Rebels, Romantics and Prophets. The responsibility of Priests, Politicians and Intellectuals in the Colombian Armed Conflict

Colombia is in an ongoing peace and transitional justice process between the Government and the FARC guerrilla since 2016. However, that country still faces a cultural and political dispute over the narrative of the origins, development, and effects of the armed conflict and its main responsible actors.  As a way of contributing to a much needed clarification process, Dr. Iván Garzón Vallejo’s volume proposes a classification around political and religious violence debates. First, the rebels who took up arms and joined the emergent guerrillas. Second, the romantics, who assume an ambiguous position; that is, those who condemned the violence, but at the same time, they approved or excused an exceptional use of force towards achieving social changes.  And third, the prophets, who believed that social changes could be achieved within democratic rules and, indeed, they rejected an agreement with the Devil, as Weber calls the option for violence.

Dr. Iván Garzón Vallejo will present his book.  Dr. Iván Garzón Vallejo is currently a Visiting Researcher at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Advisor of the Colombian Truth Commission and the National Center of Historical Memory. He currently teaches at Universidad de los Andes (Colombia) and Universidad Internacional de la Rioja-UNIR (Spain). He is the author and editor of six books and over fifty academic works about topics such as political theory, philosophy of law and constitutional law. He was Visiting researcher at Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs from Georgetown University and visiting scholar at Missouri State University. His issues of research are: Politics of memory; Liberalism, democracy and contemporary ethical debates and Politics, religion and violence. He holds a PhD in Political Sciences from Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina (Buenos Aires) and a law degree from Universidad Pontifici a Bolivariana (Medellín) with Philosophy studies.

Dr. Jenny Pearce, Research Professor at LSE’s Latin America and Caribbean Centre, will discuss the book. Jenny Pearce is Research Professor in the Latin American and Caribbean Centre at the LSE. She was Professor of Latin American Politics in the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford 1992-2016. She is a political scientist with area expertise in Latin America. She works with anthropological and participatory research methodologies on social change, violence, security, power and participation in the region. She considers herself a peace scholar, committed to theoretical development of the field of peace, power and violence as well as empirical study. She has conducted fieldwork since the 1980s in Colombia, Central America, Mexico, Chile, Brazil and Venezuela, and has published widely.   She was Visiting Professor at the University of Monterey (2014), Mexico, and the Bolivariana University, Medellin, Colombia, and at Edgehill University (2014-2019) . In July 2015 she was awarded an honour as ‘Outstanding Latin Americanist’ by the International Conference of Americanists (ICA) at their conference in El Salvador. She was Principal Investigator on the ESRC/Conacyt Newton Project : ‘Co-Constructing Security in Mexico: From Communities to the State’ 2016-2018. Her latest book is  ‘Politics without Violence? Towards a Post Weberian Enlightenment’.

Eduardo Gutiérrez Gonzalez, DPhil Student at Blackfriars Hall with a scholarship associated to Las Casas Institute, will guide the discussion.

Contact:
Las Casas Institute
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk