The Popular Appeal of Human Rights Activism: Reimagining Transitional Justice as a Political Struggle

Abstract

How do human rights activists imagine transitional justice amid sociopolitical conflicts that surface after peace agreements? Since its inception in the 2016 peace accords, Colombia's renewed endeavor to come to terms with its violent past has been overshadowed by massive protests and political polarization. In this article, I argue that populism, defined as a grid of intelligibility to make sense of frustrated demands and engage in politics, can help us understand the protest discourses of human rights defenders on transitional justice as they emerge from experiences with political marginalization and broken state promises. Based on interviews during six months of fieldwork in different conflict-affected regions, I contend that human rights defenders imagine transitional justice in terms of a larger political struggle that exceeds justice for past atrocities and can be described through three tropes that both resound with and challenge populism debates: truth as the frontier of political confrontation with right-wing elites, the “rights-defending victim” as a form of popular subjectivity and political underdog, and liberal overhaul of corrupted democratic institutions. Conceptually, my reconstruction of activist discourses serves a two-fold purpose: it bridges debates on transitional justice and contentious politics, and constructively challenges the ostensible incompatibility of human rights and populism.

Comment les militants des droits de l'homme imaginent-ils la justice transitionnelle au cœur des conflits socio-politiques qui émergent après des accords de paix? Depuis son apparition dans les accords de paix de 2016, l'effort renouvelé de la Colombie à faire face à son passé violent a été assombri par des manifestations massives et une polarisation politique. Dans cet article, je soutiens que le populisme, défini comme une grille d'intelligibilité permettant de donner un sens aux demandes frustrées et de s'engager en politique, peut nous aider à comprendre les discours de protestation des défenseurs des droits de l'homme sur la justice transitionnelle, car ils émergent d'expériences de marginalisation politique et de promesses d’État non tenues. Je me base sur des entretiens menés pendant six mois de travail de terrain dans différentes régions affectées par des conflits et je soutiens que les défenseurs des droits de l'homme imaginent la justice transitionnelle en termes de lutte politique plus large qui dépasse la justice pour les atrocités passées et peut être décrite par trois tropes qui résonnent avec les débats sur le populisme et les défient: la vérité en tant que frontière de la confrontation politique avec les élites de droite, la « victime défendant ses droits » en tant que forme de subjectivité politique et de perdante politique, et la refonte libérale des institutions démocratiques corrompues. D'un point de vue conceptuel, ma reconstitution des discours des militants sert un objectif en deux volets: elle établit une passerelle entre les débats sur la justice transitionnelle et les politiques litigieuses, et elle remet en question de manière constructive l'incompatibilité apparente entre les droits de l'homme et le populisme.

¿Cómo imaginan los activistas de derechos humanos la justicia transicional entre los conflictos sociopolíticos que surgen luego de los acuerdos de paz? Desde sus inicios en los acuerdos de paz en 2016, el empeño renovado de Colombia para asimilar su pasado violento ha sido opacado por las protestas masivas y la polarización política. En el presente artículo, sostengo que el populismo (definido como una red de inteligibilidad para que demandas frustradas cobren sentido y para participar en la política) puede ayudarnos a entender los discursos de protesta por parte de defensores de los derechos humanos sobre la justicia transicional, ya que surgen de experiencias con marginalización política y promesas estatales rotas. Con base en un trabajo de campo de seis meses con entrevistas en diferentes regiones afectadas por el conflicto, puedo afirmar que los defensores de los derechos humanos piensan en la justicia transicional en términos de una lucha política más grande que excede la justicia de atrocidades del pasado y que se puede describir mediante tres tropos que resuenan con los debates populistas al mismo tiempo que los desafían: la verdad como la frontera de la confrontación política con élites de derecha; la «víctima defensora de derechos» como una forma de subjetividad popular y desamparado político; la renovación liberal de las instituciones democráticas corruptas. Teóricamente, mi reconstrucción de los discursos activistas cumple con un objetivo doble: conciliar los debates sobre justicia transicional y política contenciosa, y desafiar de forma constructiva la incompatibilidad evidente de los derechos humanos y el populismo.

Introduction

How do human rights activists imagine transitional justice (TJ) amid sociopolitical conflicts that surface after peace agreements? Most contemporary peace accords contain TJ measures with the overall ambition to unlock a process of national reconciliation. However, the current Colombian peace process tragically shows, just as many other Latin American contexts where armed conflict came to an end (Pearce and Perea 2019), that post-accord periods tend to be shaped by resurging violence and societal polarization instead of healing.

Back in 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army (FARC-EP) signed an internationally applauded peace agreement that not only ended the armed conflict with the largest guerrilla group but also addressed structural injustices that have fuelled ravaging violence in many of the country's regions. Yet, the hoped-for dawn of reconciliation in Colombia has been forestalled by entrenched political divisions, social uproar, and atrocities against activists and former combatants that engender frustrations and new grievances. A subject of fierce political contention has been the so-called Integral System of truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition,¹ a comprehensive TJ regime that the peace accords designed as a historical promise to come to terms with the violent past (De Gamboa Tapias and Díaz Pabón 2018). Right-wing elites orchestrated an aggressive smear campaign against TJ provisions in order to delegitimize the peace agreement, which, eventually, was rejected in the 2016 referendum (Gomez-Suarez 2016). Less than two years into a conflictual implementation process of slightly revised peace accords, the election of President Ivan Duque in 2018, candidate of the political right who openly campaigned against the peace accords, left victims in a limbo of uncertainty about the Integral System and the larger peace agenda, instigating nationwide protests of human rights defenders (HRDs).

While aggressive campaigning, polarizing social mobilization, and deteriorating public communication pose severe analytical and normative challenges to TJ models, political observers have qualified these developments as rising populism in post-accord Colombia.² Ensuing research has predominantly debated the extent to which the campaigns against the peace accords and the rhetoric of Duque's administration continue populist legacies of former hard-line president and quasi-mythical figure of the political right, Álvaro Uribe Velez (e.g., Coronado 2019; Díaz Pabón 2020; also López de la Roche 2015). Yet, the political opposition is also described as mobilizing on themes prominent in populism literature, such as mistrust in elites and disenchantment with political institutions.³

The application of populism, which recently gained traction as an interpretative frame for global politics (Moffit 2016; Hadiz and Chryssogelos 2017; Destradi and Plagemann 2019), to struggles over justice in the aftermath of armed conflict bears fundamental challenges: populism remains a fuzzy concept that is contested by various research approaches. Perhaps more acute is the normative baggage of the debate, in which populism oftentimes appears as a mere “combat concept” (Pía Lara 2019) for delegitimizing political parties, movements, or regimes as being at odds with a liberal–pluralist ethos.

Defining populism as a discourse–analytical term, however, I make the, at first glance, perhaps unsettling argument that it can indeed help us gain a more complete picture of TJ imaginaries amid protests and social–political conflicts that shape post-accord contexts. More precisely, I take populism as a grid of intelligibility to make sense of frustrated demands and engage in politics, which serves to canvass how HRDs connect to people's grievances and articulate TJ as a political struggle. This struggle exceeds individual requests for justice about past atrocities and the goal of reconciliation, laying claims for radical political change that triggers antagonistic conflicts over the political present.

