Participation, Policy, and the Politics of Peace. Solving Problems of Conflict Through Civilian Inclusion

The 2012-2016 Colombian peace process between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had a stated goal of solving the problem of conflict and creating a lasting peace. Notably, it involved various public participatory mechanisms through which civilian stakeholders could contribute towards this goal. With its focus on civilian participation as part of a parallel peacebuilding process that avoids complicating attempts to agree a bilateral peace agreement between conflict parties, the current literature is unable to account for the more policy focused approach of the FARC-Santos peace process. Given the potential benefits of including civilian stakeholders in solving conflict issues that affect them - and the fact that future peace processes around the world tend to be based on incremental improvements to previous iterations - it is important to understand the impact of this design.

In this thesis, I seek to understand the extent to which the civilian input in the Colombian peace process was reflected in the substantive issues and solutions contained in the peace deal, the way that they were communicated, the resultant policies on paper once exposed to the ordinary politics of the legislative process, and the resultant policies in practice once accounting for the realities of the implementation stage. Additionally, I explore whether this civilian input is reflected in the way that the conflict parties presented the issues and solutions in their communications to the public. Given the large set of long-form text-data being analysed, I employ modern machine-learning techniques to perform much of the analysis since it not only overcomes the time and resource constraints but - given current technology - it also enables analysis to be more consistent, reliable and transparent than would be possible through manual coding and other forms of qualitative analysis alone.