Abstracts Communications and the Arts

Gobernanza de la comunicación pública en escenarios de conflicto

by Mario Fernando Guerrero Gutiérrez

The Peacebuilding model is the most used by peacekeeping missions at the international level, in the most diverse areas of armed conflict throughout the world; however, peace process monitoring statistics show the weakness of the model for the transformation of the conflict in the long term, with persistent high probabilities of recurrence of armed violence, especially in those societies where internal armed conflicts have occurred, whose logics of development differentiate them from international armed conflicts. The clearly identifiable axes of the model are the demobilization and reintegration of combatants from irregular groups, transitional justice and victim reparation mechanisms, and strategies for statebuilding and strengthening of democracy, but it is possible to identify as a lack of the model the lack of broad strategies and actions focused on the field of communication-culture, areas where the inertia and long-term logic of a society are precisely housed. Taking into account the lack detected, and understanding that internal armed conflicts alter and disturb the basic structures of a society (unlike international wars, they take place not in concentrated theaters of war or battle fronts, but within the very heart of the societies), this research objective is to understand the way in which the flows of public communication are modified by the conflict, that is, to establish the correlation between internal armed conflict and public communication, in order to consolidate a nucleus of guidelines for governance of public communication that complement the international model of peacebuilding and whose implementation, in societies undergoing peace processes, contribute to the transformation of the conflict, social reconciliation and provide guarantees of non-repetition of armed violence in the logic of long-term peacebuilding. The research is based on the comparison of three emblematic cases of societies that have suffered internal armed conflicts, such as Ireland, South Africa and Colombia; the most important dimensions of public communication are examined in each one of them, by the light of an analytical model developed, and the conclusions of several empirical investigations that over the last decades have already described and evidenced elements of the correlation between communication and conflict/peace in various countries. The research manages to establish a two-way correlation between public communication and the gestation and evolution of internal armed conflicts; thus, changes in public communication imply changes in the development of the conflict, and vice versa, the development of the conflict alters the public sphere; This correlation is inversely proportional, according to which deformations and reductions in public communication lead to the escalation of the conflict, or on the contrary, the strengthening of public communication contributes to the de-escalation of armed conflicts, that is, to the construction of peace. Thus, the fundamental importance of the field of communication-culture in…