The psychosocial management of rights restitution: Tracing technologies for reparation in post-conflict Colombia

Abstract

Psychosocial assistance is a crucial aspect of recent state reparation and human rights restitution policies in post-conflict Colombia. Drawing on the methodological tools offered by Science and Technology Studies (STS), we follow the trajectories of a psychosocial protocol for emotional recovery as a technology of reparation deployed in rural communities between 2013 and 2017. We ethnographically describe how psychological and administrative projects are merged in practice and come to shape practices and emotional self-valuations. Building on Serres’ concept of betrayal, we reflect on the potential contours of quantifications embedded in psychosocial assistance as opportunities for different forms of reparation to emerge. These forms of reparation coexist in intertwined epistemic practices of psychosocial assistance. We claim that a potentially alternative form of reparation arises despite the predominance of an administrative design mainly concerned with quantification and efficient policy management.

Keywords

post-conflict psychosocial assistance reparation rights restitution social technologies

The Colombian peace accord between the state and leaders of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC-EP) apparently brought a formal end to the armed conflict in 2016. Throughout this ongoing process, armed confrontations have continued to occur between the Army, guerrillas, paramilitary groups, and new groups consisting of demobilized guerrilla and paramilitary militants. In international terms though, Colombia is now considered a post-conflict nation. This means that the state is still faced with the considerable task of addressing the legacy of decades of violence, which has disproportionately affected the rural population (Grupo de Memoria Histórica, 2013). By 2017, official records list 6,509,000 people as forcibly displaced by the conflict (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2017). Since 2011, following the passing of the Law of Victims (LV) which first publicly recognized the existence of the armed conflict, the state has a legal obligation to both recompense victims and assist in the restoration of land to its displaced occupants. The former task is overseen by a state body known as the Unit for the Attention and Reparation of Victims (UARIV). Between 2014 and 2017, the UARIV developed a series of psychosocial tools for the assessment of victims’ needs and the magnitude of their suffering and injury. These are related to a sliding scale of financial and other forms of compensation through a series of metrics (Franco-Gamboa, 2016; Ibáñez & Velásquez, 2006).

This is the context in which psychosocial professionals, mainly psychologists, operate within Colombia. The post-accord and reconciliation situation calls for the mobilization of psychological knowledge to identify the needs of communities affected by the conflict, many of whom have internally migrated to the urban centres of the country following their displacement from rural areas. Psychosocial professionals determine how the experiences of violence embodied by people can be directly tied to historically documented aspects of the conflict, and which therefore qualify the individual concerned for state assistance.

What we see here is an applied version of psychological knowledge embedded in a set of tools and devices seeking to ensure parity in the treatment of victims and in the award of compensation. A sizeable psychologically informed labour force is required to implement and deliver these tools. The attempt to create a common measure in which the manifold, varied, and grotesque violence inflicted on victims can be reliably calculated has met with difficulties, not least of which is that victims seeking reparation need to tell their stories, and to be heard doing so. Whilst the process of implementing the LV may appear to be engaged with this need, it is also significantly yoked to a technocratic imperative to convert these stories into standards (Lampland & Leigh Star, 2009; Lawrance & Ruffer, 2015). It is deeply entwined with the need to establish the nature of the historical memory which they constitute, from which it is possible to derive a set of cases and decisions which can be addressed and closed (Mora-Gámez, 2016a). In this sense, reparation is not simply about acknowledging historical memory of violence, it is also a project of social and economic restructuring, informed—among other sources—by the neoliberal values of entrepreneurship and self-reliance. Insofar as psychological knowledge is critical to the implementation of the LV, it operates within this broader state project.

Psychologists have shown themselves to be willing participants in ideological programmes. For example, the alignment between psychotherapeutic theory and practice with nation-state projects in socialist East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall (Leuenberger, 2001), or in the supportive statement by key figures from the American Psychological Association around the first Gulf War (see Hobfoll et al., 1991). In the UK, some clinical psychologists have enthusiastically promoted the introduction of the Improved Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme as a “cost-saving measure,” designed to increase productivity, lower the state welfare bill through reduction in benefit claims, and to encourage clients to engage in “low-intensity” forms of self-management, such as guided self-help (Clark, 2018). As numerous critics have observed, such an approach is hand-in-glove with neoliberal values and the overall ideological drive to shrink the scale of state welfare support (Scott, 1998).