Three tropes render grids of intelligibility populist: Manichean vision of society, the marginalization of popular will, and the radical critique of the political order. Presenting insights from interviews with forty-seven HRDs during six months of fieldwork, I show that these tropes figure in the imaginary of TJ as a political struggle against right-wing elites that have infested debates with “fake news” campaigns; on behalf of victims, which are not broached as passive receivers of justice but a form of popular subjectivity that demands inclusion into the polity; and for a liberal–democratic overhaul of the corrupted political system. Patently, I do not treat “populism” as a normative stigma nor HRDs as populists. Alternatively, populism affords an analytical avenue to the “other side” of human rights activist discourses that often remains in the shadows of deliberation but surfaces in popular protests when the historical promise for justice seems politically deferred.

Studying HRDs’ discourses on TJ through the analytical lens of populism makes two important contributions to the current debates on global politics. First, it casts a different perspective on the expanding literature on TJ, which, in the case of the integral system, has so far focused mainly on sociolegal (Borda and Gutiérrez 2018), reconciliatory (Oettler and Rettberg 2019), or institutional–bureaucratic effects (Krystalli 2019). The concept of populism allows me to connect the debates on TJ and contentious politics by contextualizing demands for truth and justice in broader societal grievances and political confrontations after war ends.

Second, my empirically grounded analysis constructively challenges the tacit scholarly consensus on the a priori incompatibility of human rights and populism (Neuman 2020), which is based predominantly on cases of authoritarian politicians and (Western) right-wing movements obfuscating more ambiguous historical lessons about democratization and social movements in Latin America. I illustrate that populist tropes can also be found in the discourses of HRDs, as a political movement and actor of (inter-)national politics that advocates rights-based democratization, when political institutions seem to marginalize demands for justice. I repudiate dichotomist readings of human rights and populism, where the former represents the fallen ideal of the liberal script that came globally under pressure from the oppressive majoritarian spirit of the latter. Instead, we can learn with Colombian HRDs about political communication in popular struggles for justice, which counters prominent criticism on the “de-politicized” nature of human rights activism (cf. Moyn 2010).

The article proceeds as follows: First, I contextualize the discourse of HRDs on TJ in historical experiences with state abandonment, political conflicts, and broken promises, which I describe as the “present absence” of justice. I then briefly discuss why populism could be a suitable entry to study human rights activist discourses that originate from this “present absence” and why dominant current literature would discard this analytical option. I move on to develop my discourse–analytical take on populism in view of Colombian human rights activism. On this basis, I reconstruct HRDs’ discourses through three tropes that illustrate how the imaginary of TJ embodies the script of a popular struggle.

The “Present Absence” of Transitional Justice in Colombia

Discourses on TJ in Colombia must be understood against the backdrop of experiences with state abandonment, political conflicts, and broken promises. I learned perhaps most clearly about the absence of state-orchestrated justice from the lived realities of many survivors of violence during my fieldwork in the heavily conflict-affected municipality of El Tarra.⁴ In July 2019, I observed the “peace tribunal,” an activist initiative to stage vernacular ideas of justice in the Colombian–Venezuelan border region of Catatumbo. When I asked a community leader about his expectations on the integral system, he answered, “what transitional justice?,” paused, and continued with a smile, “this is a Bogotá thing.” His answer invokes a common reference to the political capital as a place of historical promises for peace and justice that is detached from people's experiences with protracted violence and the lack of public infrastructure in many regions such as Catatumbo.

As research emphasizes (Serje 2005; Vera Luego 2015), long-standing violence in Colombia cannot be understood in terms of military confrontations with guerrilla groups, or any other non-state armed actor, alone, but must be acknowledged as rooted in structural injustices, oppression, and marginalization in the mostly rural regions that form the periphery of centralized state power. Accordingly, atrocities against community leaders, unionists, or members of the political opposition in these regions have not abated, and continue to go unpunished, despite Colombia's multiple peace processes in the last four decades.

Nevertheless, the most recent peace agreement, signed by the government under the then President Santos and the FARC-EP almost three years before the “peace tribunal,” raised hopes throughout Colombia. Although Santos served as Minister of Defence in the preceding administration of Álvaro Uribe, the peace negotiations of his government renounced Uribe's “Democratic Security Policy,” which had utilized the rhetoric of counterterrorism to negate the existence of any internal armed conflict and its victims, persecute guerrilla groups and political opposition alike, and militarize the country (Echavarría 2010). The 2016 peace accords, resulting from a process that international observers praise as participatory (Herbholzheimer 2016), explicitly address structural injustices and conceptualize a system of TJ institutions to unearth truth about, and redress, the panorama of violence in Colombia's past. In its efforts, the Integral System, composed of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) and extra-judicial institutions such as the Commission for the Clarification of Truth (CEV), can build on lessons from previous, and still ongoing, TJ measures put in place by the Justice and Peace legislation or the 2011 Victim's Law (De Gamboa Tapias and Díaz Pabón 2018).

HRDs, who tirelessly advocated the peace agreement in general and the Integral System in particular, have seen themselves confronted with the massive political mobilization against the peace accords, orchestrated by the political right under the banner of the former President Uribe (Gomez-Suarez 2016). In the accounts of Colombian HRDs, “the right,” “ultra-right,” or, indeed, “Uribisim” signifies a locus of power, inhabited by all those who benefitted from the war politics of Uribe's party, the Democratic Centre (CD), and felt betrayed by the peace that Santos had negotiated. The negative peace referendum and, ultimately, the 2018 presidential election of the CD's candidate, Ivan Duque, represented a turning point toward what Ana and Ricardo⁵—first hour human rights activists of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CPDH) since the 1970s—summarize as a “peace of hatred” that only bears the “justice of victors.”

The strategy of Duque's government to object the implementation of the Integral System's central provisions,⁶ repress political protest, and deny systematic political violence against activists and former combatants (Programa Somos Defensores 2020) has, in the eyes of many HRDs, politically deferred the promise of victim-centered TJ given in 2016. Albeit most institutions of the Integral System were established in 2019, my interlocutors describe the well-intended work of the commissioners as thwarted by a lack of political support, remilitarization of many regions, and malicious political discourses. For Ana and Ricardo, Duque's election heralded the resurrection of Uribe's war ideology, centered around defeating and incarcerating the “terrorist guerrilla,” while sparing “military heroes” and pursuing the violent exploitation of resource-rich regions that counter-insurgency rhetoric had helped to cover up. Similarly, Pedro,⁷ a spokesperson of the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE), explains the little progress on the peace agreement's promises for justice and reconciliation mainly with the governmental “discourse of hate. And with hate there is no guarantee of non-repetition; quite the contrary, the discourse of hate is making us walk towards reproducing war.”

