Translocal lessons from transitional justice in Colombia: Truth, art, and memory to advance human rights and transform societies

Abstract

This article highlights the expansion of traditional concepts of transitional justice in Colombia to include an emphasis on human rights and the empowerment of marginalized communities. It describes how grassroots truth processes, collective art projects, and memory work have been essential to a transitional justice experiment that challenges dominant national narratives and power structures. It argues that Colombia’s experience may provide lessons for other political communities across the globe that are struggling to address legacies of past injustice, ongoing structural violence, and a rise in xenophobic nationalism. More broadly, it examines how this experiment might inform a model for political imaginaries based on social connections across differences—one that can compete with the power of nationalist myths of singular community. Importantly, it suggests the opportunity for horizontal borrowings via translocal networks of innovative human rights practices worldwide, not necessarily mediated by Global North institutions. This illustrates the contention that human rights globalization can operate through local advocacy.

This article explores Colombia’s transitional justice process and the lessons it may provide for the advancement of human rights in Colombia and elsewhere. In doing so, it speaks to this Special Issue’s focus on how local activists around the globe work to institutionalize in distinct local contexts their reenvisioning of human rights. This is too often overlooked in mainstream human rights discourse. Also overlooked is the opportunity for horizontal borrowings of innovative human rights practices that are not necessarily mediated by Global North institutions.

In Colombia, community-based initiatives informed how transitional justice was constituted, learning from but also going significantly beyond global models of transitional justice. This pushed Colombia beyond its official transitional process, which was originally quite narrow. Specifically, Colombia has expanded traditional concepts of transitional justice to include a much greater emphasis on human rights. The process that led to this result is noteworthy and deserves attention from other political communities around the globe, particularly those struggling to determine how to address past injustices and build more inclusive societies.

In terms of process, activists in Colombia reenvisioned transitional justice as grounded in truth and accountability, art and memorialization, and memory work. These processes have empowered the voice of Colombia’s traditionally marginalized communities, giving bottom-up ownership to demands for human rights. Though partial and contested, this process has been essential to reimagining these communities’ place in Colombian society. This reimagination challenges the power of exclusionary national narratives that conflate elite identity with national identity, rendering invisible those with less privileged identities. On that basis, I argue that Colombia can provide a model for subaltern communities in other parts of the world that want to confront their specific histories of economic, political, and social exclusion. More broadly, I argue that Colombia can provide a model for political imaginaries based on social connections across differences of identity. This is crucial to challenge the power of nationalist myths of a singular community at a time when such myths are gaining political force worldwide.

What can be learned from Colombia?

Colombia’s violent history hardly makes it an obvious model for other countries. Unfortunately, present-day Colombia remains turbulent, conflict ridden, and riven by radical inequalities along overlapping ethnic and geographic lines. Indeed, according to the Gini index, Colombia is the seventh most unequal country in the world, with its Afro and indigenous populations suffering extraordinarily high poverty rates. Colombia’s long-standing internal conflicts have been fed by these deep inequalities, generated by both anger at structural discrimination and a simple lack of opportunity to do anything other than join armed groups (Cotte Poveda, 2007; Olarte, 2023).

Movements seeking nonviolent social change in Colombia must navigate the perilous, violent borders between left-wing guerrilla groups, right-wing paramilitaries, and government forces politically aligned with local caciques and often associated with paramilitary groups. Guerrillas, paramilitaries, and government forces each intersect with the so-called BACRIM (bandas criminales), criminal groups that take advantage of the state’s absence in many parts of Colombia to engage in a range of criminal activities and that often serve as de facto governing authorities (Castillo, 2014). This danger is summarized in a simple data point: 215 Colombian “social leaders” (human rights and environmental activists working at the community level) were assassinated in 2022. This represents roughly half of all such assassinations occurring in 2022 worldwide (Reuters, 2023).

These assassinations in 2022 were not a one-year anomaly but rather a sad constant, with Human Rights Watch reporting the assassination of more than 1,000 such leaders between 2016 and 2022 (Human Rights Watch, 2023). Colombia’s Human Rights Ombudsman reported 181 such assassinations in 2023 (Reuters, 2024). These killings not only highlight the danger of nonviolent activism but also show the aptness of Julia Zulver’s critique of the notion of Colombia as a “postconflict” society. As she writes with regard to the struggle for gender justice in Colombia, the “conflict/postconflict binary is not necessarily relevant to women’s lived experience of violence” (Zulver, 2022, p. 7). Despite the 2016 peace agreement between the government and FARC guerrillas, armed conflicts have continued and, in some areas, accelerated. It is in this high-risk context that activists are working for the intersecting goals of peace, human rights, gender justice, empowerment of marginalized communities, and an end to extractive economic processes.

