Transmedia Projects in Contexts of Armed Conflict and Political Change

Colombians have suffered almost six decades of armed conflict. It is a war sustained by structural sociopolitical causes that cannot be won militarily, but has not been resolved by peace or political agreements either. The shocking reality of violence in Colombia (more than 6 million victims in the last twenty years and more than 4 million internally displaced [OCHA 2013; CHM 2013]) underpins important questions regarding the nature of the conflict and the role of civil society in armed conflict contexts. Revisiting the academic work of García-Durán (2004) and Wills (2006) by international standards, the magnitude of the Colombian conflict can be described as a war. However, the multiplicity of factors and actors involved in the armed confrontation could designate a clear situation of multipolar violence (Vásquez 2010), the degradation of the conflict can show a scenario of war against society (Pecaut 2004) or the influence of the United States in Colombia (and the focus of its foreign policy after 11 September 2001) can equally suggest the Colombian conflict as an anti-terrorist war (Hernández 2004). As a consequence, some Latin-American academics use the label ‘the war without name’ (García-Durán 2004; Wills 2006) to stress how the Colombian armed conflict would appear to have a little of all these elements, highlighting the need to adopt a complex and multidimensional approach in order to understand the nature, and future solution, of this conflict.