Our purpose in this article is not to simply dismiss the engagement of psychology with neoliberal social and economic reform as an ideological judgement. Not only would this raise the rather forbidding—and rather well-rehearsed—problem of the extent to which an individualistic philosophy remains central to the basic conceptual grammar of psychology, it would also simplify what appears to us to be a complex set of relationships between the production of psychological knowledge, the desire to address trauma and distress, and the work of bearing witness to historical memory. Our question instead is how the epistemic projects of psychology become intertwined with, on the one hand, a large machinery of the state, and on the other a significant proportion of the population who bring their stories and their injured bodies for psychological assessment and emotional recovery in the hope of constituting a different personal relationship with the state. In this case, we understand psychology and its epistemic projects as intermediaries, as spaces and practices of translation where different orders of being, a socioeconomic vision of the post-conflict state, and the witnesses of an unsettled historical memory, come together. As we will show, the translation of these different orders via the medium of psychology produces unexpected consequences that have the effect, on occasion, of enacting reparation despite itself.

Drawing on the concept of translation (Callon, 1984/2007; Law, 2008), we ethnographically describe how people and psychosocial protocols are framed and re-presented in order to enrol further participants, produce and circulate information, and promote different public narratives. Our methodological strategy consisted of following actors and objects, particularly psychosocial protocols, paying particular attention to the materiality and outcomes of practices of quantification and how the experiences of users are inscribed in those practices.

According to Derksen, Vikkelsø, and Beaulieu (2012) the reaffirmation within STS of the ontological distinction between humans and things, and more explicitly between the social and the technical, discourages possible analyses of the technologies produced by psychology and the social sciences, because it rules out the study of categories like social, psychological, or psychosocial as empirical, active phenomena (p. 142). Derksen et al. argue that the (psycho)social can emerge and be performed from distinctive technological assemblages because “the social and the technological don’t always blend so seamlessly” (2012, p. 143). Along the same lines, Brown (2012) defines social technology as “that which enables as its primary object the self-modification of some subjective state of affairs of a human subject” (p. 238) and produces novel experiences and modalities for performing the psychological and the social.

Following these proposals, this paper is an attempt to show how the psychosocial and the technological are intimately linked, while at the same time analysing “this link as an achievement, and not always a stable, comfortable, or definitive one” (Derksen et al., 2012, p. 143). We reframe psychosocial assistance as a set of techniques defining assemblages of humans and things (see Latour, 2007) that enact the social world whilst transforming the subjective states of affairs of humans (Brown, 2012). Reframing these techniques as sociotechnical arrangements directs attention to their physical and textual materiality. Similarly, outlining psychosocial assistance techniques as social technologies emphasizes their social embeddedness and ability to reconfigure subjective experiences.

This article is part of a larger multisited ethnography about technologies for rights restitution in Colombia and alternative innovations for emotional recovery and commemoration (Mora-Gámez, 2016b). Marcus (1995) describes several strategies for justifying the selection of field sites, or making connections between them, including “following people” and “following goods.” Besides “following people” through the implementation of reparation strategies, we also “followed the story” around the quantifications and the deployments of psychosocial protocols. Following psychosocial protocols offers potential routes to account for the ways in which quantifications are sometimes challenged through the translations made by their users. Despite the activities and experiences that quantifications cannot capture, an account of the quantifications can explicate how attempts at inscription are deployed and the impact they have on the experiences of actors. We aim to gain a better understanding of psychosocial protocols, their epistemic projects, their impact on everyday life, their participation in different socio-cultural and material aspects of policy regulation, psychosocial intervention, and public accountability.

The following accounts switch across a series of sites. They are preceded by a very brief description of how psychosocial assistance is related to other administrative procedures dictated by the Law of Victims and followed by a broader discussion of the complex place that psychosocial assistance has in the “settlements” of a post-conflict state.

Psychology for administrative valuation

The Law of Victims (LV) is the statute upon which the registration, management, and compensation of those persons affected by violence and displacement in recent Colombian history is enacted. The LV has a complex history (see Mora-Gámez, 2016b) arising from policy debates during the 1990s between a range of state, voluntary, international, and social movement actors. In order to become law, a considerable degree of debate and compromise took place between these actors. One of the key issues was the reluctance of the ruling parties and the House of Representatives to accept a compensation process that placed military and state sponsored actions on the same footing as those by guerrilla and paramilitary factions. Another issue was around the time period to be covered by the law. For a range of reasons, related to the chronology of key events in the conflict, January 1, 1985 was eventually agreed upon.

At the heart of the implementation of LV is the Single Record of Victims (RUV) that is meant to list all those persons whose Human Rights (as defined by international standards) were violated during the conflict. Registration is the first step towards being recognized as a person entitled to reparation—an officially sanctioned “victim.” This can take the form of monetary compensation along with psychosocial assistance. In practice, becoming registered in the RUV is a complex process that involves an assessment procedure carried out in regional centres that is ultimately overseen by UARIV. It requires the completion of multiple forms, along with interviews and other forms of assessment. Large bodies of evidence (such as police and medical reports) are required to substantiate claims (Mora-Gámez, 2016a). And nothing whatsoever is possible without possession of a cédula, the Colombian national identification card required for any formal administrative process (Restrepo, Guerra, & Ashmore, 2013).

