I am currently researching stories and experiences of polarisation in Colombia and Britain, and the strategies used by people and organisations to build bridges across difficult political divides, with a focus on storytelling.
Previous research projects include a study of Colombian government officials attempting to counter disinformation about the peace process with the FARC guerrilla in a context of historic distrust in the state, before and after a divisive referendum, and a study of cocoa-farmers in a conflict region in Colombia who declared themselves neutral to the armed conflict and build peace in the midst of violence.
Research
Stories of Divided Politics:
Polarisation and Bridgebuilding in Colombia and Britain
Individuals and organisations who build bridges across political divides
I am Principal Investigator of the 2023 European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (now UKRI-funded), hosted at the University of Edinburgh. This project builds on pilot research conducted as a Junior Research Fellow in Anthropology at Merton College, University of Oxford, about polarisation in post-peace accord Colombia, for which I conducted five months of ethnographic fieldwork over two visits in 2021-22, listening to a cross-section of people in different regions with different political orientations about their experiences of political divisions.
The ERC project began in February 2024. It will draw on my experiences of the Colombian peace process to study it alongside the political divisions in my own society, Britain, doing fieldwork in both countries with people and organisations who try to build bridges across complex political divides.
Project Abstract:
Colombia and Britain both held referendums in 2016—in Colombia on a peace accord, in Britain on Brexit—leaving enduring identity divides, and fostering widespread narratives about each society being more divided than ever. "Stories of Divided Politics" is a five-year project which seeks to understand how different individuals and organisations in both countries attempt to build bridges between politically divided sectors, with an emphasis on the role of stories and storytelling. The project will be anchored in the anthropology of politics, which studies the role of culture in people’s political opinions, ideologies and identities, and in everyday experiences of political conflict; and will draw also on political science studies of polarisation, which examine broader pictures of societal divisions. It will conduct long-term ethnographic studies in both countries, following the work of bridgebuilders of different kinds, to document and analyse this filigree relationship-building work, which is often emotionally taxing and receives little recognition. As well as carrying out participant observation at bridgebuilders' events around each country, the project will also co-convene dialogues and workshops with bridgebuilding practitioners, co-constructing findings and analyses with them, and creating a network of bridgebuilders who can share knowledge and experiences and learn from each other. The project aims to re-shape academic and popular understandings of how people live with political divisions and build bridges across them, by adding nuance and complexity to current theories about divided societies, developing a framework for comparative research on political divisions, and informing global policies on the increasingly urgent problem of polarisation and the many kinds of violence and hostility it can engender, as well as offering anayses and recommendations about how to work with polarised sectors.
Links:
Article in The Journal of Language and Politics about the narrative identity divides left by the 2016 peace accord, conceptualising the way that national narratives ripple through different storied contexts as “reverberations” that act on the lived experiences of identity boundaries: https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.24099.bur#abstract_content
Read a short story in Otherwise Magazine about a right-wing cattle-rancher-turned-peacebuilder in Colombia, trapped between two opposing sides: https://www.otherwisemag.com/between-two-waters
And read an author Q&A about the story, and on combining ethnographic research and fiction: https://www.otherwisemag.com/meet-the-author-gwen-burnyeat
Read a blog co-authored with Andrei Gómez-Suárez and Clara Rocío Rodríguez about polarisation and reconciliation five years after the Colombian peace referendum (in Spanish):
https://razonpublica.com/cinco-anos-despues-del-plebiscito-la-paz-polarizacion-reconciliacion/
Watch the webinar which inspired this blog (in Spanish, Gwen’s section starts at 36.20):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2ZeyMo4-og&ab_channel=RodeemoselDi%C3%A1logo
Read a short story about a woman experiencing polarisation within her own family over the Colombian peace referendum, ‘Milena’, in Confluence Magazine: https://www.confluencemagazine.co.uk/confluence-issue-14
Read a short story about polarisation and conspiracy theory in Oxford and Colombia, ‘Where’s My Freedom of Movement’, in Critical Muslim: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/critical-muslim-48/
Watch an interview on Chilean TV program La voz de los que sobran in which Gwen Burnyeat and Hassan Akram compare the Colombian and Chilean referendums (in Spanish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcD6F2zs410&t=10s&ab_channel=LaVozDeLosQueSobran
Links:
In 2016, Colombian society narrowly rejected a peace accord signed with the FARC guerrilla which sought to end fifty years of war, amid a disinformation campaign in which opponents of the deal claimed it would turn Colombia communist and impose homosexuality on schoolchildren. The Office of the High Commissioner for Peace (OACP), the branch of the government in charge of the peace negotiations, was tasked with explaining the peace process to society before and after the referendum. They created a strategy called “peace pedagogy”, a world first in peace process, in which government officials travelled the country giving talks to different audiences about the peace agreement, in a context of entrenched distrust toward the state. I spent a year with the pedagogy team studying their experiences translating the peace agreement for public opinion, and more broadly, the role of government-society relations in the peace process.
