past (Boff, 2001, p.58).

While ancient classical ethical pattern focused on human relations as a political and

religious treatise, current ethical perspectives must take into account values such as solidarity,

compassion and life care, besides of a wider perspective to integrate human beings in their

own differences with a new otherness: social borders, forests, species, seas and the planet as a
living whole. That is why human dignity should be understood currently as a planetary

dignity.

On the other hand, Enrique Dussel, a Hispano-American philosopher, has proposed a

decolonial emancipation Ethics. His proposal served as a theoretical framework to understand

the new challenges of social thinking. Emancipation Ethics begins from the social place

where ethical discourse is thought and actioned. In such a place there is a systematical role of

relations centered in the ideas of power, control and dominance. From that perspective,

exclusion is a particularly normalized condition up to the point that every social group is

affected by it, especially the most fragile ones. According to Dussel, nobody may consider an

Ethics without looking at the real poor situation as a symbol of any lack and misery in the

stereotyped ‘third world’.

The key point for a Latin-American philosophy – extended to others current emerging

philosophies – is to acknowledge that there is not just one ‘authorized’ center of knowledge,

often associated with European or North American settings, which could consider the other

ones as ‘second hand thoughts’, following lineal history pattern and its ideal of

universalization.

Therefore, Emancipation Ethics has a key political consequence. It is foremost a vital

critique against powerful systems that produces poverty and iniquity everywhere, specially,

in all those countries outside of Europe and North America. Some historical groups would

prefer to understand the human dignity just to preserve the establishment and its assurances.

That is why elites of war appeal to an ‘aseptic Ethics’ without affecting their interests and

conveniences. They want ‘the peace’ as an abstract idea but not dealing with the real causes

of the war. The Colombian conflict is an emblematic example of this ‘monopolization’ of

war/peace discourses; elites have been highly manipulating the conceptualization of peace,
preventing emerging forms of ethics. Emancipation Ethics do not accept such intended

treatment of social crisis rather than fighting to extend human rights as a historical practice

from local contexts to all over the world.

Again, it is a critique against the hegemony of Modern thought, the unquestioned

belief in rational purposes. Humankind, cultures, languages, races and all the planetary

diversity were understood mainly as a measurable thing. Established systems are considered

as a natural entity for everybody; thus, they can be imposed over peoples without regarding

their own conditions, heritages and cultural wealth. According to Boff, “it occurs through

political monotheism of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism” (2001, p.60). The act to

impose one rational perspective of the world over others is a significant cause of violence

despite that it can be done in the name of peace, political order and civilization among others.

Emancipation Ethics departs from outside, from the external sphere. Ethics will not be

universally extended as a global Ethics if it is not building its principles on social human

borders:

Ethics shall begin in the otherness; in the most radical other who are poor and excluded
people, blacks, indigenous, oppressed women, and all others discriminated by different
prejudices. This poor-other is much more than an economic category, it is an exceptional
anthropological value itself; they show their own face. (Boff, 2001, p.60)
As a partial conclusion, it is significant to point out that human dignity is a classical

concept developed over the time. It has remarkable insights from classical and modern

philosophy extended to contemporary social sciences useful to understand a wide range of

human phenomena. Nevertheless, it is important to notice that conceptual categories are built

as historical mediations. They are revisited from time to time according to the appearance of

new human challenges. It is the opportunity to acknowledge what the shortcomings are that

we are facing on the ground, with regard to peace and human dignity.
 Conflictual settings require thinking “from the other side”. In the case of Colombia or

any other country sharing its main features, ancient philosophical systems are not sufficient to

understand the “polymorphism of violence” or to build a peace culture. That is why integral

human dignity shall be understood as a systemic analytical concept involving ontological

legacy (from Ancients), political theory (from Modern) and historical emerging issues (from

current decolonial studies). The time has come to bridge the gap between theory and practice

and adapt the theoretical frameworks legacy to our real conditions and living challenges in

creating a new “social peace contract” from the State’s policies but also from individual and

collective ethical engagement.

EMERGING PEDAGOGIES AND INTEGRAL HUMAN DIGNITY

We sustain that integral human dignity is the enabling condition (condición

posibilitante) of the many ways to assume ethical and social commitments with regards to

peace and reconciliation. This approach expresses the transformation of a dominant model

that understands peacebuilding from a classical modern political perspective. As already

mentioned, this transformation does not imply the denial of the most representative

philosophical assumptions of political theory, but its staging within complex historical and

social realities that characterize the global world.

Thus, the integral human dignity demands a paradigm shift to integrate different

modes of being, knowing, thinking and experiencing the multiple forms of violence that

characterize the conditions in certain living realities. In that sense, the different mechanisms

that have historically led to the degeneration of human dignity in contexts dominated by

barbarism demand a holistic confrontation of the most varied dimensions that constitute its

existence. It requires an understanding of the causes of violence; the latter are not just

concepts but living experiences of subjects as real men and women have lived with multiple

forms of violence that suggest the necessity of this paradigm shift.

 This polymorphism of peace is structured around the need to build a culture based on

the negotiation of meanings to enable humanist pluralism and the reconstruction of vital and

social fabric. At this level, education from an intercultural and critical perspective plays a

leading role in redefining subjectivities and the commitment to an ethical project that

contributes to the construction of a counter- hegemonic narrative of the common concept of

peace, assumed as a normative, elitist and State-centered regulatory principle. Peace

pedagogies, while acknowledging a high sense of practical teaching methods, also require

thinking, designing and creating a set of actions and social mobilizations to make viable the

principles of global ethics as supporters of integral human dignity. The complexity of

violence in Colombia requires intercultural responses to foster integral human dignity and to

allow newer and wider conceptions of peace.