The following is taken from a visit made by the first author accompanying Elias—a claimant seeking assistance at an urban assessment centre. During the visit, Elias receives a tragic notification from the public prosecutor that will likely change his current registration status. The official letter states that his wife has been found dead. The prosecutor asks him to approach the office in Bogotá for more details and to initiate other administrative procedures. Elias explains the situations as follows:

Well, somehow this is not news at all, I always knew, maybe now we will be registered on Homicide and things will go better, but… but… [Elias gasps] but now I must make another request for a psychologist from the Unit that gives the news to my son, I hope it doesn’t take too long, I will invest that money in a small business […] I will also save some money to pay for my son’s school of course.

Undaunted by this, Elias goes on to ask for psychological counselling to tell his son about his mother’s death. But when he learns from the UARIV that there will be a wait time of at least 2 months, he decides instead to attend a practice administered by a local university which will provide him with free assistance.

What we see here is psychology being used primarily as a tool to perform a bureaucratic triage of applications to the RUV. A scale of values is constituted which organizes some of the worst and most horrific forms of human experience. Psychological knowledge helps to organize the chaos of conflict and translates it into an administrative problem to be addressed primarily through economic means. But it also creates a kind of pause or suspension, where there is a hiatus between the registration of the applicant and their transformation into the status of victim (Allen & Brown, 2016). Assessment keeps applicants in an uncertain status, where their experiences are noted but not properly acknowledged. As we see with Elias, actual suffering and distress cannot be properly addressed before the administrative process is complete. Psychological knowledge is then primarily focused on the work of categorization rather than in meeting the needs of the persons who are categorized.

Besides mediating registration, psychological knowledge also participates in the planning and delivery of compensation. This happens in the form of an agreement between the government and the recognized Victims where compensation is contingent upon compliance with specific terms. This agreement is addressed as the Plan of Assistance and Reparation (PAARI). The PAARI, via its recruitment of professionals in psychology, legitimates the government’s notion of reparation and rights restitution. The reparation offered by the Colombian State becomes a form of organizing people inside the national territory by arranging people’s skills and aligning the workforce into productive projects and conditional compensation. Here, registered applicants are implicitly forced to become productive by recruiting them into the promise of becoming urban workers, entrepreneurs, and investors. This same promise inevitably locks them in the city as an unskilled workforce while an investment in their upskilling is allegedly being made. Thus, the apparently unconditional reparative compensations offered under the narratives of International Humanitarian Law are translated into forms of governance and investments that recruit already registered employees into profitable activities and successful quantifications.

The successful capture of people’s information determines the limits and extensions of reparation in Colombia, and psychology participates in the assessment and suspension of applicants’ narratives to establish their access to rights and compensations. Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos (2008) describe this relation between capture and rights as the double R (rights–representation). People are incorporated into formal systems that guarantee control of their location, displacements, and forms of employment in exchange for rights so that the balance between representation and rights becomes a condition for the sovereignty of states. Here, psychological knowledge becomes an artefact “defining the matrix of positive rights and representation within the national territory, and the non-existence of rights” (p. 7) beyond official registration.

Psychology for emotional recovery

So far, we have described how psychological knowledge is mobilized as part of the process of registering Victims and guiding them in the use of compensation. But there is also a distinct mobilization of psychological knowledge in the form of psychosocial assistance. The Law of Victims defines this as a strategy of reparation that is parallel to monetary compensation. Since 2012, the Psychosocial Team of UARIV has gathered professionals from different fields like arts, sociology, psychology, social work, and anthropology to develop support strategies for registered applicants. One of the strategies was the Emotional Recovery Strategy (ERE) used throughout the national territory in a group format. It is a protocol consisting of 10 sessions aiming at monitoring the emotional reports of participants across 3 to 4 months of participation. It also involves a series of activities addressing the participants’ experiences of violence and war through guided practices of emotional self-management and self-valuation. Although it has a clear therapeutic design, the ERE was assembled by a group of professionals from a variety of disciplines including psychology, anthropology, sociology, and fine arts. According to the designers, it seeks to facilitate group engagement and social participation, rather than merely individual psychotherapy. As we will see below, all the sessions of the ERE must include a numerical report—a self-quantification of the perceived emotional recovery per session.

In a visit to a rural town, the psychosocial professional (PP) of the UARIV circulates a handbook during the first session of the ERE in a community of registered applicants. Attendants are required to use this handbook in every session.

