Democratic Security Policy and Human Rights Organizations in Colombia, 2002-2010: Explaining conflicting social identities from a historical perspective

Since 2003, the relations between the government and the Human Rights civil society organizations in Colombia have been characterized by extremely tense dialogues. Almost any existing scenarios of dialogue eventually broke up. Complex (and urgent) debates, both on human rights and on other economic and social issues, were being increasingly reduced to (and disguised into) particular criminal issues. The explanations of the tension have been kept in a very simple realm. Nevertheless, what I argue in this document is that this tension has much deeper roots. These roots can be traced in history and go as far as the genesis of the Colombian state in the first place and the conformation of the human rights civil society organizations in the second. Given the above problematic, this research contribute some elements to further explore the reasons why, if human rights are proclaimed to be universal values, and equally recognized and praised by all, in Colombia they are a particular place for political confrontation. In that sense, this research explores what are the deep causes behind the tension between these organizations and the Uribe’s government, and if it is human rights at the end what is making these two actors to be in confrontation or other constitutive dynamics of the Colombian history and reality. To explain the existing tension between these two actors and to find the deep causes of it, I use the Morphogenetic Approach of Margaret Archer, and the neo-Gramscian perspective of Robert Cox. The first chapter describes the tension between government and human rights organizations and places it in context. Chapter two presents the theoretical model, discusses its explanatory power over other frameworks, and elaborates on the proposed methodology. Chapters three, four and five read Colombian history through the morphogenetic lens by dividing it into its three stages: the Structural Conditioning, the Social Interaction and the Structural Elaboration. Chapter five complements the previous historical reconstruction with neo-gramscian elements. Combined, these two readings help explain the tension in unprecedented ways. Relevance to Development Studies This research applies a specific historical approach to unveil the political consciousness and institutional frameworks in a developing country. The approach can be replied for different situations and countries. Moreover deep explanations as the pro-posed one avoid the lack of rigor and ambition of most political understanding of our countries. Furthermore in a practical sense this paper opens the intuition that the actions of International Human Rights agencies and organizations in Colombia (and maybe the rest of Latin America) will be unavoidably get caught in national political struggles blurring by default its alleged universal principles and stands. This of course needs to be carefully addressed when talking about international cooperation for development in a country as Colombia.