Intercultural peace pedagogies search for new grounds to learn how to “live” and deal

with conflicts; it is about how we learn to identify the complexity of conflicts and how we

can transform conflicts towards other forms of relations, seeking justice and reconciliation.

Intercultural peace pedagogies are about learning to differentiate between conflict and

violence and understanding how ethics from below can foster community building (Cascón

Soriano, 2001, p.5-6).

In that sense, community involvement is essential to “decolonize” peace and

contribute to the constant training of an active civil society; not from an elitist perspective,

but from a global one. It is therefore crucial to consider our global intertwinement to tackle

polymorphism of violence, but also to consider the intercultural facet of constructing peace: a

necessary dialogue between the different forms of knowledge should be preconize to truly

redefine human dignity in violent contexts. At the heart of intercultural pedagogies are the

principles of recognition of diversity and co-construction of knowledge within spheres of

tangible conviviality, where the self enters in relation with the other, delegitimizing
segregation or other types of discrimination (Aguado, 1991). Intercultural peace pedagogies

are practically looking for social spaces that promote constant dialogue around diversity,

situated knowledge and cultural encounters which would facilitate the construction of a

national narrative around peace rather than violence. As argued by Estermann (2006),

interculturality seeks to transcend the logics of Modernity and foster a fair dialogue between

subjects who understand the world differently, constructing a common reality of conviviality,

guided by principles of interexistence.

Intercultural and critical pedagogies are also political acts, as they allow a

reconfiguration of society, its structures and intrinsic forms of violence; it opens the path to

tackling racism, political violence based upon ideologies, dehumanizing conducts, etc.

(Walsh, 2009). It is about constructing a more holistic vision on education, understanding the

need to involve social organizations as well as local communities in the edification of a new

ethical project that would not reproduce the hegemonic models of doing politics without

people. Intercultural peace pedagogies are about alterity and relationality. Through the

building of a vital encounter and meaning negotiation, it is a constant learning of the reality

of the other; a biographical mediation that dignifies the other and the living environment.

If the main challenge is to move towards other forms of being, then emerging

pedagogies are a social key to comprehend rationalities from the margins. Contrary to liberal

perspectives, emerging pedagogies are not an end in themselves, but a radical and nonviolent

way of building a new historical order from the grassroots levels. That is why we propose to

consider intercultural critical pedagogies, ‘humanist-complex’ pedagogies and other forms of

emerging systems of thought as tools to foster the polymorphism of peace in opposition to the

current polymorphism of violence. These approaches to building new systems of relating to

others remind us the social function and the ethical assumption of education, especially in

violent settings. Education should be understood beyond classrooms as its social task
involves the engagement of civil society and institutions; it implies a multidimensional action

to guide the construction of emerging rationalities and realities to contribute to the

transformation of historical processes.

From these emerging perspectives, de-mercantilizing, de-constructing and de-

colonizing peace:

[…] requires a holistic and systemic approach to peace, to the processes that represent
it and ethics and values enshrined in it. [ ... ] It calls for mitigating localized social
fabric and values of peace, and it also questions the imposed idea of change at all
costs, usually that of a peaceful process. (Fontan, 2012, p.63)
Tackling polymorphism of violence implies questioning the very conceptualization of human

dignity and comprehending violence beyond the strictly political actions impulse from above.

In the Colombian context, it means that communities must move towards the construct of an

ethics that guarantees their visions on human dignity; decolonizing peace entails grassroots

initiatives that first identify the multiple forms of violence lived daily and second, proposing

their own conceptions of peace(s) as to reshape and reconfigure social ties.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
“Perhaps laughter and the fiesta are not signs of superficiality, but rather serve to
disguise a tragic awareness of our complex reality.” (Restrepo, 2004, p.184)
The current situation in Colombia, and in global politics, is linked to a major

difficulty: giving sense to violence, rendering it intelligible as commented by Martin (1997).

Based on a common expectation of non-repetition of violent acts, giving sense to violence

implies understanding how we can experience our self in other manners, both personally and

collectively.

The acceptation of polymorphism of violence as a normal situation in the country

coupled with the monopolization of peace discourse by elites have also contributed to the

disenchantment of the population with regards to the possibility of ending or diminishing

violence. Polymorphism of violence can be overcome; it is by no means an impossible task

and currently, a lot of peace actions to re-dignify human beings in Colombia are taking place

throughout the country. In this chapter, we argued that the first step towards this task is the

acceptance that violence is complex, omnipresent and not only political, demonstrating that

the current conceptualization of peace is still promoting a State-centered hegemonic pattern

to follow while not addressing root causes of violence and its multiple forms.

Social polarization has undermined solidarity (GHM, 2013, p.14) and, with it, the

possibility of considering human dignity holistically. We proposed to consider ethics from

the global South to rethink peace from the values of solidarity, compassion and care in order

to comprehend violent settings as the Colombian armed and social conflict, but also to

foment other conceptions of peace. These conceptions of peace must go beyond the Modern

thoughts on politics and westernized visions of ethics as to foster planetary integral human

dignity. The possible responses with this regard lies on emerging pedagogies as a powerful

strategy to unlock violent social structures.

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ENDNOTES
1
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia – People’s Army).
2
In Spanish, “asistencialismo” refer to the successive tentative to tackle violence, inequalities and poverty with
providing immediate solutions without thinking in the long-term, favoring a culture of dependence within the
population. The most common example is the providing of food to rural population by the government, political
candidates or local and international NGOs. This has been highly criticized for reducing the agency of local
populations in peacebuilding and social transformation.
3
Küng has clarified (2014, p. 451) that Global Ethics is related to concept of Ethos as the fundamental attitude
and moral conviction of each person rather than Ethics is a conceptual system about attitudes, values and moral
human laws. Ethics is more than mere law and right.