After the participants have received the handbook, the PP asks them: “In my region, when you feel bad you say you are anguished. In your region, what word is used to address that feeling?” To begin with, the room was filled with silence and faces of confusion, but after a few examples the participants started to try out some different words. These words included “achilado,” “achicopalado,” “achantado,” and “desparcha’o.”¹ In the end, most of the participants record “achantado” in their handbooks. The PP asks another question: “From 1 to 10, how ‘achantado’ are you feeling today?” The Likert-semantic differential question uses the idioms given by participants to establish an approximation of their current emotional state. The question produces expressions of confusion in the attendees. Many participants repeatedly ask the person sitting next to them about what number to record, others do not read or write so their interaction with the device is limited, and some participants simply do not understand the purpose of marking a number at all. Instead of facilitating the planned activity for the session, or the expected trust required to build emotional recovery, an important portion of the session is used in training participants how to record a proper response in the official documents.

The above paragraph describes the sequences of translation (Callon, 1984/2007; Law, 2008) of the emotional experiences of the participants into a psychotechnical device designed for coding that emotional experience into a number. As with any other translation, there are important discontinuities (Latour, 2013) reflected in the confused and variable uses of the handbook. The session continues with a statement and a question by the PP—“For some of the victims of the armed conflict ‘emotional recovery’ means ‘to be able to contend with life’. In a single sentence, what does ‘emotional recovery’ mean for you?” This leads to an outpouring of words from participants: “Simply move on with this,” “shaking these feelings off,” “stop feeling bad,” and “overcome these emotions.” Consistent with the script outlined by the handbook, the next question was asked by another PP: “If we were on a road and the final goal was shaking these feelings off, and we had to walk down that road in 10 steps, where being 10 steps away means being really far but being one step away means being very close to the end of the road, How many steps away are you from the end of the road?”

Again, a large chunk of the session is given over to assisting participants into completing the records. After making sure every participant has written down their numbers, the PP finishes the session and reminds people that they cannot leave without signing the attendance record and the minutes. The PP quickly takes note of the names, their cédula numbers, the numbers indicated in the handbook, and asks them to sign and fingerprint the forms.

A particular interaction occurs between a participant who has marked two numbers instead of one in his handbook, and the PP who asks him about the reasons for marking 3 and 7. Matias argues he does not see the point of marking only one number because he feels different emotions. “Yes, but you have to mark only one, Matias,” says the PP, who is in a hurry to fill the final form. Matias replies he does not understand why he has to mark his feelings with a number but after the PP’s insistence he erases his two marks and puts a new circle around number 1. When the PP asks for the reasons for the new number, Matias claims in a very convincing manner, “I guess I am just beginning at this, and 10 is the goal, so I am marking 1 because this is the start.” The PP accepts Matias’s reasons and registers the number 1 amongst the other information. Matias keeps his handbook, and the records obtained by the PP will then be included in the official reports of the strategy by the central office in Bogotá to circulate them in institutional reports. For example, the official report by the UARIV (2014) presented by the President to the Congress claimed:

The implementation of the ERE increased since 2013 until 24,789 participant survivors exceeding the projected goal of 20,000, so this was fulfilled by 124%. In total, the ERE was implemented in 206 locations in the country. (p. 152)

Similarly, in his report to the Congress in 2015, the President of Colombia states:

82000 victims of the armed conflict were assisted by the Program of Integral Health and Psychosocial Assistance in its modes: individual, family, and community. During the same period, 57000 victims were assisted through the Emotional Recovery Strategy. (Santos, 2015, p. 101)

The participants’ experiences of pain, their memories of violent events, and even their perceptions of the uselessness of the quantification are now translated into a number, an official report, and a management indicator. In this way bodies becomes translated into a state project as the building blocks for a post-conflict settlement with the past (see Brown, 2016). Pain cannot be addressed directly, it can only be configured within this project when it is translated into a movement (from greater to lesser, from farther to closer), a trend, that is aligned with flows of resources.

Reparation despite itself

In a visit to another town during the second session of the ERE, the PP distributes sheets of paper and says: “Let us think of an animal that you consider really dangerous and we are going to draw it.” The suggestion produces laughs and comments—“Must it have any legs?” “Must I have seen it in person?” Jose laughs and asserts they are free to draw any animal they want, so lions, sharks, snakes, caimans, and huge birds are drawn on the paper sheets. After, the PP says: “Let us now think of the violence in our lives, let us think of that animal as the violence or the actors that assaulted us” and asks what that animal did to them. Regina, the first participant, is approached by the PP repeating the question, but she keeps silent, so the PP gets closer and asks her to speak if she wants, clarifying that remaining silent is also an option.

