A Theory of War-Peace Convergence in Cultural Processes of Meaning Making and its Conflict-Perpetuating Qualities

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Panel Session: After War

Abstract

Peacemaking and warmaking have been thought of as antagonists–one interferes or inhibits the action of the other. The academic literature has not questioned the possible unintended consequences of peacemaking that may sustain or even reinvigorate civil war. In this paper, we take this route and argue that peacemaking and warmaking are homologous processes of meaning work and, when the two converge, they produce mechanisms that can lock societies in ongoing cycles of conflict escalation and deescalation. We propose a theory of war-peace convergence that asserts that when opposing political logics meet within the state, communities, and individuals, they produce organizational, relational, and cognitive mechanisms that sustain civil war in the long term. Examining sixty years of Colombian history (1958-2022), relying on archival sources, interviews, and secondary literature, we discuss three conflict-perpetuating mechanisms at the convergence of peace and war: state disarticulation, fringe-to-mainstream organizational realignment, and victimhood dissociation.

Authors

• Nicolas Torres-Echeverry, University of Chicago

• Laura Acosta, University of California, San Diego