Verbal violence in public debates about the implementation of the peace agreement in colombia

Abstract

In the historical context of the implementation of the Peace Agree-ment, signed in 2016 between Colombian State and the FARC-EP guerrilla, a case of verbal aggression is analyzed in a public debate with radicalized positions in favor of and against the signed Agreement. Using ELAN 5.0 software, selected sections of the radio debate between an academic and a lawyer which took place in July 2018 were transcribed, focusing on acts of verbal aggression. The cate-gories emerging from the inductive analysis of the transcription are contrasted and related to explanatory precategories from ethological studies on aggression. The case is approached from an interpretive and interdisciplinary perspective of discourse analysis, whose main technique consists of dismantling discursive mechanisms that produce meaning. The results show that accusations and challenges can be interpreted as verbal mechanisms that lead to violence during public disputes. The conclusions emphasize that both the accusations and the verbal challenges have political implications in relation to the difficulty of overcoming the Colombian armed conflict. The ethology of human aggression contributes to the field of anthropological and linguistic reflection on the use of language in hostile interactions within specific sociocultural, historical and situational envi-ronments. This reflection is one that leads us to wonder about the influence, the explanatory character, and the limits of sociobiological dispositions in the development of hostile interactions, although this interpretation does not necessarily imply the adoption of a deterministic view of social behavior.