Regina starts crying and the PP kneels very slowly and touches her hands while waiting silently for her words and asking the other participants to join Regina in her silence. An atmosphere of pain and sorrow quickly spreads in the room. The PP asks her if she wants to speak and she nods her head. The PP asks again:

PP:

What did that animal do to you?

Regina:

That snake bit me and injected me with poison, a kind of poison I have not been able to get rid of, it injected a poison in my son and he lives sick for remembering how they hurt his mom […]

Regina continues telling her story, describing the horrors of war, especially those suffered specifically by women’s bodies. A long moment of silence reigns until another woman points her finger towards her child, hugs him and says he is what violence left in her life. After following the instructions in the script of the ERE, the PP and the participants fill the room with lions destroying families, sharks infecting young women with HIV, big birds taking away the childhood of children and providing them with sterility and hate. Expressions like “it tore me apart, and devoured women,” “it made us run away” become part of their accounts of the passage of violence through their lives.

The session ends with hugs between every participant, and individual meetings with the PP were also agreed upon. However, ERE handbooks were missing from the session and numbers were never collected. The script of the ERE was partially followed but the management indicator was not registered at all so that the forms, minutes, and fingerprints did not become a part of the outcomes of the session. The PP explains that the number was designed by the directives of the psychosocial team in Bogotá to fulfil the requirements of the UARIV. Considering the “intrusive nature of the number” and the importance that things like “reassurance, visual contact, and listening time” deserve, the PP has decided to fill the number only in three of the nine sessions. Among several sessions of the ERE in different locations where the number was requested, the participants understand the number as “something to realize how you are” or “how the pain goes down.” Some others address the number as an object to “put the pain in words.” A comment offered by a participant of the ERE is quite useful for illustrating its performative character: “it helps them [PPs] to check whether what they are doing works or not.”

On the one hand, the ERE can be understood as a device that has the potential to arrange a space where people share their experiences and position themselves as experts in pain recovery. On this basis, the attempt to encourage the use of participants’ own words to address their feelings is quite innovative. However, it is likely that the partial success of the strategy expressed by the participants in different visits is not actually captured by the management indicators or the emotional recovery index. On the other hand, it remains inevitable that the ERE extracts information as self-quantifications from the participants and PPs. Such numbers will thereafter circulate in official reports and become part of how the state “sees” its citizens (see Scott, 1998) while producing information infrastructures that enact a kind of state (Passoth & Rowland, 2010), which in the case of Colombia consists of post-conflict grounded in reparation.

Most of the participants described to each other how their sharing in the sessions had made them feel “less ashamed and guilty” about their past, and that they had few friends from whom they did not have to hide their stories. This is a notion of reparation that exceeds psychosocial protocols and state policies. Here, reparation emerges from the detours of the ERE carried out by its participants into ungoverned spaces. It originates from their experiences and creates something unexpected in the administrative design of the ERE. Reparation becomes meaningful for people pursuing recovery after violent experiences; besides enacting emerging spaces exceeding the initial design, reparation becomes a relational achievement possible by betraying the state’s administration of reparation.

Take, for instance, the last session we described. Here the shared experience of recalling violent events created relational arrangements between the particular details of the participants’ memories, the assaults, the expressions, words, times, and places. These came together when participants during the session narrated and shared their stories of sexual abuse and represented the perpetrators in drawings. If we consider affect as a relational dynamic (Reavey & Brown, 2015), the tone of the recalled memories is an emergent aspect of the interaction between participants, the protocol, and the psychosocial companion.

The events narrated by the women in this group resemble what Reavey and Brown (2015) address as vital memories. These are “kinds of memories that present considerably greater difficulties in both accommodating into daily life and in reconstructing in alternative ways” (p. 329) and that are particularly evident in groups of people usually considered as vulnerable. As the experience of Regina shows, those kinds of memories become recurrent features of the past that will always be pertinent and require current management.

Vital memories are also relationally transformed by the institutional practices that elicit them, so that, for example, legal and therapeutic environments differentially facilitate the recollection of difficult events (Reavey & Brown, 2015; see also Berntsen & Rubin, 2012) since the former demands evidence and precision whereas the latter is concerned with meaning and symbolic value. Nonetheless, the recalling of memories elicited by the PP in the absence of records, numbers, and signatures seems to produce a transformation of the meaning of the experience of violence and the expansion of a supporting empathetic network of participants.

Regarding the quantification of emotional recovery, the mere establishment of a subjective numeric goal may have important implications in the experiences of participants (see Nissen & Barington, 2016). The ERE seems to entangle diverse forms of agency between the participants who develop a new form of expertise in dealing with their personal feelings; the PPs, as extractors of estimations and modulators of new forms of expertise in participants; and the ERE itself, as a device that relatively standardizes the guidelines for promoting new forms of expertise and provides a partial indicator of the success of the strategy as a form of reparation.