In terms of the vacuity of the notion of Colombia as a postconflict society, the fifty-year civil war with the FARC guerrilla group was settled with a formal peace pact in 2016. However, moving the peace pact from formality to reality has been unsteady at best. Colombian opponents—led by elites who profit from the political economy of conflict—successfully used nationalist motifs to mobilize popular support against the peace pact, resulting in its narrow rejection in a 2016 plebiscite (Fabra-Zamora et al., 2021; Bernal, 2022). In 2018 these emotive motifs also helped lift to power the anti–peace pact party and a president, Iván Duque, designated by the “finger” of Colombia’s populist strongman Álvaro Uribe. Once Uribe’s party was restored to power, implementation of the peace pact was largely stymied. In particular, though lauded for its ambition in addressing the structural inequities that fed into conflict in Colombia, it was precisely those ambitious elements of the pact that were paralyzed. The FARC’s demobilization continued, but grand promises for everything from rural land reform to truth and accountability for past human rights violations were undermined (Isaacson, 2021).

Nonetheless, Colombia’s transitional justice and human rights movements have been remarkably sophisticated, incorporating lessons from sources around the world both horizontally (from Latin American neighbors and social movements in other parts of the Global South) and vertically (engaging with global human rights norms, laws, and institutions). The shocking defeat of the 2016 peace pact plebiscite revealed the sophistication attained from these engagements: marginalized sectors did not simply accept that narrow loss; instead, they were spurred to mobilize. Saffon Sanín writes that, ironically, the plebiscite loss

was importantly countered by the vigorous mobilization…which demanded an “Agreement Now!,” that is, a prompt renegotiation and adoption of an adjusted agreement that would prevent the breakdown of the ceasefire…. Attacks on the peace bolstered the emergence of a political and popular bloc supporting the transformative components of the peace agreement and thereby a leftist redistributive agenda. (Saffon Sanín, 2021, p. 77)¹

This mobilization brought together sectors of traditionally excluded communities—indigenous groups, Afro communities, feminists, sexual rights activists, and, most importantly, victims of Colombia’s armed conflict. Those victims include individuals who were killed (450,664—80% of them civilians), disappeared (121,768), internally displaced (7.7 million—putting Colombia second in the world only Syria), stripped of land in favor of large landholders or multinationals, kidnapped, subjected to sexual violence, recruited as child soldiers, or any of the many other ways in which violence has disproportionately impacted Colombia’s poorest populations (Colombia’s Truth Commission Final Report, 2023). Given the grassroots nature of these mobilizations, many of the groups are small and shifting. Two of the more prominent are Movimiento Nacional de Víctimas de Crímenes del Estado (MOVICE) and Colectivo Mujeres al Derecho de Colombia (COLEMAD). Most notable, however, is that this mobilization was decentered but networked, based in the grass roots but with a national impact.

These mobilizations fed into two estallidos sociales—largely nonviolent nationwide uprisings—during Duque’s term as president. These uprisings brought together many forces (with labor unions playing a key role) to conduct paralyzing strikes, mass protests, noise-making via caceroladas (the banging of pots), popular education, and street theater (Chang & García-Montoya, 2021). It is fair to say that these events played a key role in delegitimizing President Duque and the populist Uribist political project. The bottom-up solidarities built during Colombia’s estallidos merged into a political mobilization that confronted the country’s violent past and its ongoing hierarchies and exclusions. This intersected with and to some degree merged into top-down politics with the election of the country’s first left-wing president in 2022—ex-guerrilla Gustavo Petro, whose election would have been impossible to imagine just a few years previous. Unsurprisingly, President Petro is currently facing serious headwinds, but the political-social transformation that he is just one part of clearly represents an unprecedented shift in Colombia politics.

