Political community without negotiation? 'Radical disagreement' and the ethical dimensions of the search for peace in Colombia

Abstract

A possible 'non-negotiated solution' to the Colombian conflict is an idea that some appear to take seriously (it was the topic of an international conference on the Colombian conflict at the University of Oxford in 2009, which I attended). However, this article argues that far from providing a solution, the idea of a non-negotiated way out of the armed conflict carries the danger of suppressing or ignoring its underlying social and political conflicts, which can lead to the possibility that violence will simply later reignite. The construction of a genuine political community in the highly complex Colombian context requires not only a negotiation between the state and the insurgency, but also a negotiation between all social sectors on the basic premises of the national project and the conditions and presuppositions of coexistence; a task that calls for rigorous philosophical exploration and clarification. Such a task implies the search for rationally constructed consensuses, which necessarily involves and interpellates the social sciences whose objective is to analyze the conflict in order to find possible ways out and appropriate responses. However, it is argued that neoKantian and Habermasian philosophical approaches, to which various theorists and analysts have turned, is inadequate. This is also the case with Orlando Fals Borda’s conception of the relation between theory and practice, today reinterpreted by some in terms of discourse ethics. It is held that the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre provides better resources for understanding and overcoming the problem of 'radical disagreement', which affects both the social sciences and society with its problematic relations between communities and the state.