In this interview, Dr. Prof. Salamanca Rangel of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia, tells about his work as a research partner in the PRIO led project Red Lines and Grey Zones: exploring the ethics of humanitarian negotiation (RedLines).
Could you please introduce yourself? I am a researcher and professor at the Javeriana Universidad in Bogota, Colombia. I hold a PhD at Deusto University in Bilbao and also have been a researcher at the postdoctoral level at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research in Uppsala. In the last three years I have been part of a team of the Red Lines and Grey Zones project. Basically, I have had a relation with the humanitarian field, trying to build what we call the nexus between humanitarian action, peace building (which is my primary field of work and expertise), and development.
What has your role in the project been? I have to give you context to explain my relationship with this. It all started with research that we carried out on the situation of confinement in Colombia long ago – in 2011 actually. We finished the first study of that specific humanitarian situation that implies that communities are affected by armed actors that confine them or place them somewhere else. They seclude them and by those means both the mobility and access to minimum goods for survival is interrupted at different levels.
So PRIO and the colleagues there knew about this, and this is where the relationship with the project started in 2022. From then we have been carrying out research, first of course conceptually, but also we need to get research in the field and this is where we started to develop a relationship with a local NGO working at a specific area in the Pacific South of Colombia, where communities were secluded. This is where we started to ask questions because what we actually witnessed was that the bigger the NGO, the less effective were the humanitarian negotiations that were carried out. We experienced this tension all the time between what was carried out officially and what was carried out at the local level, which led us to a whole discussion on what it was to actually have a concept of localization which the survival of the community depends upon.
We realized that what really worked was working at the most modest level possible, at the community level. And I have examples of that. The local NGO, called Pazame El Ballon, were organizing football tournaments in the secluded area, and by this means they did two things. One was to educate minors to develop skills to live in a conflict area. The whole seclusion came from the use of mines so actually they were for example teaching the kids to recognize where there were mines.
At the same time, in organizing the whole tournament they were able to understand the type of relationship that the community itself had with the armed actors in the area, and by means of telling them and negotiating with them both at the NGO level and at the community level, they had to negotiate with the armed actors, trespassing zones, trespassing invisible boundaries. They had to move from one little town to the other in the area to be able to play and this all happened by means of the football tournament. And that was a variation of what you could actually call the humanitarian negotiation. The NGO could not be there all the time and even if it was a very local and very small NGO doing this, at the very end the whole question was how to transfer these negotiation abilities to the people.
Well, let me tell you, they already know how to do it. It was us who were the intruders. It was us who didn't know how it happened. It was us who were to realize. And actually when we were there, more than anything, as an academic what I was doing was witnessing, you know, just closing my mouth to see how that happened because that really taught us about what the limits of our theories were. As you see, our mission was to find out how everything we know about formulas and recipes for humanitarian negotiation do not actually work when you are there. And you mentioned that there are many different actors in this. Could you elaborate on who were the most central actors? We have rebels – which is guerrilla movements of two kinds that are there – plus a very strong paramilitary presence, plus the army. So, the communities have to work and develop their daily life between these three types of actors and with each of them you have to develop a certain narrative because their political or non-political discourse is totally different from each other. In peace studies we have this author, Stathis Kalyvas, that works on the concept of how communities adapt to a certain reality. And what we saw is that depending on who you were talking to and how you were talking to them, you had a different narrative to develop. So that survival depended very much on what you achieved by means of how you talk to them.
Following this project, what will this research be useful for? How do you think it can be used? During all this time we were able to communicate broadly with a platform of organizations that is called the Humanitarian NGO Forum in Colombia. This is a platform that has something like 40 humanitarian organizations, and the work that we were doing with PRIO allowed us to talk to all of them. It was like a point of reference to say that also humanitarians could work with academia. It is not that common that the humanitarian world and the academic world talk, and I saw that as the first big result. We managed to put them to work together. So for the time of the project we were able to have the forum gather at the university periodically and we were able to have the discussion about what we said in practice and what we had in theory. I think that was a very important result of what we were doing. At the same time, we were able to organize different kinds of events.
And these events imply that we had a specific relationship with some of those humanitarian organizations. There was Save the Children, there was World Vision, there was Action Contra La Feme. And we were able to organize different types of events with Geneva Call. Those were Chatham House Rules events, in which all the discussions we had about these different situations that we were witnessing in the field were put on the table and used to try to influence the way in which policy was made. This was an example of what we call practical academia – or pracademia. We had a discussion, and I was sponsored by PRIO to do that, on how actually academia may become practical. And I think the humanitarian field and the topic of humanitarian negotiation are very good examples of how we as academics may become immediately useful while doing solid research for the future.
This interview was made by Sunniva Jægtvik (PRIO), in collaboration with Kristoffer Lidén.