The case of Colombia shows that social movements can use grassroots truth processes, art, and memory work to imagine how to recognize, confront, and repair historic injustices. Whereas the global transitional model initially emphasized apolitical reconciliation as its goal, in Colombia, a shift toward human rights–based accountability took hold. This was marked by a process that, perhaps more than in any other preexisting practice of transitional justice, was less top-down and more attuned to the voices of victims. This allowed demands for radical rights-based changes in social, political, and economic structures to emerge as a form of reparation. Specifically, the integration of such voices flowed out of processes such as engaging in memory work to democratize the voices heard in Colombian politics; weaving art into the way social movements are constituted and expanded; and designing a transitional justice system that links retributive, restorative, and reparative justice in an unprecedentedly holistic manner (Bries Silva, 2024). There are, of course, enormous obstacles to achieving the societal transformations envisioned by these processes. Nonetheless, there is also much to learn from them, such as how they might be models for locally driven politics that can be adapted to other parts of the world.

But how does one do such work? It is in this context that local activism in Colombia becomes interesting for those seeking innovative ways to confront entrenched structural violence and its undergirding ideologies. There is no way to impose anything close to a unifying structure on the different forms of local activism in a country like Colombia, which is fragmented by violence, regional identities, gender- and sexuality-based violence, and ethnic and class differences. There is, however, a phrase that is repeatedly invoked in Colombia by many different community activists struggling to give visibility to the dispossessed, displaced, disappeared, and otherwise disadvantaged: hacer memoria. I take this phrase as a departure point to explore innovations in local Colombian activism to confront embedded power structures.

Memory work: What is hacer memoria?

The literal translation of hacer memoria is “to make memory.” But that literalism doesn’t do justice to the implications of the phrase in the Colombian context. Hacer memoria can best be summarized as a call to reimagine the political community’s historical memory. This is done to take agency over how that memory defines who constitutes Colombia and whether that includes communities marginalized throughout much of the country’s history due to race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, and geography. Perhaps the shortest, most apt translation is “to take memory”—that is, to use memory processes to redefine dominant narratives about who “real” Colombians are.

Those dominant narratives are concisely summarized by María Emma Wills Obregon:

To maintain their place at the top of the social and governmental ladder, Creole elites appealed to a civilizing memory, that of a concept of politics tailored to the new ruling elites, with their views of progress, development, science, the relationship of dominion and exploitation of nature, and the arts and letters of “high culture.”…Cultures divided between “civilized” and “savages.” The “others,” the communities “without historical memory” according to these elites—Blacks, mixed Afro-indigenous peoples, indigenous, palenqueros—were represented as untamed and unhealthy…their voices and capacity to self-represent expropriated by these elites. (Wills Obregon, 2022, pp. 21–22, translation by the author)

Memory work—haciendo memoria—challenges this expropriation of the voices and histories of subaltern communities by “recognizing the diversity of memory and a commitment to safeguarding the pluralism” of historic memories in Colombia’s diverse communities (Wills Obregon, 2022, p. 30). It is difficult to single out a particular origin moment at which such processes emerged. But it is possible to get a sense of the decentered, grassroots nature of the groups that contributed to pushing memory processes forward. MOVICE was officially founded in 2005 at the second Encuentro Nacional de Víctimas de Crímenes de Lesa Humanidad (National Meeting of Victims of Crimes Against Humanity), which was attended by representatives of 230 organizations from 28 Colombian states (“Historia,” 2015). Similarly decentralized is La Ruta Pacífica (The Pacific Route, which now includes more than 300 organizations from 18 Colombian states), founded in 1996 and originating in 1980s activist movements. MOVICE’s most important antecedent was also created in 1996: the Proyecto Colombia Nunca Más (Colombia: Never Again Project) initiative (“Historia,” 2015). The goal of Proyecto Colombia Nunca Más was to develop methods of analyzing information about crimes committed by the state (“Colombia Nunca Más,” 2016). Its slogan, Somos semilla, somos memoria, somos el sol que nace ante la impunidad (“We are seed, we are memory, we are the sun that rises in the face of impunity”), indicates that, from an early date, “memory” has been a key trope in movements to resist the dominant political imaginaries in Colombia.

