Between War and Peace: Orthogonal Organizations and the Urban Remaking of Colombia's Twenty-First-Century Left

This dissertation examines how a political ideology, closely associated with unfolding violence, becomes part of institutional political life. It builds an explanation from studying Colombia, a setting where the left was framed and perceived as too close to violence, as some left-wing groups remained in arms and others didn't. In a path overlooked by the literature, it finds that the left gained political space and electoral support through orthogonal organizations—organizations that were not understood through dominant ideological dividing lines and particularly not as "left." In this sense, orthogonal organizations allowed for the cultivation of new identities and ideologies in ways that were decoupled from public perceptions. They played a central role in politicizing a sector of the electorate that previously did not identify with—and even rejected—the left. This argument is based on a comparative ethnography conducted across four intermediate Colombian cities. Two of them—Manizales and Bucaramanga—have become particularly averse to the left, while the other two—Pasto and Santa Marta—have seen the emergence of local left-wing processes. The project leverages both the local trajectories of these cities and comparative ethnographic evidence gathered around the election of Colombia's first left-wing former-rebel president in 2022. Drawing on two years of fieldwork across these four cities—including two rounds of extensive participant observation in each, over 160 in-depth interviews, and 6,050 systematically coded protest events from 1985 to 2022—the dissertation argues that in places where the left faced the harshest resistance, orthogonal organizations were central to opening political space. The dissertation is structured in two parts. Consisting of two chapters, Part I presents three processes: first, I show that the political challenges the left has faced since the 1980s, primarily repression and cultural rejection, have been structured by the oscillation between peaceful and military solutions to internal war (Chapter 1); second, I portray regional variation in the prevalence of these roadblocks, indicating that some regions were particularly averse to left-wing politics throughout the period and showing that leftwing politics gained a place slowly and gradually (Chapter 1); and third, I elaborate the contexts of the cities under study and show that the structural conditions that informed how city dwellers experienced war led to three kinds of playing fields for the left: "as threat", bifurcated, and affirming of identities (Chapter 2). Part II develops an account of each of the three playing fields and makes the case for orthogonal organizations, which rely on not being publicly perceived as leftist, in action across three chapters. Chapter 3 examines orthogonal organizations in the cities of Manizales and Bucaramanga, cities where the left was perceived as a threat: barras (organized soccer fans) in both cities, and an environmental committee in Bucaramanga. Chapter 4 addresses the University of Magdalena in Santa Marta, a city where right-wing paramilitarism took its most aggressive form. In all three organizations in these two chapters, members developed different ways of making sense of the ongoing violence and responding to it in ways that carried political consequences. Finally, Chapter 5 presents the case of Pasto—the only city where there was no rejection of the left, and thus no need for orthogonal organizations. The chapter shows how an openly left-wing union led to the development of an organizational network in which traditional forms, such as unions and neighborhood juntas, gained a prominent role. In this setting, conflict affirmed left-wing identities and helped build a broad, horizontal coalition of leftist politics—one that contrasted with the more vertical structure that emerged in Santa Marta. Theorizing orthogonal organizations opens a door into a larger research agenda on the ways in which organizations are, on one side, culturally understood, framed, represented, and through it, empowered or constrained; and, on the other, on how different organizational forms allow for the cultivation of identities and forms of political action. In this sense, the dissertation makes a more specific secondary contribution to the literature on left-wing politics in the region, showing how the interaction between organizations and people's sense-making mediate the emergence of the left and condition forms of left-wing politics. In so doing, it makes the case for understanding politics beyond the dominant views of clientelism, political parties, and social movements, which have been dominant in the region, placing politics in the everyday forms of organizing in urban life. From this angle, the Colombian case is just one to think about a broader process in which organizations and cultural representations interact.