Introduction

The previous chapter addressed the antecedents to direct victim participation in the Santos– FARC-EP peace negotiations – documenting the victims’ forums of 2014 and building into this a wider discussion of the rationale for victim inclusion in the Havana talks from the perspective of the participants in and organizers of the delegations. The chapter contended that a complex, nuanced and context-specific understanding of participation should be adopted when evaluating victim inclusion in peacemaking and victim-centred transitional justice initiatives. From this perspective, the chapter proposed the employment of an instrumentalization– empowerment spectrum, which allows for an approach that recognizes that instrumentalization and empowerment are not necessarily mutually exclusive phenomena, but rather may be experienced by victims across diverse fields and levels, at times simultaneously, during and in the wake of participation interventions. It was argued that instrumentalization and empowerment are contingent upon whether and, if so, to what degree victims are able to navigate and (re)negotiate relations of power exercised by elite political, economic and military/armed actors. The strategic assertion of individual agency by individual and collective victims as they seek to (re)negotiate power within the framework of formal inclusion mechanisms or peace talks plays a key role in this regard. However, the capacity of victims to assert their agency is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather is, in turn, itself contingent upon the extent to which the mandate of formal inclusion mechanisms allows for the re-allocation and redefinition of relationships of power and, of course, the degree to which perpetrators respond to the assertion of victim agency. In other words, although agency may be asserted innovatively and strategically, as it was during the Havana talks, the mandate of inclusion mechanisms will play a key role in setting the parameters for what victims – whether individual or collective – may or may not be able to achieve.

Within this framework, the following chapter examines the process through which participants were selected for the victims’ delegations, drawing upon interviews with members of the delegations and other relevant actors in the peace talks. What is of particular interest in this chapter is how the selection process – which was designed and led by elite national and international actors – addressed the fundamental issues of representation and gender.