What deserves more attention is the way in which professionals and participants translate, recreate, and deviate from the administrative design partially present in the ERE, and the way some emerging features seem to substitute, recover, relieve, or revivify social relations among participants. What “repairs” is something beyond the devices themselves, the handbook, or the emotional recovery indicator. Here, despite its administrative design, reparation emerges from the betrayals, within the alterations enacted by the people using and appropriating the ERE in the national territory. Reparation might be achieved by promoting such appropriations and detours. Hence, the managerial design of the interventions and the infrastructure that supports it must be translated (Callon, 1984/2007) and rearranged. Yet, the presence of the administrative design in the form of quantifications is necessary in these spaces for its translation to be possible. In other words, people affected by violence could create repairing arrangements or transform their emotional and social configuration, despite governmental reparation but still on the basis of its mobilization.

Psychosocial assistance as betrayal

We have established the administrative logic of the governmental reparation system for people registered as victims of the armed conflict. The system itself displaces the emotional experiences of people participating in the administrative procedures for accessing benefits. Unsurprisingly, such logic partially expands during the deployment of psychosocial assistance protocols, a set of technical tools to manage people’s emotional experiences. However, we have also established that there are alternative configurations that emerge within the system itself and permit other arrangements for ERE participants.

This brings us to a crucial question for understanding the challenging potentialities of psychosocial assistance as an epistemic project in post-conflict Colombia. What is a translation of psychological tools meant to be repairing? Reparation assembled by social technologies like the ERE comprises a “social world” (Derksen et al., 2012) nurtured by an accountable logic that is still partially present. But in the particular case of the ERE, how could a social technology be translated from an administrative design to enact a social world that actually makes a difference for its users in their daily lives?

John Law (2008) states that translation consists of making two words equivalent. However, given the fact that two words are never equivalent “translation also implies betrayal […] translation is both about making equivalent, and about shifting. It is about moving terms around, linking and changing them” (p. 144). The link between psychosocial assistance and government interventions does not necessarily mean that the former inevitably reproduces the managerial logic of the latter. Instead, psychosocial assistance and its users can shift its direction to pursue meaningful changes in people’s experiences of violence. Elsewhere, we have established that states standardize experiences of victims positioning themselves as spokes-actants (Allen & Brown, 2016; Mora-Gámez, 2016a). However, the sessions of the ERE show us that its users can also produce arrangements where the voices of participants are not necessarily diminished.

Elaborating Serres’ notion of translation, communication may be betrayed by the medium through which it passes. But if we take the position “downstream,” at the point of destination rather than departure of the message, we may see this failure, this betrayal, as an inherent aspect of the process of invention (Brown, 2002). Assuming that the participants of psychosocial assistance sessions are the destination point of the strategy, we can think of reparation despite itself as an inventive process that cannot be scheduled or designed, only accompanied, supported, and, under certain circumstances, facilitated. Instead of following the exact path traced by the design of the ERE, for creativity to possibly emerge, something different is required: a betrayal of the state-institutional design. This is precisely what some PPs and participants achieve by ignoring the request to provide numerical data, focusing instead on affective experiences whilst recalling violent events, and creating an arrangement of empathic confidence that will also transform other aspects of their lives. The latter achievements would not be so easily obtained by spending the session explaining the use of the handbook of the ERE and the logic of the number for addressing their current emotional state. Psychosocial betrayals that enact reparation despite itself have no defined direction or formula, they are instead something that people permit and decide to experience. Distinct from what the original design pursues and in opposition to clinical and mental health intervention protocols, psychosocial assistance should not forecast the results of its implementation, but precisely assist them and let people create them. Psychosocial betrayals create arrangements that challenge and exceed quantifications.

We have suggested that social technologies like the ERE can potentially translate and betray the managerial design to enact a different social reality for their users. Our appreciation does not imply that the presence of the ERE in itself guarantees the emergence of creative arrangements. For psychosocial betrayals to emerge, it is necessary that particular alliances and cooperation between psychosocial professionals, participants, and the uses of the ERE coexist.

