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Gwen Burnyeat, 2022, The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in 
Colombia. Chicago University Press. 320 pp., ISBN: 9780226821627 
 
In a national referendum held October 2nd, 2016, Colombians rejected the peace agreement 

their government had negotiated with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, 

commonly known as FARC. President Santos amended the deal, skirted the people and sent it 

to Congress, which ratified it. Implementation began December 1st. The Office of the High 

Commissioner for Peace, a state dependency, launched several projects under the aegis of 

“peace pedagogy”: a mission to educate Colombians on the contents of the 297-page document 

that was to end five decades of war. The Face of Peace is the result of Burnyeat’s ethnography 

of peace pedagogy, its bureaucrats, and their ardent belief that disagreement is a 

misunderstanding in need of a technical key. 

 

The book is divided into two parts. The first, Anthrohistory of the Santos Government, spans 

the first three chapters. In Chapter 1, Burnyeat examines how Santos’ accession to power 

consolidated a liberal (or in Slobodian’s (2018) sense of the term, globalist) government 

worldview, including the hiring of global marketing agencies to woo combatants into peace 

(44). Formally declaring the conflict an internal war opened it to international humanitarian 

law and to a liberal peace paradigm; Chapter 2 examines how, in peace pedagogy, this 

paradigm is propelled forward by a “rationality drive” that sees its own work of explaining 

peace as technical as opposed to political in both the conversational sense of “governmental” 

and in the sense of the given hierarchy of values of a worldview (104). “The Antipolitics of 

Cultural Liberalism,” Chapter 3, opposes Juan Manuel Santos and ex-president and agreement 

skeptic (my term) Alvaro Uribe to flesh out how the liberal common sense conflates the 

political with politicking, manipulation and dishonesty, so that technocratic utopianism can 

dismiss its internal other: the irrational, backward populist (117). 

 

The second part, Ethnography of Peace Pedagogy in Action, begins with Chapter 4, where we 

join a peace pedagogy officer during a town visit to examine how these officers produce 



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legitimacy for themselves, the agreement and the government in the key of explanations, “the 

culturally liberal mode of government communication with society” (133). Chapter 5, “State-

Consciousness: Three Layers of Responsibility and Trust” shows how, having decided that 

“information” was “too technical” and “not emotional enough,” peace pedagogy practitioners 

organised popular sessions to target people’s emotions: always anxious about falling in the 

“populist” trap of “misinformation,” they aimed for a kind of cultural authenticity, lodged 

inside the suffering subjects of tokenised diversity, to complement their sense of their own 

rationality (163, 169). Chapter 6 looks at a version of the political these officers did not 

pathologise: liaising, be it with other organisations, popular leaders or local authorities. Chapter 

7, the last one, examines how international organisations’ demands, funds and timing shaped 

the work of peace pedagogy consultants, comfortably middle class and liberal/globalist in 

outlook but increasingly set in the “elite precarity” (215) proper to short term contracts and 

project managerialism.  

 

This is one of the first book-length ethnographies to come out on the issue of the post-truth, 

dis/misinformation and the political, speaking from a refreshing vantage in a singularly perfect 

case study. The Face of Peace is an exceptional examination of how technocratic reason co-

opted the political philosophy of liberalism (in the historically accurate sense of the latter term), 

confusing its own penchant for trivial technicalities with the latter’s sense of what makes 

political virtue. Simply put: the entire book pivots on the paradox that these officers were 

charged with explaining the reasons the peace agreement was good – and, I add, the particular 

form of peace it proposed –but without campaigning for the agreement, or actually endorsing 

it in any way, even though they were hired by the very government that produced and 

negotiated that particular agreement. “Pedagogy but not politics” (15) is fine and dandy on 

paper, but as the inevitable question then becomes “how do we tell the difference?” great 

ethnographic potential ensues. Burnyeat’s analysis of these anxieties, and ultimately of the 

triangulations between liberal philosophy, technocratic cultures and populism they lead to 

(106-117) is particularly sharp, advancing debates on all three fronts. 