Perhaps most key was the interplay between official laws and institutions that preceded grassroots activism. In 2005 the Justice and Peace Law (Law 975) was passed by the Uribe government, primarily to give amnesty to its paramilitary allies. Nonetheless, partly due to amendments passed by the Colombian Congress, it also introduced truth processes and memory work as a key part of the official discourse that connected to surging grassroots action. Wills Obregon notes that even during the Duque government’s attempts to use official memory institutions to repress rather than empower alternative histories and voices, haciendo memoria “stayed alive in public spaces, in houses, in the streets, in (regional) territories, academic discussions, and in the Peace Pact war crimes tribunals and truth process institutions…. Unlike anointed official memories that reiterate singular narratives, these initiatives took on the profound diversity of local, regional, and national public spheres” (Wills Obregon, 2022, pp. 44, 48). This is beautifully summarized by Virgelina Chará, who describes her work in this field as a process of “memories covering Memory” (Velasco Trujillo, 2020, p. 189).

Wills Obregon concludes that such small grassroots actions—she mentions altars to the dead, memory gardens, murals of remembrance, school museums, human rights workshops and archives, community memory museums, and photography expositions, among others—were a nonviolent rebellion against the silence that armed groups attempted to impose on communities, especially in territories outside of Colombia’s main urban centers (Wills Obregon, 2022, p. 50). This work spanned and created connections between grassroots groups, community-based art, academic activism, and official institutions in ways that informed Colombia’s transitional justice architecture. Its official structures of transitional justice are often lauded as “cutting edge,” markedly distinct from antecedents in other countries. If this is true, it is largely due to the bottom-up insistence that grassroots art and memory work are constitutive of transitional justice rather than post facto decorative additions to top-down government-led processes, as has too often been the case elsewhere.

The academy and art: Constituting transitional justice in new ways

Colombia’s Truth Commission highlights the country’s unique transitional justice structures on its website, noting that “Colombia is the only country in the world to have set up all three entities at the same time, which makes it possible to respond to the right of victims and society’s demand for justice, truth and reparation.”² “Three entities” refers to the Colombian system’s holistic linking of retributive, restorative, and reparative justice in its war crimes tribunal, search unit for disappeared peoples, and Truth Commission, respectively (Bakiner et al., 2019). This is true, but it neglects other elements in the 2016 peace pact that are essential to a sustainable peace. As Pablo Abitbol writes, “the essential core of the peace agreement lies in the intersection of the transitional justice institutional architecture that it puts in place, and its mandates for a reorientation of drug policy, democratic aperture, and rural [land] reform” (Abitbol, 2023, p. 133).

The novelty of this architecture is attributable to the grassroots movements described earlier and their intersection with, horizontally, transitional justice experiments in other parts of Latin America and the world and, vertically, UN agencies and transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the International Center for Transitional Justice, which has been quite active in Colombia. At the center of these intersections was the Historic Memory Group (Grupo de Memoria Histórica, or GMH). Formed in 2007 and consisting of academics and activists, the GMH became a focal point in the interchange between victim and subaltern groups and government institutions, insisting that victim groups be at the heart of telling and retelling their histories. Ricardo Velasco Trujillo notes that, with GMH, “official reports and apologies, monuments, commemorative cultural events and forms of cultural production dedicated to honor the victims became central initiatives invigorating a politically contested transitional process within an institutionally weak post-conflict setting” (Velasco Trujillo, 2020, p. 10).

This was key in informing proposals for transitional justice during negotiations in Havana with the FARC; delegations included substantial participation by civil society, which led the way in advancing these proposals. This ensured that transitional justice in Colombia, even as it became embedded in governmental institutions, would be very different from its antecedents around the world in two key senses: first, it would be deeply based on the voices of victims, as represented by grassroots movements, and second, via those voices, it would expand transitional justice well beyond practices in other countries in terms of reimagining how political community is constituted.

The distinctiveness of Colombia’s transitional justice is evident in both process and substance. In process, Colombian community groups began to “take memory” in the midst of armed conflict, decades before a “transition” following the (partial) resolution of that conflict with the 2016 peace pact. As already highlighted, there have been important synergies among local, national, and international forces, but the most important impulses toward an expansive transitional justice process have come from the bottom up, flowing directly out of memory work done at the grassroots level. In substance, in part due to these community-driven impulses, transitional justice in Colombia is ambitious in its link of retributive, restorative, and reparative justice, both formally and informally. Perhaps most important, in both process and substance, it has constituted itself in ways substantively informed not just by memory work but also by communal art projects designed to sew (coser) or weave (tejer) a new, more inclusive social fabric (an oft-repeated metaphor in Colombia). As Simić argues, this type of art can “engage the public on multiple levels to create the potential for confronting both injustice and historical narratives that need to be challenged” (Simić, 2017, p. 226).