Appropriating Serres’ (1982) thoughts on communication networks, we can reframe the state as the sender of a message, registered applicants as receivers, and psychosocial assistance and professionals as the passages or channels of such relation. Here, the opening of a passage allows noise, interruption, and interference, and therefore potential transformation. Such interferences inevitably introduce variations in the trajectories between senders and receivers, which represent a paradox since effective communication implies also a risk of failure. The injections of difference can take different forms that analyse (take but do not give), paralyse (interrupt usual functioning), and catalyse (force to act differently). Here, psychosocial professionals become noises, interferers that paralyse the administrative features of reparation, and at the same time instigate the situation for participants to take a different direction towards interactions that they found significant and revivifying. The role of interferer and mediator demands additional tasks consisting of comprehending what people expect to be regained, positioning the already existing psychological knowledge on dealing with experiences of pain. These tasks turn psychosocial professionals into hybrid agents since most of them are state representatives, reparation interferers, and creative betrayers that might promote reparation despite itself.

Psychosocial assistance: An ongoing debate

We have explored how, on the one hand, psychological knowledge participates in administrative assessments pausing people’s experiences of pain without properly acknowledging them. On the other hand, psychological knowledge in the form of the ERE might also interfere with the administrative logic of reparation. Thereby, psychosocial assistance can take the form of quantifications becoming indicators and official numbers. But at the same time, psychosocial assistance becomes a space where detours from quantifications are possible. Psychosocial professionals acknowledge the limitations of the numbers and management indicators like the ones produced by the ERE, among other strategies. Nevertheless, they are also aware that such numbers “keep the money coming.” Thus, the managerial feature of state reparation inevitably spreads into psychosocial assistance. The same management indicators suggest that at least 90,000 people attended ERE sessions between 2013 and 2016 throughout the country, a total that becomes an important part of the 426,031 registered victims granted with compensations until 2016.

The multiplicity of psychosocial assistance is also evident in the ongoing public debates about reparation policies. By the end of 2017, the Ministry of Social Protection was still deciding about the best strategy for providing psychological care to the remaining registered applicants through a National Plan of Psychosocial Assistance for Victims (PAPSIVI) implemented within the national health system. The psychosocial team of the UARIV was being consulted about such plans, but so was the professional association of psychologists (COLPSIC) which resulted in tensions around the topic. The ERE was among the list of potential protocols to be widely used in the country. However, academic and professional bodies of psychologists instead promote the implementation of evidence-based protocols such as the Narrative Exposition Technique (NET) and brief therapy models for managing PTSD, depression, anxiety, as well as the implementation of instruments like the Multiscale Inventory for Psychosocial Evaluation (EMP), and screening tests, among others assessing the effectiveness of interventions and the mental and psychosocial conditions of people (COLPSIC, 2015).

A first national forum about the future directions of the PAPSIVI was carried out by COLPSIC between 2014 and 2015 in different cities in the country. As the basis for the discussion of the panellists, COLPSIC wrote a communication addressed to every subscribed member claiming:

There are reported weaknesses in the implementation of group and individual interventions that provide a full response to the particular needs of people (handicapped, with psychiatric disorders, with different regional origins, etc.) Hence, achieving a characterization will contribute to the comprehension of the problems, features, needs, interests and particular interpretations in these populations that improve their assistance […] it is important to recognize that the purpose of the interventions is not research, but the contribution to the quality of life of people and community welfare, so the skills for registering, collecting, organising and reporting information must be strengthened [in psychologists]. (COLPSIC, 2015, p. 2)

The route suggested by COLPSIC precisely reproduces the administrative logic of effectiveness in the state reparation system, and perhaps because of this, such an approach will have a strong predominance in the resulting PAPSIVI. Even though the tension is still on the table and has mobilized forums, colloquiums, and different types of academic events organized by COLPSIC and the Colombian Association of Psychology Faculties (ASCOFAPSI), the future of psychosocial assistance in Colombia is still a matter of debate. Whereas protocols like the ERE and others alike continue to be used, there is a growing number of reports in favour of strategies giving more predominance to quantifications (see Moya, 2014) as part of psychometric and empirically validated strategies. Psychological epistemic projects seeking quantification–administration coexist then with projects leaving room for interfering and betraying state-administrative logic. For the time being, the logics of administrative designs seem to continue existing. This coexistence of psychological epistemic projects occurs within a spectrum of instituted and non-instituted spaces that deserve further attention. Yet, as long as there are quantifications and numbers to be produced, psychosocial betrayals might have the opportunity to participate in the reparation of post-conflict Colombia.

Conclusion

The extent to which modern psychology constitutes a mode of governmentality, a means of exercising political reason at the level of bodies and subjectivities, is well established (Hook, 2007; Parker, 2007; Rose, 1996). Also, the role of numbers and indicators is crucial in the sociopolitical relations built around policy projects (Bello y Villarino & Vijeyarasa, 2018; Merry, 2016; Porter, 1996). In this sense, the case of psychosocial assistance is a particularly vivid example, but in no way exceptional. But this is to treat psychology as in the service of modern statehood rather than from the perspective of the specific epistemic project that drives the discipline as a whole. Or put in other words, if we turn from what psychology does towards the logic of how it enacts itself as a discipline, the specificity of the Colombian case becomes apparent.

