In brief

In this guest blog, Gwen Burnyeat introduces her work researching bridgebuilders in Colombia and Britain: people seeking to create and nurture relationships across complex political divides. 

Often major social changes, from the end of Apartheid in South Africa to women’s suffrage in the UK, have been driven by a combination of resistance and bridgebuilding across difference. Gwen hopes to make the often painstaking work of bridgebuilding more visible. Read on to learn about Gwen’s preliminary findings from fieldwork in Colombia, and for an invitation to be a part of the research in Britain. 

For fifteen years I’ve been asking a question that has taken me from the mountains of Colombia to the Scottish Highlands: how do people build peace and live well together across deep political divides?

I am a political anthropologist, writer, and peacebuilder. I spent seven years working with a cacao-farming peace community in a war zone in Colombia, learning how they build peace amid violence. I then spent a year with Colombian government officials who were trying to communicate to society about a peace accord signed with the FARC guerrillas, which sought to end fifty years of war, before and after a divisive referendum in which 50.2% of voters rejected the accord. The referendum created new identity divides between ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ voters which intersected with multiple other interlocking divides, from race, class and region to generation and gender.

Throughout this time, I’ve watched my own country, Britain, experience increasingly polarising politics. I don’t want to simplify the enormous differences between a global south country affected by decades of civil war and a global north country which is still comparatively privileged, though increasingly unequal. Nevertheless, the UK has its own increasingly hostile political divisions over myriad national issues such as Brexit, immigration, class, inequalities, culture, religion, political identity and region; which all intertwine complexly with specific local tensions in different places.

In the context of global concern over increasing political divisions, we need more focus on the bridgebuilders: the people and organisations who bring people together across difference.

My research project, ‘Stories of Divided Politics: Polarisation and Bridgebuilding in Colombia and Britain’, aims to study the people and organisations in both countries who seek to build bridges across complex political divides. I formulated the project because I want to explore bridgebuilders across these very different contexts, documenting their diverse objectives and strategies, understanding the challenges they face in their work, and discovering what lessons they have learned.

As an anthropologist my research is based on ethnographic fieldwork, carrying out long-term participant observation with bridgebuilding organisations. I spend time with them on the ground as they do their work, and co-construct knowledge in conversation with them.

The fieldwork in Colombia, conducted by ethnographic researcher Juliana Franco Calvo in collaboration with peacebuilding organisation Rodeemos el Diálogo (ReD), followed four dialogue initiatives that seek to build bridges across difference.

Peace Breakfast in Dabeiba, Antioquia, with Rodeemos el Diálogo. Credit: Rodeemos el Diálogo, 2024.

Two of the initiatives brought together elites of different kinds—from political leaders and mining company CEOs to Indigenous leaders and student activists—in regular dialogues. For one, dialogue is the means to an end: building consensuses across difference to inform national security policies. For another, the dialogue is an end in itself, creating a habit of dialogue that ripples out into participants’ different spheres of influence and builds relationships that can be activated in times of need. A third initiative hosts dialogues across different sectors in one place, developing relationships and working on improving coexistence in that community. The fourth spans local and national levels, hosting breakfasts with people from all walks of life, from experts to housewives, to build a culture of dialogue that both transforms intimate relationships and intervenes in national policy.

While data analysis is still ongoing, preliminary findings already resonate with the British context:

Human connection and vulnerability

All the initiatives prioritise bringing together people from diverse sectors in ways that emphasise personal stories over institutional roles. When people share personal experiences, they often recognise the vulnerability of the other and build empathy, even when they disagree. Mostly, these initiatives don’t attract “radicals” from different sectors, because dialogue requires willingness—you cannot force people to encounter difference, and often, the political context influences who engages. But those who do participate gain tools and information to engage with more “difficult” others in their personal and professional lives.

The choreography of dialogue matters

The bridgebuilders put immense care into organising dialogue spaces, focussing on details of seating and food (it’s always good to have food, as it creates intimacy), creating rituals like reading aloud guiding principles at the beginning, and developing thoughtful facilitation methods that can bend and flex if needed. This choreography needs to become practice: you cannot build bridges with just one encounter; it takes repetition to develop a culture of dialogue.

Long-term relationship work

The bridgebuilders invest enormous time, emotional labour and care in building, maintaining and repairing relationships with all their participants. While dialogue as a practice centres on the spoken word, bridgebuilding involves much more: the body, emotions, intuition, the heart, and many forms of grief and trauma. Often the bridgebuilding happens in the interstices—the coffee breaks, or the casual chat at the end of a session. Human relationships are unpredictable and spontaneous, flourishing unexpectedly, such as when one participant’s life was saved during intense protests by a relationship built in one dialogue initiative.

Bridgebuilding as vocation

Bridgebuilders themselves experience their work as a philosophy or way of life. Being a bridgebuilder involves modelling a way of being in the world, trying to be the example of the change they wish to see. In good feminist tradition, the boundaries between their personal and political lives are blurred: they bring knowledge and practices from their bridgebuilding work into their personal lives and vice versa. Often, they have trajectories which have given them insight into difference, capacities to relate across it, and have developed legitimacy among different sectors which they put at the service of their community or country.

I’m now looking for bridgebuilders in England, Scotland and Wales who might be willing for me to spend time with them as they do their work, visiting them over the next eighteen months or more, for me to get to know their work and feature it in my research. This might look like:

I don’t have a set definition of bridgebuilding to impose from the outside; what matters is the intention to bridge rather than deepen division. This took quite different forms in each case in Colombia, and will in Britain too.

This is a collaborative process; I aim to learn from bridgebuilders’ practices, understand the challenges they face, and hopefully offer space for reflection and make my research useful for those I work with. After the fieldwork in each country there will be a series of workshops to bring together bridgebuilders from different contexts to share experiences, create a network to learn from each other, and to collaborate on policy recommendations. I’m hoping to build long-term relationships that might lead to future collaborations.

At a time of divisive politics worldwide, bridgebuilding is more relevant than ever. Encounters across difference which explore issues of how to live well together centre confrontation, in the sense of being confronted with the reality, existence and humanity of the other, and in that of confronting seemingly opposed positions that often have no resolution.

Politics is characterised by conflict, and bridgebuilders are political beings, because they create and nurture relationships between these differences and conflicts.

Ultimately, I hope to write a book featuring stories of bridgebuilders in both countries, making this work more visible. There are many heroic stories in both academia and everyday narratives about people who resist or stand up to injustice, like Gandhi, or Greta Thunberg. Those are important stories to celebrate and study, and it is not always appropriate to bridge; the conditions have to be right. But often, major social changes, from the end of Apartheid in South Africa to women’s suffrage in the UK, have been driven by a combination of resistance and filigree bridgebuilding across difference. Yet history doesn’t always make visible this painstaking work. Many bridgebuilders are stigmatised by both sides: my Colombian collaborators are sometimes accused of being right-wing by those on the left, and left-wing by those on the right.

I believe in spending my research energy on things that bring me hope, which is why I want to learn from the people and organisations who do this work, and showcase their efforts at making a better world.

If this resonates with your work, I’d love to hear from you at gwen.burnyeat@ed.ac.uk.