It is too early and, certainly, beyond the scope of this article to judge upon the highly complex and multilayered system of TJ measures in Colombia; to understand the discourses around TJ, however, it is important to acknowledge the frustrations of many survivors of violence that unfold in a tension between presence and absence, a tension that Edkins (2011) describes in cases of enforced disappearances. The government discourses and institutional façade of TJ make the denied access to justice more palpable for many survivors, who feel that their demands are not heard, being at once present promise yet also record of absent reality. Instead of being just “not there,” the absence of TJ is present in the dashed hopes that haunt those who continue to suffer from violence, stigmatization, and marginalization in post-accord Colombia. Let me illustrate this insight with a quote from a focus group discussion⁸ with HRDs working on victims’ rights in the conflict-afflicted city of Barrancabermeja:

The [Integral System] practically gave an impulse to the social movement of victim organizations. This small window that opened […] makes it possible to contribute to the cause of victims, but today […] there is a crusade of the government […]. And, thus, the window that was created for the movement of victims is put on hold, generating […] an act of re-victimization with regards to the expectations of the victims to access [justice].

My focus is not on the politics and implementation gaps that cause frustrations (see Sanchez and Rudling 2019) nor on the revictimizing repercussions of the ‘present absence’ of justice for historically disadvantaged communities to which the quote alludes to; rather, I study the discursive effects. I read this ‘presence of an absence’ as a discourse-theoretical condition, which Derrida has coined as ‘hauntological’ (Derrida 1994, 161): a constitutive lack that animates HRDs’ discourses to reimagine TJ, other than governmental, donor, or most scholarly discourses, as a political struggle to realize the deferred promise of justice.

Throughout the last decades, HRDs have sustained popular protests, often bloodily repressed, to demand social justice and break the culture of impunity for political violence (Cruz Rodríguez 2015; van Isschot 2015). In reaction to the onslaught on the 2016 peace accords, HRDs largely rallied behind the Integral System and mobilized against the Duque government, for example, in the civil strikes of 2019.⁹ Yet, it has been the publicly less-visible “peace tribunal” in El Tarra that made me understand that political antagonisms are irreducible from TJ discourses in Colombia: hundreds of activists—many of them travelling days from other conflict-ridden regions—aligned to air their frustrations and express mutual solidarity in what they perceive as being mostly a political conflict with the country's war-mongering elites, which has not ended but intensified with peace seemingly in reach.

“We the People”: Populism and Human Rights

Studying the discourses of HRDs as they emerge from the “present absence” of TJ amid socio-political conflicts requires an opening of scholarly perspectives toward debates on protest and public polarization. Traditionally, scholarship has discussed popular mobilization against elites and exclusive political systems in Latin America under the label of populism (Roberts 2014; Giraldo Ramírez 2018). The meaning of populism is inherently contested by different approaches, but ideational literature has gained enormous traction in the booming scholarship of recent years precisely for defining populism not as a type of leadership or political organization but as a malleable mode of political communication (Hawkins et al. 2018).

From an ideational perspective, populist communication portrays society as a divided social space, based on a Manichean distinction that defines the “people” as both an ethical positioning of “the good” and the political identity of the majority, which is allegedly deprived of political sovereignty. “The elite” is then the name of the evil counterpart, the political identity of the corrupt and fraudulent whose rule deprives the people of self-determination. In this light, populism is about the volonté générale, which—in line with Rousseau's thinking—is not the aggregate of all individual interests but the abstraction of a general will that speaks in the name of the people (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2018). Ideational scholars cohere to the analytical insight that populism does not appear purely but is always articulated with “thicker” host ideologies—for example, the “nativism” of the European extreme right—which, in turn, define what counts as “the people,” popular will, or “the elite” (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017, 532).

Discussing human rights activism in terms of populism seems at first perhaps odd, given the normative stigmatization in current debates; yet, it is not far-fetched, especially when we contextualize human rights in contentious politics, as seems pertinent in the case of sociopolitical conflicts around TJ in Colombia. In this vein, Rancière (1992) suggests that the politics of human rights unfold not through deliberation within a given political community, but when outcasts stage dissensus, contest exclusion, and rupture the political order that had denied them a voice. Contestations over human rights are, for him, at the core of politics as emancipation, when the idea of “human” in human rights is mobilized to demand equality under unequal conditions (Rancière 1992; also Schaap 2011).

In my view, Rancière's influential writings describe the politics of human rights in terms that are similar to the discussions about the corrective or restorative function of populism in democracies (cf. Arditi 2005). Henderson (2020), for instance, points at the democratic tension of an impossible unified and enduring identity of “the people” and the simultaneous necessity to represent the people as the source of legitimate power. This tension animates an incessant democratic debate about who is represented as “the people.” While democratic politics is, in her understanding, essentially about speaking for, and thus unifying, “the people,” populism is a discursive means by which groups can dispute their exclusion from representation in the polity (Henderson 2020, 125–26). Her argument can be illustrated with the historical legacy of populist leaders in Latin America, from Peron in Argentina to the rise of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Colombia, who turned stigmas of societal outsiders—like “the poor” or racialized communities—into virtues of “the people” and mobilized their electorates to break the exclusionist rule of oligarchic power cliques (De la Torre 2017, 196–98).

Populism as a mode of political communication represents a promising avenue to unpack the contentious politics of human rights. Ideational turns in populism literature seem to offer an analytical entry to study how Colombian HRDs mobilize grievances and frustrations in the political struggle for TJ. However, this analytical option is to be discarded if we follow predominant scholarship that largely agrees on the a priori conceptual incompatibility of populism and human rights (Neuman 2020). According to the influential definitions of Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017, 7–8), the Manichean take on society opposes the pluralist ideal of compromise. Potentially corrective democratic functions of populism are, therefore, seen as outweighed by the perils of summoning a somewhat obscure “will of the people,” which is prone to silence dissent, disrupt the liberal–democratic ideal of deliberation, and violate constitutional constraints on majority rule (Müller 2016).

Debates on the international politics of human rights have largely echoed the criticism of the anti-pluralist and illiberal thrust of populist discourses (Alston 2017). For Donders (2020), empirical evidence suggests that populist parties and movements violate the universal spirit of human rights by advocating a highly selective and discriminatory application of rights in favor of a fictive native and culturally homogenous “people.” This corresponds with the view of the executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Kenneth M. Roth, who argues that populists “treat rights as an impediment to their conception of the majority will” and, thus, portray “rights as protecting only the terrorist suspect or the asylum seeker at the expense of the safety, economic welfare, and cultural preferences of the presumed majority.”¹⁰

What these debates suggest is that human rights are antipode, or eventually antidote, to populism but surely not the hosting ideology. Populism tends to be associated with an authoritarian leadership that exploits grievances and feelings of insecurity, based on recent cases of nationalist and xenophobic politics in Europe and the United States (cf. Homolar and Löfflmann 2021); human rights, on the other side, are framed as apolitical, liberal–institutional limits to dangerous politics on behalf of “the people” (Neuman 2020). This debate mainstream, however, obscures all those cases, specifically in Latin America, where pluralist ideals and political rights themselves are at the heart of struggles for popular sovereignty against elites in formally democratic yet illiberal political orders. In the next section, I conceptually reinvigorate populism as a discourse–analytical term of contentious politics, which, as I illustrate empirically, raises relevant questions about Colombian human rights activism.