The involvement of psychological tools and assessment serves as a kind of triage during registration to the RUV. It establishes orders of magnitude in relation to experiences of conflict that are then mapped directly onto economic values. However, in doing so it also creates a suspension or pause in the process (Jaramillo, 2012). This suspension becomes extended into a prolonged process of being administered. Triage is usually understood as a process of prioritizing available resources in critical situations. In this case, it is a sorting of extremes that is concerned with distinctions between categories rather than the urgency of need. It is more important to have correctly placed an individual applicant with regard to the overall parameters of the population than it is to have ordered them with respect to the urgency of their needs.

Here there is an interesting translation process where conflict and distress are transformed into indicators, economic utility, and capacity. State reparation then becomes contingent upon taking up a place in a socio-political project. Here psychology switches from identification of injury to surfacing skills and capabilities. It is the medium through which an extraordinary transformation occurs where Victims become Productive Subjects, and compensation becomes investment. It is perhaps worth reflecting here on the etymology of the term reparation. We usually see the meaning of the term as arising from repair, to fix or make amends for injury. Yet the root is in the Latin reparare, “to make ready again.” Psychology here enables citizens to enter a compact with the state wherein they are prepared for a new economic future.

Psychosocial assistance per se, as we saw it being delivered, is concerned more with populations than with individual cases. The general trends, as collected centrally by the UARIV, appear to be driving the process. Victims enter the process hoping for affirmation of their experiences, for the opportunity to tell their stories. But the right to speak was tied to the demand to speak in a particular way—to learn how to translate distress into numerical form. The devices designed for the process create a kind of equivalence between extreme and traumatic experiences, to be distinguished by differences of degree. This forecloses on whether there may be other moral, emotional, or political differences in kind around these experiences.

The epistemic project of psychology in Colombia has, since its beginnings, been deeply grounded in quantification (Jaraba-Barrios, 2011; Mora-Gámez, 2014; Pulido-Martínez, 2007, 2010). The ongoing deployment of reparation policies offers a particular scenario in which psychology participates in the quantification and visibilization of the consequences of historical violence in communities and individuals across the national territory. Despite the wide participation of institutional psychology in such an epistemic project, less integrated communities of psychologists and PPs seem to acknowledge the limitations of quantifications and protocols to assist communities in their recovery. The participation of instituted psychology in the political debates about psychosocial assistance is established. Yet, groups of PPs currently engage in participatory designs that reduce the existing gap between design and implementation of psychosocial assistance.

Psychosocial betrayals, as described in this article, exemplify possible spaces of encounter, friction, and reconfiguration where quantifications and their excess fold into material arrangements favouring people’s support. Right in the middle of the exercise of translating Colombia’s past into a vision of its psychosocial future, there is a kind of crack in the process—when the numbers don’t add up, when the exercise of collecting population-level data creates a space where there is the possibility for something different to occur. Reparation is fundamentally a temporal process which is difficult for psychology to adequately grasp, given its difficulty in adequately theorizing irreversible time. It needs to emerge, rather than be organized as a trend. When psychosocial professionals take ownership of the data collection, a space arises where something that might be a glimmer of reparation occurs. Reparation seems to occur when the state enters into the indeterminacy of both translating and being unable to translate the experiences of victims into quantifications, when psychology and its representatives are forced to pause to make sense of experience. Psychosocial betrayals open spaces for such pauses to happen in the ongoing configuration of post-conflict Colombia.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research of this article was partially funded by the Administrative Department of Science, Technology and Innovation COLCIENCIAS. Research funding call 568 (2012).

ORCID iD

Fredy Mora-Gámez

Notes

Author biographies

Fredy Mora-Gámez is a postdoctoral researcher from the Department of Thematic Studies (Tema T) at Linköping University. He is also a researcher of the Grupo de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia, la Tecnología y la Medicina (GESCTM) at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. His research explores the intersections between social psychology, science and technology studies, and migration studies. He has conducted ethnographic research about infrastructures for registration of victims in Colombia, relocation of migrants in Europe, and alternative forms of technoscience and cultural memory developed by social movements.

Steven D. Brown is Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Nottingham Trent University. His research interests are around experiences of inpatients and community mental health care and social remembering amongst vulnerable groups. He is author of Vital Memory and Affect: Living with a Difficult Past (with Paula Reavey, 2015, Routledge); Psychology Without Foundations: History, Philosophy and Psychosocial Theory (with Paul Stenner, 2009, Sage) and The Social Psychology of Experience (with David Middleton, 2005, Sage).

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