While there are many examples of these communal art projects, I highlight just two as bookends to the trajectory I have been tracing. The first and most famous is Las Mujeres Tejedores de Mampuján (Women Weavers of Mampuján); its creators were awarded a Colombian national peace prize in 2015. Following massacres and forced displacements by the paramilitary Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia in 2000, the creators began a communal quilting project in 2006 entitled Desplazamiento (Displacement) to memorialize their ordeal (Ruiz Hernández, 2019).³ As described in the Colombian magazine Cromos (2015):

What the tapestry shows is harsh and revealing. There are figures of old people in hammocks, men and women with bundles and children in their arms, uniformed and armed men pointing their guns at them. “First we made it on cardboard and then we sewed it,” explains Juana Alicia, who after Teresa’s departure became the leader of the group that today is known as the weavers of Mampuján. Their experience was so healing and comforting that they continued making more tapestries: another one was called Masacre, and it showed how those same men who intimidated them later went to the Las Brisas village and killed 11 peasants in a macabre route they called the route of death.

Both Desplazamiento and Masacre are on display in Bogotá’s National Museum, an indication of the force with which this unpretentious art project hit Colombia. With United Nations support, these tapestries toured other violence-ridden regions of Colombia, disseminating the idea of using weaving projects as communal ways to reweave the threads of community and peace.

This sewing-weaving metaphor is central to communal projects that bring together art and memory work, and it is evident in numerous projects throughout Colombia. Perhaps most notable are the arropamiento projects of the Unión de Costureros (Sewing Union), led by Virgelina Chará. Using fabric and quilting techniques produced at an open workshop at Bogotá’s Casa de la Paz and sent in from contributors around the country, these projects are analogous to those of the Tejedoras de Mampuján in how they make visible the sorrow caused by displacement and death.

Most provocatively, these large-scale fabric projects are stitched together to cover public spaces. In September 2022, for example, Colombia’s Palace of Justice—a particularly fraught symbol of conflict—was covered in Unión de Costureros fabrics (Leal-Guerro, 2015; “Tejer Como un Vehículo de la Memoria,” 2015). This was done with an intentionally political purpose connected to transitional justice. As Velasco Trujillo describes this type of work: “Victims and human rights organizations, rural black communities and other disenfranchised groups, are able to articulate their demands for historical redress, while making visible current claims for justice and present conditions of marginalization and exclusion” (Velasco Trujillo, 2020, p. xii).

These cultural expressions are fundamental rather than ancillary to a transitional justice process that is located in communities rather than owned by the state; that forces the recognition of past injustice and uses it as a tool to create a future embodying more pluralist notions of community; and that is a vehicle not for reconciliation but for accountability and radical change. In short, these cultural expressions are simultaneously both art and demands for rights in the cultural, economic, political, and social spheres.

Theoretical frame: Translocal networks

The larger context for this case study and the intersecting questions that animate it is what Jackie Smith envisions as “trans-local networks of intersectional human rights advocates to flow together around shared claims” (Smith, 2020, p. 8). Smith argues that such translocal networks can help “envision and enact new political identities and practices that could—more than any state-centered civil rights activism—advance a new, decolonial form of globalization” (Smith, p. 8).

The case study of Colombia as a model for transitional justice in other locales allows us to interrogate that theoretical possibility. Specifically, it points to different ways to conceptualize the diffusion of norms. In dominant models, norms are either diffused from or mediated by Global North centers of power. The “boomerang model,” for example, posits that groups in the Global South will connect to international organizations (based primarily in Geneva and New York), “gatekeeper” NGOs (based in the Global North), or powerful states (generally European or North American) to put pressure on states violating human rights (Keck & Sikkink, 1998). Although the boomerang model has some efficacy in certain cases, it fails to reflect a multipolar world in which human rights activism is increasingly centered in different parts of the Global South (Dancy & Fariss, 2023). César Rodríguez-Garavito smartly moves beyond those limits in his notion of “multiple boomerangs,” writing that:

As global power becomes more multipolar, local NGOs are creating new coalitions focused on producing what I call multiple boomerangs. In this case, political pressure for human rights change comes from different geographic locations, and is simultaneously mobilized and directed towards different and multiple targets. (Rodríguez-Garavito, 2015)

Even these multiple boomerangs, however, focus on networks within states and across states and societies in the Global South. Horizontal, transnational diffusion of norms is necessary to push this notion further. There is no reason why states and social movements in “northern” countries—including and perhaps especially the United States—cannot participate in mutual learning from locales addressing analogous power structures. Indeed, at a time when the political imagination regarding how to confront populist nationalism seems to be exhausted, it may be prudent to move past traditional human rights strategies that focus on domestic connections to international institutions. Inverting the usual maps of how the world works—including being open to ideas and movements that flow horizontally and from South to North—is urgent if these challenges are to be met.

