Rebel School Governance

• In Event: Who rules? Actors, movements, and struggles behind education governance in Latin America (Part 2)

Proposal

CIE has a significant tradition of contributing to debates about educational governance, examining actors from local teachers and schools (Keddie 2016; Jeong et al. 2023; Fontdevila and Verger 2025) to global players involved in setting goals and transnational reforms (Robertson 2012; Menashy 2017; Tikly 2017; Zhu et al. 2020). Yet, despite this diversity, the field has largely overlooked forms of governance that occur outside official frameworks and institutions (for an exception, see Marchais et al. 2025).

This study addresses that gap by analyzing insurgent governance in education. Drawing on debates in comparative politics and civil war studies, it examines the logics, mechanisms, and effects of guerrilla governance in a public school in eastern Colombia, in an area controlled by the National Liberation Army (ELN) (Rodríguez-Gómez, forthcoming). Central questions are: How is guerrilla authority over a public school established and legitimized? What are its effects on the school community? Building on Kasfir (2015), I conceptualize educational governance as historically situated social practices of administration and regulation, understood as collective efforts to shape and sustain particular distributions of power through education.

The analysis focuses on the Rafael Baralt School in Arauca, Colombia. In 2017, the Peace Agreement with the FARC-EP coincided with a bilateral ceasefire with the ELN, creating temporary access to this zona roja. Supported by research assistants, we conducted over 75 semi-structured interviews with teachers, students, families, and individuals tied to the insurgency. We also reviewed official sources and ELN pamphlets from its 1960s foundation to the present.

Findings show that the two pillars of ELN ideology—popular power and popular warfare—shape insurgent governance mechanisms regulating school life. On one hand, the guerrillas’ interest in consolidating the school as a community development hub was evident through political support for expanding facilities and providing economic resources. On the other hand, their strategic need to mobilize material resources and people concentrated in the school to strengthen war capacity also emerged clearly. These dual logics illustrate how insurgent governance intertwines with both social and military objectives.

The relationship between insurgent and state governance, therefore, varies according to guerrilla strategies. When oriented toward promoting community welfare, insurgent governance does not displace the state; instead, it reinforces state policies through alternative means. Conversely, when the goal is to weaken the state and assert territorial and social control, insurgent governance comes into direct tension with state mandates, particularly those concerning the right to education and children’s rights.

By examining the ELN’s DLS front, this study highlights how school governance in conflict zones is unstable and fluctuates with wartime demands. It also shows how educational communities navigate frictions when the routines of power generated by the legal order intersect with those produced at its margins. In doing so, the study expands the field of comparative education governance by incorporating insurgent actors, offering new insights into how education becomes both a site of community development and a resource for armed struggle.

Author

• Diana Rodríguez-Gómez, University of Wisconsin-Madison