Popular Appeal in Human Rights Discourses

I approach populism as a grid of intelligibility that provides political meaning to frustrated demands and orders them in a broad popular front against the political order. The implied shift in defining populism, from a specific content toward the mere discursive form of imagining and articulating any content, is often associated with the philosophy of Ernesto Laclau, who, as a keen observer of Latin American politics, has submitted that there is nothing intrinsic to populism that would define it as “anti-rights” or anti-liberal (Laclau 2005a, 171).

In his influential work, Laclau juxtaposes institutionalist and populist discourses as the two extreme ideal types of articulating demands: In the former, social demands are directed to and met by the institutions of the political order, whereas the latter transforms frustrated demands on the grounds of their common marginalization into “fighting demands” raised against the political order in divisive conflicts (Laclau 2005b, 38, 45–46). For Laclau, institutionalist and populist discourses are ideal types because neither could ever manifest purely in society. Hence, he proposes understanding populism rather as a certain logic of articulation—the “logic of equivalence” that unites unfulfilled demands behind a common signifier of popular will—which always exists in a politically balanced tension with its opposite, “the logic of difference,” emphasizing the particularity of individual demands (Laclau 2005a, 76–77). What Laclau calls an ontological theorization of populism as a logic or mode of articulating demands—in difference to definitions that start with certain “ontic,” or ideological, content—radicalizes ideational positions and fashions populism as the discursive blueprint of contentious politics and direct opposite of the deliberative ideal of politics.

What we can learn from Laclau's abstract theorization is not to ask whether HRDs, or their agenda, are populist per se but how populist articulations figure in their discourses. This line of questioning sheds light on how HRDs contextualize the grievances and frustrations of many survivors of violence in the popular opposition against political elites that gained momentum in post-accord Colombia. As a discursive–analytical concept, populism reveals how the imaginary of justice after the end of armed conflict is, for HRDs, inextricably linked with larger issues of democratic failure, political marginalization, and societal inequality—issues that, as some argue (e.g., Vergara 2020), are historically at the core of populist politics and that TJ literature with a focus on reconciliation tends to blind out. I speak of a grid of intelligibility, instead of logic or mode, to stress the ontological dimension of populist articulations that, according to Laclau, afford comprehensive political explanations for people's grievances and positionality, or indeed subjectivity, in a world that seems marked by societal division and conflict (see Laclau 2005b, 33).

Based on Laclau's theory, I would argue that three tropes together essentially define populist grids of intelligibility: the construction of a political frontier between those who embody political power and an ostracized political underdog, the interpellation of “the people” as a popular subjectivity that resists power, and a radical critique of the political order. In what follows, I discuss these tropes more in detail and outline how they help us to trace popular appeal in HRD discourses, that is, the construction of an imaginary of TJ as a political struggle. Together with brief reflections on my methods, this prepares the analytical backdrop against which analysis unfolds in the next section.

Political Frontier

Laclau's writings start from the assumption that discourses take different political forms depending on the type of logic that dominates the articulation of demands (Laclau 2005b, 33). Consistent with this tenet, recent ethnographic studies have traced the origins of human rights in Colombia, not in the deliberation of democratic institutions but in the political protest of persecuted activists in the 1970s and 1980s (see Tate 2007; Gill 2016). Socialized in the “militant left,” activists began to adopt human rights as a language of contention to oppose what they perceived as a de facto dictatorship, where elites abused state of siege powers to repress opposition and subvert formal democratic institutions (Tate 2007, 104).

Populist grids of intelligibility are forged in these political struggles, when protestors integrate their hitherto marginalized demands into an “equivalential chain,” in which individual demands not only retain their particularity—for example, the demand to access justice institutions or to learn the truth about past violence—but also share the negative dimension that they remain unheard (Laclau 2005b, 37). Insofar as institutional avenues to satisfy demands within the political order seem foreclosed, populist grids of intelligibility provide the imaginary of a new political totality, that is, a just society centered around certain elevated key demands; yet, this imaginary, according to Laclau, always requires the construction of an enemy who is the reason for rejection and marginalization (Laclau 2005a, 85–86). Therefore, the articulation of an equivalential chain, as the bedrock of populism, inevitably creates a “populist rupture,” the political frontier dividing the social space into two camps: the “political system” versus an upcoming political underdog that embodies popular will (Laclau 2005a, 86–87).

“Political frontier,” as the first trope, gears my analysis toward how HRDs relate frustrations with the “present absence” of TJ to the power of political cliques, who block rather than comply with the demand for truth. By elaborating on truth as the key signifier in an antagonizing discourse, I expound how historical political conflicts resurface in the HRDs’ imaginary of TJ.

Popular Subjectivity

Laclau's writings coalesce around the post-structuralist notion that discourses constitute the subjectivity of agents (Laclau 2005a, 68). Tapping on this insight, TJ literature has convincingly demonstrated that who counts as “victim” or “perpetrator” of atrocities is not prior to but ultimately the product of different political discourses surrounding the governance of justice (Cronin-Furman and Krystalli 2020; Gray, Stern, and Dolan 2020). I take populism to contribute a novel perspective, because it allows me to discuss how HRDs interpellate victims as a political subject, not in legalistic, bureaucratic, or restorative terms, but as a representation of the marginalized “people.” In other words, I show how HRDs render the victims’ fight for political recognition a metonymy for the political struggle of the oppressed Colombian people for a new political country.

Populist grids of intelligibility bestow subjectivity on those who do not find representation within the political order, by aggregating their heterogenous demands and converting them into the expression of a singular, popular subject, a political underdog who opposes the “state of affairs” (Laclau 2005b, 37, 47–48). For Laclau, the discursive construction of a popular subject depends on the articulation of a popular demand that transcends the individual ones, forges a common bond, and, thus, becomes the signifier of “popular will,” in which marginalized identities can recognize each other as political community (Laclau 2005a, 74, 82, 86–87). Yet, symbolizing diverse identities in a single protest camp comes, so he argues, at the expense of divesting any particular meaning of popular demands to the extent that almost all there is left is the joint struggle against the political order (Laclau 2005b, 40). We can understand the popular subject as a reverse mirror revealing that “the people,” in the name of which democratic political orders are constructed, is not a universal signifier, let alone the sum of all social relations, but remains always a particular identity that allegedly represents the totality of society (see Laclau 2005a, 94).

The second trope, “popular subjectivity,” alludes to how HRDs both doubt the state's commitment to recognize victims and contextualize victim's agency in the mobilization against the political order, which had facilitated the violence against them and subsequently marginalized their suffering. This allows me to draw attention to a key tension in the TJ imaginary of HRDs, between supporting individual requests of victims to the Integral System and sustaining a broader political struggle to resent state tokenism and bring justice for the “Colombian people.”