The importance of recognizing translocal networks is not merely theoretical. It returns us to the importance of the case study of transitional justice in Colombia. In the case of Colombia, transitional justice—through community-led truth processes, art projects, and memory work—has been constituted by human rights in ways that differ from customary top-down transitional justice processes. This is relevant to other locales going through transitional justice processes. A country like the United States, for example, with its long history of racial injustice and grassroots social movements demanding truth and accountability, has much to learn from Colombia’s social movements that drive transitional justice from the bottom up (Chase, 2023). More broadly, however, Colombia’s experiments are about more than just transitional justice in discrete parts of the world. Lessons from Colombia also speak to the broader issue of xenophobic nationalism, which is on the rise across the globe. With forces of resistance seemingly befuddled and in retreat, how can that resistance be reinforced?

Extending the theme of this Special Issue, such resistance is most effectively empowered by translocal and multivocal processes, rather than impulses that come from a singular source, whether it be global institutions, transnational norms, national governments, or local activism. Challenging xenophobic nationalism requires working across literal and figurative borders that too often limit how institutions, norms, and activists can mutually reinforce one another. To bring this article full circle, I connect the issue of ethnonationalism both to a theoretical frame that emphasizes the potential utility of translocal networks and to the case study of transitional justice in Colombia.

Transnational nationalist imaginaries

It is logical to assume that nationalist movements are not connected, given their grounding in mutually exclusive ethnic foundations. That there is, in fact, a networked alignment of nationalist forces pushing against human rights, pluralism, and inclusive democracy around the globe is forcefully argued by Alaa abd el-Fattah, who is Egypt’s—if not the Arab world’s—most prominent political prisoner. Imprisoned by the Egyptian government for his fierce defiance of its crackdown on the popular activism underpinning the Arab Spring, he has continued that defiance behind prison walls through the publication of his stunning You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021). In it, abd el-Fattah argues that the crushing of the Arab Spring’s revolutionary democratic movements anticipated the global emergence of a network of xenophobic nationalist leaders, including Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Benjamin Netanyahu, Viktor Orbán, and Donald Trump, among others. These alignments have emerged from intense interplay and borrowings at global, transnational, and local levels unmediated by any type of centralized institution.

A specific example from Colombia illustrates this sort of unexpected networking. Among the factors that led to the defeat of the Colombian peace pact was its association with an attack on the Colombian family and religious traditions through its supposed “gender ideology” (Beltrán & Creely, 2018). This theme did not emerge out of the blue but was borrowed from like-minded nationalist leaders across the globe. As Sonia Corrêa puts it, “anti-gender campaigns have not been gestated at the ground levels of societies, but rather in the high spheres of international negotiations and theological lucubration [laborious work]. They constitute a transnational phenomenon” (Corrêa, 2017). The Colombian populist right merely adapted this transnational targeting of gender ideology to a Colombian context, portraying it as an attack on local cultural traditions.

Connecting the crushing of democracy in Egypt and the Arab world to the subsequent rise of antidemocratic movements in other places is partly attributable to the development of a shared political imaginary. Unlike previous conservative and even authoritarian politics, what has emerged in recent years is a distinct, self-consciously networked transnational movement of populist nationalisms (Hoffman & Ware, 2023). This movement has discarded traditional conservative concerns in favor of a nationalism grounded in common themes, including the demonization of those who defy dominant ethnic, patriarchal power structures as traitors to the nation. It might seem odd, for example, that a Jewish nationalist leader like Netanyahu would make common cause with other leaders whose nationalism is grounded in antisemitism, such as Hungary’s Orbán. Rather than dismiss these oddities, however, I suggest that they raise both a key point and a key question that are essential to a human rights–based perspective on the interconnected populist, antidemocratic nationalism present in so many countries.

