The Populist Appeal of Human Rights Activism: Imagining Transitional Justice Beyond its ‘Present Absence’ in Colombia

How can populism as an analytical concept help us to understand human rights activism on transitional justice (TJ) in view of current political mobilization and protests in Colombia? Since its inception in the 2016 peace agreement, Colombia’s renewed endeavour to come to terms with its violent past has been overshadowed by stalled implementation and polarizing confrontations. In this article, I harness populism as an analytical concept to study the imaginary of transitional justice (TJ) in the looming protest discourses of human rights defenders (HRDs). I argue that populism as a mode of political communication affords to study the discourses on TJ as they emerge from experiences with broken state promises, which make the presence of justice felt only through its blatant absence from the lives of many victims. Based on this ‘present absence’, HRDs imagine TJ as a political struggle that can be described through three populist tropes: truth as the frontier of political confrontations; the rights-defending victim as popular subjectivity; liberal-democratic transformation as counter-hegemonic horizon of protest. My populist re-construction of activist discourses, which I have traced during six months of fieldwork in different conflict-afflicted regions in Colombia, picks up on the call to study TJ in view of contested politics and subjectivities. Conceptually, the article challenges the increasing scholarly consensus on the a priori incompatibility of human rights and populism that conceives of the former as an ideal of the liberal script that came under pressure of the ferocious anger of the latter. My empirically grounded analysis highlights what we can learn from Colombian HRDs about the democratizing and rights-promoting effects of popular mobilization, when justice is politically deferred.