The Locus of Power and Horizon of Popular Struggles

Following a de-constructivist understanding of discourses as unstable and elusive attempts to represent social reality, Laclau argues that “populist ruptures” are nothing essential or time invariant. Instead, he invites us to understand “people” and “power” as placeholders for historically contingent, antagonistic constructions (Laclau 2005b, 39): the former concerns the Self that speaks on behalf of a political community, signified for example as “workers,” “nation,” or, indeed, “victims,” whereas the latter can refer to, for example, “the regime” or “oligarchy” as the locus of power and impediment to the political constitution of the Self that cannot be legitimately part of the community (Laclau 2005a, 87).

Laclau suggests that his frontier opens a chasm between radical political alternatives within the social space, involving a choice about the future shape of society (Laclau 2005b, 47). This antagonistic chasm crystallizes around popular demands, which, for Laclau, can be interrogated for their “tendentially empty” and “floating” dimension. “Tendentially empty” means that the demand of a particular group becomes both the more universal symbolic horizon of popular resistance and the signifier that renders oppressive power and exclusion visible (Laclau 2005a, 97). By “floating,” Laclau describes that these demands are not exclusive to popular struggles but can be co-opted by rival political discourses, which eventually renders the meaning of these demands ambiguous, or even causes the political struggle for alternatives to die down (Laclau 2005a, 130–33).

The extent to which Colombian human rights activism has advocated political alternatives is disputed in recent studies. Some argue that HRDs are the natural heirs of workers and campesino organizations that mobilized popular opposition in the early twentieth century (e.g., van Isschot 2015), whereas others associate the shift toward human rights with a de-politicization of activism (e.g., Gill 2016). Under “radical critique,” the third trope, I explore how HRDs tie their imaginary of TJ to a political vision that challenges the connection between political power and violence as the condition of and obscured by the illiberal order administering Colombia's post-accord transition.

Notes on Material and Methods

I have studied the discourses of HRDs on TJ primarily through in-depth interviews, augmented by field notes from personal observations and the analysis of key activist publications. I conducted interviews as part of the fieldwork for my PhD project, in which I was, among others, interested in learning about HRDs’ perspectives on TJ and the Integral System in particular. I perceive of the label “HRD” as a self-designation, employed by my forty-seven interview partners, who work for different types of organizations with an explicit human rights agenda that ranges from general political rights to campesino or indigenous rights. Defending human rights is a very precarious activism in Colombia because the commitment to denouncing violence and injustice continues to render activists as targets of attacks, especially in the cities and adjacent regions that I chose as sites for my research apart from Bogotá: Buenaventura at the Pacific Coast, Barrancabermeja in the Magdalena Medio valley, and El Tarra in Catatumbo. I conducted the interviews during two research stays of three months that covered the politically polarized times of the first post-accord presidential elections in 2018 and the conflicts over the JEP's statutory law in 2019.

My interlocutors clearly received me as an international researcher, yet my own activism background opened doors, for example, when I was invited to join the peace tribunal as scientific observer. Interviews have allowed me to study more informal articulations as they emerge from the lived realities of my interlocutors, who occupy different societal positions mirroring the diversity of Colombian activism in terms of education, class, ethnicity, and gender. While our conversations also touched upon the work with the Integral System and reconciliation on the community level, they recurrently revolved around the grievances and frustrations that have amounted to protests and strikes throughout the country. My interlocutors encouraged me to write about the political conflicts that seem inevitable in the quest for TJ, but only later I came to approach them from the perspective of populism.

Certainly, I am aware of the potential hazards in writing about HRDs, whose activism I am sympathetic with, in connection with populism due to the contemporary buzz around the term and the public stigmatization of protests and activists by political elites in Colombia. Yet, I did not want to give in to the immediate reflex of sanitizing my insights behind the shield of a deliberative ideal that, wrongfully, would elevate human rights activism above popular politics, which are the roots of human rights in Colombia. Obviously, I do not claim that HRDs are populists, especially not in the derogatory sense of the word. What I do contend is that the three tropes, which I described as amounting to a populist grid of intelligibility, can help me to carve out analytically how widespread frustrations inform an imaginary of TJ as a political struggle that appeals to popular experiences and connects to contentious politics that surface in an ever more polarizing country. Instead of bending my experience of empirical reality to a scholarly debate, or an anyways sinister political agenda, I believe we can learn with HRDs about political antagonisms that shape the other side of reconciliation and deliberation in the discourses about TJ, without making analytical or normative judgements a priori.

When I speak of “HRDs,” I am not claiming to represent all the activists that adhere to the label and the multiverse of discourses they (re-)produce nor is my intent to obscure the internal differences in the struggle for the rights of victims (Rudling 2019). Alternatively, I chart the imaginary of a political struggle that I found present in my observations and conversations with very different activist personas, being therefore significant, though not exhaustive, to understand TJ in Colombia.

Reimagining Present Absence: Transitional Justice as Political Struggle

In what follows, I illustrate with references and direct quotes the popular appeal in HRDs’ discourses as it unfolds in three tropes: political frontier with the Colombian right, the popular subjectivity of victims, liberal–democratic transformation as the horizon of popular struggle.

Political Frontier against the Colombian Right

As an entry point to current HRD discourses on TJ, we need to begin with the shifting political landscape in post-accord Colombia. For many activists, the grief and frustrations that replaced much of the initial hope in 2016 connect to the return to power of the Colombian right. Irma,¹¹ who is the director of an established Bogotá-based human rights organization, clarifies the term for me as follows:

In Colombia, […] [the right] has become richer through the war. […] They are sectors that have been attacking any peace initiative […]. Thus, I believe that the sectors of the right are not just limited to the [Democratic Centre], […] they are […] parties or social sectors that resist the transformations […] that must be made to build equality, to build social justice and environmental justice.

Her quote illustrates that “the right” signifies the antagonist who returned to power after the peace agreement, symbolizing all those societal forces who have profited from war and impede social justice efforts.

Talking about the political campaign of “the right” in the peace referendum, Pedro¹² qualifies the media presence as “very aggressive […], with a lot of money, but above all, with some very perverse and very effective strategies.” By this, he refers to what Roberto¹³—analyst of the Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP)—calls the spread of “fake news,” such as, for example, the false claim that demobilization programs are to be largely financed by pension funds. Many activists contextualize the massive onslaught on the peace accords within an international trend of systematic and widespread disinformation campaigns, such as in the election of Donald Trump or Brexit. Illustrative of the divisive and mendacious campaign is the disparagement of the peace process for alleged impunity, or the inadequate sentencing of former FARC combatants (cf. Gomez-Suarez 2016). As a result, “impunity” became a contentious, or “floating” signifier between the campaign discourses of the political right and HRDs, who define impunity as the obfuscation of truth, by which powerful elites seek to restrict the focus of TJ on the guerrilla and to deny state—and thus their own—responsibility for past atrocities.

The political frontier against the “Colombian right” condenses around the demand for truth. This is no coincidence: the demand for truth has historically bound heterogeneous activism together in the devotion to come to terms with decades of ravaging violence (cf. Grupo de Memoria Histórica 2016). Since state institutions have largely not delivered on these demands, truth slowly became a key, popular demand that forges equivalences among victims and activists in their pursuit of justice. Pedro's following account explains how the concealment of historical truth concerning the connection between political power and violence is the foundation of the political project of the Colombian right:

They [the government and the right] are more scared now […] President Duque is the main saboteur of the agreements—and why?—because he does not want the country to know the truth. The truth about why this conflict went on for so long, the truth which explains that behind the conflict there were people who were getting rich by taking over the land.

Correspondingly, the grassroots association Communities Constructing Peace in the Territories (CONPAZ)¹⁴ disqualifies peace under the institutional auspices of the political right as the continuation of impunity and violence:

a new era of impunity is being inaugurated under the name of peace, a new era of lies. When we were building our society on the basis of the truth for everyone; […] the absence of a committed government, a responsible congress and a responsible judicial branch, have been throwing it away. A truth that would have allowed for ethical and material sanctions to outlaw violence forever […].

In the following quotes, Ana and Ricardo¹⁵ expose the political frontier that divides the Colombian right and HRDs based on the demand for truth:

The post-truth is theirs. […] [They pretend] there was a terrorist siege [in Colombia], as Álvaro Uribe said. So [they] deny the massacres, deny the torture, deny the disappearances […] The truth that they construct […] is nothing other than the truth that has denied human rights violations.

They contrast this “Other” of truth, or “post-truth,” with the demand of HRDs:

A truth that satisfies the victims. A truth that not only tells us who pulled the trigger […] but also who had political, social and economic power in those regions over those deaths. That is the truth that, of course, the Colombian State is not interested in, that neither the victims know nor the world knows.

As a result of this division, the discourse on TJ became a politicized battlespace for simmering political antagonisms rather than a means of reconciling them. The Integral System has gained the support of activists, primarily because commissioners are in part recruited from the human rights community and not—as Miguel,¹⁶ who submits cases to the Integral System in his capacity as member of the Barrancabermeja-based organization CREDHOS, remarks—“[politicized] bureaucrats dressed up as officials who love victims.” Besides the partial autonomy from state institutions, the restorative approach, which weighs information on larger patterns of violence over the punishment for individual perpetrators, induces the political right to go to war with the Integral System. My interlocutors elucidate that attempts to co-opt the institutions and to impose right-wing narratives are effective in severing the bond of trust that human rights organizations forged between victims and the Integral System. Julia,¹⁷ a lead investigator of the Popular Feminine Organization (OFP), deplores the impact of change of directors of the National Centre of Historical Memory, an institution created under the framework of the Victims’ Law, under the Duque administration. For her, the government's power to align memory work with the narrative of the political right illustrates the fragility of trust in the peace accord institutions:

They are still state institutions. Although […] much ground has been gained in terms of establishing trust and opening channels for frank dialogue, now there is again a process of rupture between grassroots organizations and initiatives of [the Integral System] because they have failed to deliver and […] because of an ideological alienation that happens in some of them, too.

Carolina,¹⁸ who accompanies victims in the Integral System for the feminist organization Corporación Humanas, makes me consider the consequences of politicizing TJ for future cooperation with the Integral Systems:

I think what is a battlefield is the JEP, between HRDs and the government, and that is where the mistake lies. […] [The JEP] has [yet] to prove [that] they are going to do it right. […] But if you say that, publicly, you become a spokesperson for the right.

Her reflections summarize the preponderance of antagonisms in the discourse on TJ that narrows the space for critical deliberation.

Victimhood and Popular Subjectivity of Defending Rights

Land rights activist Omar¹⁹ takes the history of his own Afro-descendent community to explain that a single victimizing event can engender an intergenerational chain of victimizations. In his case, displacement not only violated civil rights yet also caused traumata and uprooted the sense of identity for coming generations, which survive in illegalized settlements on Colombia's Pacific Coast. In his narrations, the official recognition of victimhood, however, is a frustrating story of bureaucratic logics in different TJ efforts (see also Krystalli 2019). Juan,²⁰ who legally advises claimants of land restitution, contextualizes Omar's life story in the experience of so many survivors, who have repeated the same testimonies in front of different legal–political institutions, like the Unit for the Reparation of Victims, the Unit for the Restitution of Land, or the Justice and Peace tribunals. Poor inter-institutional coordination and cooperation with claimants, he complains, create legal uncertainty, disenchantment, and ultimately further distrust in TJ institutions.

This story speaks to the above-discussed tenet that the identity as “victim” is contingent upon the discursive production of victimhood. It was not until the Santos government passed the 2011 Victims’ Law that official state discourses acknowledged the existence of an internal armed conflict and, as a result, recognized the demands of victims of state-sponsored violence. Yet, three years into the implementation of the 2016 peace accords, the apparent focus on the “victim” as the bearer of rights seems for many HRDs nothing more than a rhetorical gloss for the continued marginalization of survivors’ demands. The following anecdote, recounted by Guillermo,²¹ lead investigator of the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), elucidates how the recognition of victimhood has seemingly turned into a “political currency” of power quarrels:

One day, a doctoral student came and told me “We have done a study and came to the conclusion […] that [the Colombian peace process] is the only peace process that takes the victims into account”. I kept looking at her and said […] “What is the importance of victims supposed to be?” No, here victims only have importance for the spirit of revenge of the perpetrator. This is to say, here they only recognize the victims of the FARC because it is a form of saying to the FARC “you lost”. Then, the FARC said: “We lost, but you lost as well”. Therefore, they also must recognize the victims of the state. […] So, the victims, really, are the joker for the perpetrators to make the other feel that they didn't win.

In contrast, HRDs interpellate “victims” not as a passive identity, produced in a victimizing act and “valued” according to the responsible perpetrator, but as a political subject that lays claims against the political order. The following account of CREDHOS activists²² describes the reinscription of frustrated demands and marginalized survivor identities into a common subject of contentious politics:

There is no trust here […] [demands of victims] have been atomized. Then, MOVICE was created […] there were platforms that expanded […] to claim the rights of victims. Our challenge: to try to unify a [common] claim to the State [using] the window of possibility given to us, and to establish real guarantees for the victims, of all of them, no matter what the victimizing acts are. […] Since we were all victims of the armed conflict […], we must recognize [all kinds of victims] as a political subject in the [act] of claiming rights.

Departing from the marginalization of victims in the mills of TJ bureaucracy and elite interests, the discourses of HRDs interpret the “victim” as an agent of political change. Accordingly, Danilo²³ from REDEPAZ states the following:

yes we are victims of the conflict, [but] we cannot remain in an imaginary of victims […] that we are poor, and that we are [miserable]. […] We are political subjects who […] want a change. We have an experience of what happened to us, [this] experience obviously gives us the name, or catalogues us as victims, but [being] political subjects we build […] a country, and we are not victims that hope that Duque will give us [anything].