The key point involves a shared political imaginary. Netanyahu allies his political project to projects of antisemitic nationalism knowing that, beyond the obvious contradiction, they are based on analogous conceptions of political community: that the political community should be based on one ethnic group rather than coming to terms with the inherent pluralism of all states and societies (Sternhell, 2019). These various populist nationalisms can uplift one another’s projects—despite the cognitive dissonance of Jewish nationalists and antisemitic ideologues working together—by cooperating against the forces advancing human rights and pluralist representation. Populist nationalisms share a common, connected basis: they use myths of unitary social-cultural fabrics under threat to advance emotions that support exclusionary conceptions of political community over pluralist coexistence. So, despite the irony, if an ethnic group is at the center of each nationalism claiming power in distinct national spheres, there is no reason for them not to cooperate in a common struggle against global norms that challenge their antipluralism. Netanyahu, Orbán, and the other populist nationalist leaders mentioned by abd el-Fattah (and others) are certainly not wrong in one sense. Human rights norms are, indeed, the most powerful global political imaginary in challenging nationalist imaginaries, which is why it is so crucial that they be empowered (Rodríguez-Garavito & Gomez, 2018).

The key question, thus, is how to combat nationalism grounded in emotive motifs such as “Family, Faith, and Fatherland” or the Trumpist variant “God, Family, and Guns” (Højderstrand, 2020). The simple but insufficient answer is that a pluralist, human rights–informed conception of political community is an obvious antidote to nationalism. This may well be true, and although such an answer may be rational in the lecture hall, it lacks the powerful emotional pull of nationalist imaginaries. This brings us back to the lessons from Colombia, where activists have worked to build emotional connections by creating compelling narratives to advance transitional justice and human rights frameworks. If nationalisms are grounded in a shared, deeply felt sense of familial community, this provides a model for devising compelling narratives that tell—with equally powerful emotion—a story of more inclusive forms of political community that can grab our collective political imaginations.

The stakes are enormous. The challenge of creating a pluralist political culture is one that human rights movements and transitional justice processes have long failed to meet. The case of Colombia provides insight into innovative ways that grassroots social movements can change the conception of who constitutes a political community in polarized societies that are dealing with mass atrocities or long-standing structural violence justified by nationalist narratives. Models from different parts of the world are available to inform, transform, and empower political imaginaries to galvanize positive support for antinationalist visions of political community. Such models need not be exclusively mediated by international institutions; nor do they need to flow from the Global North to the Global South.

In a US context​, the Colombian case highlights the relevance ​of learning from ​transitional ​processes that ​seek to open space for ​grassroots-impelled visions of political societies that empower subaltern communities. There are several specific lessons relevant to the United States’ history of racial injustice. One is that Colombia’s “transitional” justice process started well before there was a peace deal, and it continued, despite the demobilization of the FARC, while conflict raged unabated in much of the country. This punctures the myth that transitional justice architecture should come into play for only a limited time after a country transitions out of authoritarianism or a violent conflict (Wiebelhaus-Brahm, 2019). Even if there is no ongoing “high-risk” situation, as in Colombia, underlying structures of exclusion and violence often remain. Many tools in the transitional justice arsenal are relevant to such structures. Specifically, tools such as truth and accountability processes linked to memory work and symbolic reparations are urgently needed in the US. Indeed, there are already numerous local initiatives focused on these elements. Such initiatives could benefit from the experiences of transitional justice in other parts of the world, such as Colombia.

The lesson of broader relevance is that movements for social change grounded in global human rights or linked to transitional justice principles must find more evocative ways to engage their political communities. Regarding human rights, Rodríguez-Garavito (2021) states a predicament that returns us to the theme of populist nationalism:

The success of populist and anti-rights movements and governments in gaining majority support has made visible another limitation of the human rights field, that is, its relatively narrow membership and audience…. Conventional human rights organizations and narratives—with their reliance on legal language and their larger membership in the global North—have failed to engage with and appeal to large sectors of the population, including the young and the “persuadable middle” sectors in increasingly polarized societies. (p. 9)

It is here that we return to art as a form of social-political communication, as so powerfully illustrated by the communal art projects in Colombia. Populist nationalism has a compelling narrative: the ethnic family is under attack by those who would pollute its purity. To counter this narrative we need equally compelling narratives of different, more open forms of community that challenge inequalities, empower those who have been rendered invisible, and demand economic and political rights (Wills Obregon, 2022, p. 22). This cultural work opens up space for stories that resonate with the lived realities that connect rather than divide people across racial, ethnic, gender, and sexuality differences. This space allows populations to collectively experience human rights aligned with their aspirations. Or, as Shadi Mokhtari writes, it invites communities to “engage with human rights and place faith in the notion that they should fight to obtain its emancipatory promise despite their longstanding exclusion” (Mokhtari, 2023, p. 661).

