The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Jose David Ortega Chávez, who shifts our focus to Colombia, and specifically to the peace narratives in the speeches of its four last presidents. The interest here is in which actors these narratives highlight, what political functions the narratives serve, and what view of the nation they construct.
This draws on the strategic narratives framework, which are understood as meaning-making devices employed by political actors. Their point is to influence the behaviour of others. This project gathered some 7,400 speeches from the four presidents, from both presidential archives and YouTube. Speeches were cleaned (especially for YouTube transcripts) and divided into meaningful paragraphs, and classified into being about conflict or peace, or other topics, using BERTopic.
Structural topic modelling was then applied to the conflict/peace corpus, and strategic narrative applied to the results from the topic modelling. Key narratives changed with each presidency: peace as restoration of state monopoly for Uribe, who especially addressed the state and paramilitary and guerilla groups as actors and emphasised the absence of violence as a result of these actions; as collective endeavour for development for Santos, who addressed the Colombian people as peacebuilders after the cessation of guerilla warfare; as institutional implementation for Duque, who mostly addressed the state as needing to continue the implementation of the post-2016 Peace Agreement; and as a national and social pact for Petro, who addressed the people, the state, ‘the territories’, and elites as emphasis shifted to the maintenance of social cohesion.
This shows three distinct understandings of peace: Uribe and Duque see it as requiring top-down approaches to peacebuilding; Santos articulates a more participatory approach linked with the development of Colombia as a nation; and Petro focusses on more bottom-up approaches to peacebuilding.
Which of these narratives are most constructive at fostering peace, then? Local agency and ownership is critical to peacebuilding, which privileges a bottom-up approach; durable peace also requires inclusion and participation; and greater narrative complexity can also help create conditions more conducive to peace. This might imply that Petro’s approach might be the most successful, then, but his policy also faced many legal and institutional constraints, which made it less successful.
Similar analyses may also be applied in other national contexts, then, and the approach presented here should also be able to be used for these. But of course there is also a need to further study the way such narratives are received by their audiences.