Let me clarify the connection between these illustrative descriptions of victims’ agency and the concept of popular subjectivity. Popular subjectivity emerges when discourses mobilize frustrated demands and atomized identities, hitherto forced to exist in the margins of power. Both exemplary quotes define victimhood through demanding rights, not through individual requests to TJ institutions or the state under President Duque, but as a struggle to create the political conditions of justice. This implies, as was also emphasized repeatedly by Guillermo, an ethical commitment to construir país,²⁴ whereby victims come to perceive their identity not as a shameful, individual aberration but as a political community that struggles for a better country on behalf of an oppressed Colombian society.

The articulation of a more universal struggle to build the political conditions for collective recognition and preventing future victimizations, which pervades all of my interviews, stands in tension with the particular need of victims to punish perpetrators and find closure individually. Carolina's²⁵ personal reflections on the Integral System are very revealing in this regard:

We were the ones who told the victims “look, the important thing is not the punishment, but that a country is built where we do not fear that our sons and daughters will be victims of displacement or sexual violence again”. And let's say on that […] the victims gave in. […] I think [the Integral System] is fundamental because it is a possibility to continue dreaming that we [as a country] can change. […] But, of course, if you're going to give benefits to a military man, who committed a massacre, raped women, and on top of that doesn't tell you the truth, then […], as always, it is the victims who lose in the processes. […] We thought that it was the best way, but the best way leaves them without rights.

Her thoughts allude very much to the discursive balancing of the popular appeal to mobilize experiences of victimization for political transformation and more institutional logics of cooperating with state authorities that promises the satisfaction of individual victims’ demands.

Read as a whole, the interviews suggest that human rights discourses in Colombia are not just about guaranteeing the individual access to justice but also about creating a consciousness as HRDs and a political movement, whose subjectivity is defined through political contention (cf. Rettberg 2015). The experiences of millions of victims are described as congruent with the life of the “ordinary” people living in the “ever same” normality of a political order forged in and governed through violence.

Liberal–Democratic Horizon

Toward the end of a long interview in the still burning afternoon sun of Barrancabermeja, I came to ask Miguel²⁶ what he personally associates with the mandate of the Integral System. After taking a deep breath, and lamenting the complexity of the question, he ponders:

Truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition […] give you back your human dignity. In the context of war […] and repression, [this is] the first thing that was taken from the people. […] It is that the people can walk down the street without having to bend their heads to the discourse, justifying the fact that their son was killed because he was [allegedly] a guerrilla member. It is being able to go down the street with the peace of mind that those responsible […] are not drinking beer somewhere as if nothing had happened.

His answer indicates that the discourse of HRDs is not simply an outrage against the political right, but also projects a different vision of social life in dignity. Justice in terms of truth—as the following speech of the victims’ representative Alejandra Gaviria²⁷ elucidates—symbolizes a surface of inscription to imagine politics otherwise:

It is of no use for me to tell and remember what happened to my father and family 30 years ago, if that does not help to transform this situation. It is of no use for us to sit down and talk about the horror we have experienced, if the direct consequence is not that all Colombians realize that this has to change. […] Remembering […] means, above all, committing oneself to the present, working so that this terrible thing does not continue to happen to us. But the memory also speaks of the future that […] we urgently need to build a country from our here and now.

Truth assumes the role of a popular demand, for it relates to the common experience, foremost among survivors of state-sponsored violence, to be kept in the dark about the circumstances of atrocities and to be sometimes even stigmatized, as alluded to by the first quote from Miguel. The popular demand for truth diametrically opposes the negacionismo²⁸ of the political right, that is, attributing all kinds of violence to (counter-)insurgency. The following passage from a legal intervention of MOVICE²⁹ distinguishes between political violence perpetrated under the pretext of armed conflict on behalf of right-wing elites from combat-related violence, a central element of the popular demand for truth:

[Political violence] is definitions, plans and strategies for the systematic and general elimination of political opponents, social and popular movements, and defenders of human rights. […] This violence has not been “diffuse and indiscriminate” nor did it originate in the armed conflict, but it is directly linked to the existence […] of social, political, economic, labour, environmental […] conflicts, where violence has been used in a deliberate, strategic and systematic way with the aim of weakening or banishing the exercise of […] rights claims.

Consistent with this passage, HRDs reiteratively stressed that the political fate of the Integral System rests with learning about networks of right-wing elites that continue to co-opt democratic state institutions. After a long day of meetings on the legal setbacks of the Integral System, an activist³⁰ who has spent many years researching cases of enforced disappearances told me: “victims want to hear one name in the tribunals: Álvaro Uribe.” In this common narrative figure, Uribe as a former President and caudillo³¹ of the right also refers metonymically to a political order of violence—including paramilitary, military, business leaders, and politicians— for economic gains, which has in recent decades largely been coordinated by the former president.

HRDs fear that a TJ process, which does not establish the truth about responsibilities of elites in power for historical and contemporary violence, feeds into existing sentiments of terror, insecurity, and revenge. Like many others, Martín³²—a renowned figure in the activist scene for his lifelong engagement with the prominent Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission (CIJP)—points out that these sentiments continue to hollow the democratic project of Colombia and victimize society further. He invokes a subtle yet historically relevant equivalential relation in the denunciation of power in Colombia: linking political violence, deception, the mobilization of fear, and the illiberal democratic rule of political elites (cf. López Hernández and Ávila Martínez 2010). For Rubén and Adriana,³³ from the LGBT organization Colombia Diversa, the pernicious campaigns of 2016 and 2018 exemplify the continued abuse of formal democratic procedures by the political right to restore their exclusivist rule:

We are afraid that the Duque government […] use the excuse that it won in the democratic contest to put an end to democratic institutions. […] There are concerns shared by all organizations and movements […] that have to do with the fact that [the government] wants to put an end to the democratic principles of Colombia and human rights.

Adriana and Rubén allude to the populist trope of restoring democracy against corrupt elites in power. Yet, the political struggle of HRDs does not defy pluralism and liberal institutions—as postulated in prevalent populism research—but, quite the contrary, defines legality and basic rights as the horizon of their struggle against unbounded, authoritarian rule. Martín's one-word answer to my question about what TJ should aim for crystalizes this vision: “¡Democracia!” By this, he refers to a “different democracy,” where people can disagree without being stigmatized or killed, where the rights of indigenous people and afro-descendent communities are as respected as the land claims of small peasants and workers’ rights.

It is by no means a Colombian singularity that the demand for truth about state-sponsored violence eventually ignites a larger popular struggle for a rights-based democracy, as public protests against authoritarian regimes in Argentina or Chile exemplified. In contemporary Colombia, the discourse on TJ serves as a platform to expose a key political contradiction: between the official government discourse on a democracy in transition to peace and the activist perception of a re-consolidating illiberal regime, which glosses over the unholy alliance between power and violence. Pedro,³⁴ hence, reflects on the role of human rights as follows:

For us, human rights are a tool to build and strengthen democracy in a society. Societies like Colombia need the work of human rights defenders, as we are led by governments, by a State […] that have always had a little interest in fulfilling their obligations as governors to society, so that human rights become a platform for mobilization, […] struggle, the organization of communities […]. I insist, in Colombia, this is an urgent, permanent need, given that it is a society which lacks institutional offers. Today, in the midst of this peace process, well, human rights have a revival, given that the peace agreement is an instrument for building a new society.

