How Colombia Faces Its Past

(Image by ABEMOS/iStock)  

Human rights researchers have long known that countries adopt international norms in different ways. A new working paper by Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, a research affiliate at UCLA School of Law’s Promise Institute for Human Rights, examines Colombia’s implementation of transitional justice programs. She finds that internal political concerns spur countries to treat international human rights standards as a menu from which they can choose certain parts while ignoring others.

“This article introduces the concept of selective decoupling to better explain how states adopt some components of a policy that signals a commitment to a global standard, while rejecting or altering other aspects in response to national pressures,” Dunkell writes.

The paper examines Colombia’s struggle to make peace after its brutal five-decade civil war between government soldiers and allied paramilitaries, on one side, and Marxist-Leninist guerrillas, known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), on the other. The country went through two separate processes to implement transitional justice: the first in 2005, when paramilitary groups fighting on the government side were granted limited amnesty, and the second in 2016, when the government and the FARC agreed on amnesty for the guerrillas under different terms.

These two different attempts at transitional justice raise a puzzle for Dunkell: “Why did the same country design such dissimilar types of transitional justice at different points in time?”

Previous researchers have found that leaders frequently signal their compliance with international norms by signing human rights treaties or announcing broad commitments and sweeping programs. These findings conform to world society theory, which holds that global institutions and norms shape the behavior of nations, organizations, and individuals. But leaders and their governments often abandon or fail to implement promised changes. To address this problem, Dunkell takes an approach that further refines the theory.

“Rather than examining decoupling as something that happens after a policy or institution is established, my research considers the strategic agency of government officials in the state who selectively decouple an approach when it is being designed,” she writes.

Between 2015 and 2017, Dunkell did 16 months of fieldwork in Colombia. She conducted 59 formal and 93 informal interviews with participants on both sides of the two sets of government negotiations with civil war participants. This enabled her to look at transitional justice as it took shape during the 2016 talks.

In the last two decades, transitional justice has taken hold around the world as a global norm. The idea of transitional justice encompasses four standards: justice, truth, reparations, and non-repetition—a commitment that the same types of crimes will not recur. During negotiations to bring a civil war to an end, it can be politically unfeasible to prosecute and imprison each perpetrator according to the country’s ordinary judicial procedures. Under a transitional justice program, the country would instead impose different punishments or settlements on perpetrators, such as paying compensation to victims’ families, rebuilding a school, or divulging details about how specific people were killed during the conflict, Dunkell says.

“It’s so important to be able to properly bury a loved one, to know what happened,” she says.

As the Colombian government works to build trust among its citizens, the country has struggled to restart civil services that were under attack during the war years and to assert control over remote areas. These challenges have influenced how the government treats former FARC guerrillas; some of its agreements deviate from accepted transitional justice norms.

“I’m revealing the interests and power relations that shape how transitional justice is administered,” she says.

“The paper highlights a more nuanced set of dynamics that lie between truth and justice, as well as accountability and impunity among other issues,” says Yan Long, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She says the study’s contributions include illustrating how transitional justice processes neither uniformly track a global standard nor stay the same, but instead evolve as they are shaped by individuals and the political context.

This article appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of the magazine with the headline: "How Colombia Faces Its Past"

Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.