Conclusion

This article has explored how Colombia’s transitional justice is grounded in grassroots ownership of truth and accountability processes, which in turn are grounded in art and memory work. This speaks to a central puzzle of our time: how to create emotional support for abstract notions of pluralist politics. This is relevant both to the particular case of Colombia and to political communities around the world struggling with how to create an alternative to the siren song of xenophobic nationalism. I suggest three partial answers to that puzzle.

• First, it is urgent that human rights be located in the local rather than the global. As Goodhart observes, the emancipatory potential of human rights can best be realized in “place-based, politicized, radical, and people-centered politics” (Goodhart, 2023, p. 42). I would add, however, that “local” must not be defined in an insular, siloed manner; rather, it should be based on a recognition of how localities are globally interconnected through both transnational identities and global norms, laws, and institutions. It is urgent to simultaneously have space for local place-based politics, translocal networks, and global solidarities and tools (Chase, 2023, pp. 5–8).

• Second, we must move beyond “international” human rights to the extent this implies a top-down diffusion of norms from a central source (Sikkink, 2017, p. 250). Given that human rights now seem to be more resonant in the Global South than the Global North, horizontal borrowings, including from the Global South, are an increasingly obvious source of creative ideas and energy (Dancy & Fariss, 2023).

• Third, building off the two prior points, for too long, human rights have been about “vernacularizing” international law at the local level rather than allowing social movements to not only use human rights at the local level but also determine what human rights can become across the globe (Chase, 2012; Madhok, 2023). What has been discussed in this article is just one example of the “processes whereby local actors, including subaltern groups, introduce modifications and neologisms into the vocabulary and even the grammar of human rights” and transitional justice (Rodríguez-Garavito, 2023, p. xix).

Abd el-Fattah gives the clear admonition that forces of democracy and human rights need to have global solidarity if they expect to confront globally fueled nationalist movements. Just as nationalisms learn and borrow from and support one another, an expanded political imaginary of pluralist coexistence can be informed by global sources. But to do so, I would argue that the traditional conceptions of “global”—largely limited to the transmission of ideas from the Gobal North to the Global South or from international organizations to nation-states—must be expanded. There must be a shift from traditional vertical forms of global networking to include more horizontal, transnational exchanges that allow mutual learning from grassroots political actions worldwide.

Nothing discussed here is a magic bullet to counter nationalist myths in Colombia, the United States, or elsewhere. But it provides a point of departure, recognizing that social and cultural change is as essential as legal and institutional change and that mutual learning is needed to inform structural political transformation. In short: if we hope to transform our political imaginaries, we would do well to experiment with how interconnected localities around the world can engage in human rights via truth, art, and memory processes. We need to create new spaces to dream of the sorts of resistance and change that are urgently needed in a world on fire.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anthony Tirado Chase

Anthony Tirado Chase is a professor of Diplomacy and World Affairs at Occidental College. Chase’s publications on human rights include the books Human Rights at the Intersections (co-edited with Mahdavi, Banai, and Gruskin, Bloomsbury, 2023); Handbook on Human Rights and the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge, 2017), Human Rights, Revolution, and Reform in the Muslim World (2012), and Human Rights in the Arab World: Independent Voices (co-edited with Amr Hamzawy, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Notes

1 Saffon Sanín adds: “The unfulfilled promises of social transformation that the agreement makes have offered grounds for potential beneficiaries to organize, politically participate, and make demands, which significantly threaten the interests of regional elites who have traditionally gained from violence” (Saffon Sanín, 2021, p. 72).

2 The Truth Commission’s formal name is Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición—Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence, and Nonrepetition.

3 This brief summary draws from the masters’ thesis of Juana Alicia Ruiz Hernández, Mujeres Tejedoras de Mampuján: Un Tejido con Sabor a Paz (Women Weavers of Mampuján: Weaving that Tastes of Peace). It is worth noting that Ruiz Hernández is one of the weavers of Mampuján.