Pedro urges us to understand the origin and contemporary function of human rights in Colombia, not so much in institutional, but populist discursive logics, directed against what my interlocutors recurrently denounced as an exclusive elitist rule or form of “electoral despotism.” In this context, the demand for truth is less in the service of reconciliation with the political right wing but a political weapon to fight the continuation of violence and anti-liberal culture under the current government.

Conclusion

Protests against the Duque government did not abate but intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic. Although a great variety of social, political, and economic grievances bring people to the streets, the implementation of the 2016 peace accords remains a key subject of contention. This article starts with the empirical claim that we must contextualize discourses on TJ in this political contention and the frustrations with broken state promises in many conflict-ridden regions. Conceptually, this contextualization is largely uncharted territory, considering that the expanding theoretical work on TJ is still little articulated with the literature on popular mobilization and contentious politics.

Based on the writings of Argentinian philosopher Ernesto Laclau, I have submitted that populism offers a promising analytical way forward. This may be surprising, given a current debate mainstream that largely discusses populism for its xenophobic, nationalist, and authoritarian manifestations. Yet, when we follow Laclau's theory and define populism discursively, as a grid of intelligibility in contentious politics, which always exists in tension with deliberative ideals, we can study how discourses of HRDs make political sense of widespread grievances and frustrations. Accordingly, I have refrained from using populism as a label and, alternatively, harnessed it as an analytical term to trace popular appeal in the discourses of activists that reimagine TJ as a political struggle amid mounting sociopolitical conflicts in the country. I have shown that HRDs understand the Integral System also as a battlespace against the political right, whose political power rests with deception about political violence that continues to haunt the political present in Colombia. The popular demand for justice through truth symbolizes a common horizon for protest against the unbroken power of right-wing elites. Victims are interpellated as the political representation of the people, who live the everyday of conflict and violence, but whose political struggle shall not restore sovereignty “in their name,” which would trap them in the passive identity as victims; rather, “the victim” comes to embody the Colombian volonté générale—a symbol otherwise often ascribed to a political leader in populist literature—to transform the political order and fight for the constitutional promise of a rights-based democracy.

My analysis of TJ discourses in Colombia implies an analytical and normative critique on contemporary debates about human rights and populism: as a discursive concept, populism is not a priori incompatible with human rights but gears the analytical gaze toward their origin and function in protest movements, instead of institutional discourses. Normatively, I challenge the general stigmatization of populism and call for a more nuanced assessment based on the content of popular mobilization and the ways in which populist and institutional logics are discursively negotiated. Different from reconciliation frameworks, populism contributes to TJ literature by providing insights into how social forces politicize frustrations, grievances, and marginalization into a struggle for justice against political orders that have facilitated violence but survived peace agreements. In Colombia, liberal political transformation—as opposed to neoliberalism—has become the standard by which millions of activists will judge the success of Colombia's TJ process.

Footnotes

1

Henceforth “Integral System.”

2

Javier Corrales, “The Return of Populism, Latin America Style,” The New York Times (June 25 ,2018). Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/mexico-colombia-populism.html. Accessed January 22, 2022.

3

La Silla Vacia, El populismo de Petro y el retorno de Uribe se deben a los fracasos de Santos (December 26, 2018). Available at https://lasillavacia.com/el-populismo-de-petro-y-el-retorno-de-uribe-se-deben-los-fracasos-de-santos-69362. Accessed January 22, 2022.

4

Field Diary, Norte de Santander, July 2019. I conducted all interviews myself in Spanish. Due to the high-risk situation of HRDs in Colombia, I refer to all interlocutors with pseudonyms and disclose in the corresponding footnote only the information that my interlocutors felt comfortable sharing publicly.

5

Interview with representatives of CPDH, July 2019.

6

El Espectador, Presidente Duque objetó seis artículos de la ley estatutaria de la JEP (March 11, 2019). Available at https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/politica/presidente-duque-objeto-seis-articulos-de-la-ley-estatutaria-de-la-jep/. Accessed April 27, 2021.

7

Interview with a representative of MOVICE, July 2019.

8

Focus group discussion with representatives from the Regional Corporation for the Defence of Human Rights (CREDHOS), July 2019.

9

The Guardian, Colombia: thousands take to the streets in third national strike in two weeks (December 4, 2019). Available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/04/colombia-protest-duque-bogota. Accessed April 27, 2021.

10

Kenneth M. Roth, “The Dangerous Rise of Populism. Global Attacks on Human Rights Values. Keynote,” HRW World Report (2017). Available at https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/dangerous-rise-of-populism. Accessed September 9, 2020.

11

Interview with an HRD, July 2019.

12

See footnote 7.

13

Interview with a representative of FIP, June 2019.

14

CONPAZ, “Comunicado conpaz,” Colombia Humanas (November 19, 2017). Available at https://comunidadesconpaz.wordpress.com/2017/11/20/ustedes-pueden-evitar-este-naufragio-y-encauzar-el-tiempo-hacia-la-paz-total/. Accessed March 9, 2022.

15

See footnote 5.

16

Interview with a representative of CREDHOS, July 2019.

17

Interview with a representative of OFP, July 2019.

18

Interview with a representative of Corporación Humanas, July 2019.

19

Field Diary, Buenaventura, June 2018.

20

Interview with a representative of Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), July 2019.

21

Interview with a representative of CODHES, July 2019.

22

See footnote 8.

23

Interview with a representative of REDEPAZ, June 2019.

24

Engl. build [a new] country.

25

See footnote. 18.

26

See footnote 16.

27

Alejandra Gaviria, “Día de la Memoria y la Solidaridad con las Víctimas del conflicto. Discurso de Alejandra Gaviria, vocera del Movice,” CSPP (April 10, 2017). Available at http://www.comitedesolidaridad.com/es/content/d%C3%ADa-de-la-memoria-y-la-solidaridad-con-las-v%C3%ADctimas-del-conflicto-discurso-de-alejandra. Accessed September 9, 2020.

28

Engl. denialism.

29

Soraya Gutiérrez A., “Intervención Movice ante la Corte Constitucional sobre ley de amnistía e indulto,” CCAJAR (August 4, 2017). Available at https://www.colectivodeabogados.org/?Intervencion-Movice-ante-la-Corte-Constitucional-sobre-ley-de-amnistia-e. Accessed September 9, 2020.

30

Field Diary, Bogotá, May 2019.

31

Engl. strongman.

32

Interview with a representative of CIJP, July 2019.

33

Interview with representatives of Colombia Diversa, June 2018.

34

See footnote 7.