Project Details
Projekt
Courts in Transition: Judges, Peace, and Politics in Colombia’s Peace Processes
Applicant
Jan Boesten, Ph.D.
Subject Area
Political Science
African, American and Oceania Studies
African, American and Oceania Studies
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 452411306
The project is embedded in an Oxford/Berlin Research Partnership with CONPEACE at the University of Oxford. My research project focuses on the unfolding peace process with Colombia’s formerly strongest guerrilla organization, FARC-EP (Spanish acronym for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army, hereafter FARC). My project has real-time policy benefits and is consciously designed as a transdisciplinary research project that engages in knowledge exchange with various social actors, ranging from civil society, political decision-makers to the private sector.Transitions with ANSAs have normative, as well as macro and micro institutional ramifications. The FARC peace process offers the opportunity of a systematic comparison with a past peace process between the Colombian government and the AUC, a counterinsurgency group. The same context conditions of both peace processes allow for the application of a most similar systems research design with two armed non-state actors (ANSAs). In order to focuse on the effects of armed conflict on relations between political and violent actors—both at the national and sub-national level (and the interconnection between both)—and I explore the differences between the two peace processes on three levels:1) Normative effects: How does the normative definition of the “political crime” in the FARC Peace Process differ in its substance and interpretation from the “political crime” in the Justice and Peace Process? 2) Macro institutional effects: How does the trajectory of political dynamics differ between the Justice and Peace and the FARC Peace process and as a consequence affect the separations of powers differently?3) Micro institutional effects: How does the onset and progression of the transitional justice process affect the security landscape differently in marginalized zones of the country at the sub-national level? This comparison provides nuanced analyses for the contention between Transitional Justice and Transformative Justice over the effects of structural violence and the ability of legal parameters to address such violations. By systematically juxtaposing the effects of the two peace processes, my research contributes to understanding the production of legal reasoning as well as the effects of normative frameworks. As transitions alter relations between the branches of government, this research also sheds light on their consequences for separation of powers systems. Finally, the systematic comparison of transitions will also help to extrapolate the sources of order during armed conflict, the potential for uncertainty during transitions resulting from shifts of the local security landscapes, and contribute to developing a valid definition of institutions in the context of non-state order.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Canada, United Kingdom
Co-Investigator
Professor Dr. Sergio Costa