This project, based on my PhD at University College London, thanks to a Wolfson Foundation Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities, led to my second book, The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia (University of Chicago Press 2022 and Spanish translation, Editorial del Rosario 2024), an ethnography of government officials in the Colombian peace process. The book problematises liberal fantasies about using rationality as an antidote to disinformation, populism and so-called ‘post-truth’ politics, and argues that although the Santos government achieved a technically brilliant peace agreement, its downfall was the failure to build a strong alliance between government and society for peace. My PhD thesis won the 2021 LASA/Oxfam Martin Diskin Dissertation Award, and the book won the 2023 Public Anthropologist Award.
This project also resulted in three peer-reviewed articles: one in the Bulletin of Latin American Research about the problem of distrust in the state in the peace process, one in Critique of Anthropology theorising the concept of “cultural liberalism” to analyse the OACP’s responses to disinformation, and one in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute proposing the “face of the government” as an analytical framework that furthers the anthropology of the state by bringing theories of the face in to the understanding of government-society relations.
Read a blog for the LSE Latin American and Caribbean Centre about this project, ‘Colombia’s Unsung Heroes’:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2018/06/07/colombias-unsung-heroes/
Read a blog from Palgrave Macmillan’s Author Perspectives:
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/blogs/perspectives-in-politics-international-studies/gwen-burnyeat-blog
Listen to a podcast from the Oxford Transitional Justice Research Network in which Gwen presents the book Chocolate, Politics and Peace-building:
Listen to Gwen speak about this work on a podcast all about chocolate called Well Tempered:
Video clip of Gwen summarising the book for the Spanish edition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dLWJBMLrKw&ab_channel=EditorialUniversidaddelRosario
Watch the video of the launch of the Spanish edition in the Libería Lerner in Bogotá: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMoTMVYobuQ&ab_channel=LERNER
Links:
Read a blog about this project for Anthropology News:
https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/government-peace-pedagogy-in-colombia/
Listen to Gwen speak about the book on the Talking Peace, Exploring Conflict podcast:
Listen to Gwen speak about the book on the New Books Network podcast:
Read an interview with Gwen for the 2023 Public Anthropologist Award:
https://publicanthropologist.cmi.no/2023/02/22/winner-of-the-public-anthropologist-award-2023/
Read a newspaper article Gwen co-authored with Colombian colleagues María Paula Prada and María Isabel Cristina González about lessons learned from government peace pedagogy in Revista Semana (in Spanish):
Watch the webinar ‘Dis/information and peace’ in which Gwen shares lessons from the Colombian referendum (Gwen starts at 1.10.20):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noHgQcj2jDE&t=2s&ab_channel=RodeemoselDi%C3%A1logo
Read a blog about government peace pedagogy amid distrust in the state for The Conversation.
The Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, one of the most high-profile grassroots peacebuilding organisations in Colombia, is a community of rural cocoa-farmers in the conflict zone of Urabá, who were trapped between left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and state armed forces, and declared themselves neutral to the war as a protection strategy. It is really thanks to them that I became an anthropologist. I first met them when I was working in Urabá as a conflict observer and international accompanier with Peace Brigades International, then I studied a Master’s in anthropology at the National University of Colombia and continued working with them as a researcher, thanks to a Leverhulme Trust Study-Abroad Scholarship and an ICETEX grant.
This research led to my first book, Chocolate, Politics and Peace-Building: An Ethnography of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, Colombia (Palgrave Macmillan 2018 and Spanish translation, Editorial del Rosario 2022) which documents their history, and argues that their everyday cacao farming work illuminates their political identity, an article in anthropology journal Antípoda about the Community’s rupture with the Colombian state, and my film, Chocolate of Peace.