 

Of interest is also the author’s judicious examination of how this reason found its ethnographic 

limits. These officers explained to themselves their defeat in the referendum as a result of 

having been too technical, “not emotional enough,” and of the success of the other campaign’s 

lies; doubling down on their own reasons they told themselves in order to succeed they had to 

educate the people and “be emotional” (101, 103, also 162). With both argumentative rigour 



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and ethnographic generosity, Burnyeat honors her interlocutors’ explanation of their defeat 

without necessarily endorsing it, makes room for their frustration with their campaign 

opponents and refuses trivial nihilistic relativism: “Uribe’s ‘myths,’ however, were often 

barefaced lies that deliberately sought to misinform. Critiquing liberal claims of objective truth 

should not create false equivalences between the inescapable biases of always-already situated 

knowledge and intentional post-truth” (52-53).  

 

From a certain political reading, those ethnographic limits tease perhaps the boundaries of the 

argument. The author was herself a peacebuilding practitioner before the referendum (11), and 

when doing peace pedagogy for her ethnography she used a documentary she produced to 

discuss why the agreement and all its terms were necessary to end the conflict (93). She 

positions herself with frankness: “in everything I did, I was firmly on the side of civil society 

and of peace” (12). Recognising the crucial difference between explaining how a set of people 

saw “peace” as “technical” and opposed it as “political” and endorsing that opposition is partly 

what makes this book a success – but the analogous difference with respect to the opposition 

between “peace” as absence of conflict and “peace” as in the exact content of this 297-page 

agreement is now harder to find. It is, of course, not the author’s work in this book to examine 

the arguments presented by anyone who opposed this agreement, simply because that’s not 

what the book is about, but this positionality and ethnographic approach make it harder to 

develop a language for, for example, those who did want peace – just not this particular version 

of it. Or to understand other, equally technical, arguments someone may have made against 

this peace, against several parts of the agreement, or against the fact of declaring peace. By the 

author’s own description in the second half of the book, many different parts of “civil society” 

actually disagreed with the agreement or even with declaring peace. “The side of peace” has, 

in a sense, collided with “Peace,” such that the dichotomy technical-political the book so 

expertly problematises now haunts us in the guise of peace-antipeace. 

 

I suspect the author was aware of this risk, as the conclusion takes the argument forward by 

resorting to neurosciences and other such disciplines exploring in their own assumptions how 

humans are never rational, how affects, emotions and ambiguities permeate all our decisions, 

and so on. This is undoubtedly an exciting direction, but sceptical readers may find the turn to 

the brain and to affect as much of a fix as the turn to the technical, shying away from our actual 

political condition: that where they may be a perfectly “rational,” reasoned, aseptic, case for 

not having this peace. 



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These considerations notwithstanding, The Face of Peace is an exciting, original, timely 

contribution to the growing field of studies concerned with truth battles, but also important to 

anthropologies of bureaucracy, technocracy, government, NGOs and the political, as well as 

sociology, geography, development studies and cultural studies. The prose is clear, all 

arguments are well contained and the book does not presuppose knowledge of Colombia or of 

the theories it uses, making great course material from early undergraduate years onwards.  

 
Works Cited: 
 
Slobodian, Quinn. 2018. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. 
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
 
Juan del Nido is Research Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Max Cam Centre for 

Ethics, Economy and Social Change. His work focuses on political and economic reasoning, 

and has been published by Economic Anthropology, The Cambridge Journal of 

Anthropology, The Anthropology of Work Review, and Hipertextos. His book Taxis vs. Uber: 

Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires, (Stanford U. Press, 2021) examining post-

political reasoning in the conflict around Uber’s arrival in Argentina was awarded the Carol 

R. Ember Book Prize by the Society for Anthropological Sciences. 

 

© 2023 Juan del Nido 

 


