Chapter 3 Orlando Fals Borda’s participatory action research: At and beyond the crossroads of Camilo Torres’s neo-socialism and liberation theology

From critique of violence to rebellious social science

Camilo Torres’s pluralism and the liberation social science tradition

In his comments on Subversion (1967), Silva Michelena drew Fals Borda’s attention to the chronic inability of Colombian subversive groups to become a viable political option – a situation closely related to Colombian social conservatism, which was reinforced not only by the Catholic Church’s alliance with the Conservative Party but also through the adoption of traditional values in key social institutions such as the family and schools. Therefore, Silva Michelena wrote, ‘this is one of the factors that made Camilo an ideal leader for Colombia but, as you have said, [Camilo] can be revived and it would not be the first time that a dead person makes a revolution’ (ACH-UN, FOFB. Subversión, 54).

Although Camilo Torres’s vision of a pluralist utopia was distorted by realities almost immediately after he expounded it, Fals Borda agreed with Michelena that there already existed the minimum ideological and organisational elements ‘to initiate a new cycle of subversive development in Colombia that will lead to another order, the fifth of the historical series’ (1969, 170). If Fals Borda regarded Camilo Torres as the standard-bearer of a new subversion in Colombia, it was not because Torres was a priest who preached the new socialist revolution in religious tones. It was because the moral direction of his pluralist utopia had become the crossroads at which many disenfranchised and even rival leftist factions converged (López-Pacheco 2017, 176; Pereira 2008, 394–5). Moreover, Fals Borda’s critical retrieval of Torres’s ideological drive was an effort to reclaim the utopian and moral ingredients from those who turned them into a mere justification for armed struggle.

Therefore, Fals Borda’s method of ‘reviving’ Torres consisted in reappropriating through historical inquiry at least three aspects of his pluralism that Fals Borda sought to render into an autochthonous ideological framework for political action: (1) the politics of human dignity, which Torres encapsulated in the concept of ‘efficacious love’ (Torres 1971, 351; see also Díaz-Arévalo 2022a) – a moral imperative that was at odds with the ritualistic type of religion which has little ethical significance in everyday life. In Colombia, a highly segregated society where most people live in poverty, Torres wrote (La República 16 June 1965), effective charity had to point to the practical and social implication of Christian faith; (2) pluralistic dialogue and criticism of false binaries, which aimed at de-spiritualising politics. Torres’s dialogue with the Marxists and the communists challenged the ideological Manicheism held by the church–state alliance which had perceived all good to rest on one side, and all evil on the other. Torres’s dialectic is no longer between good and evil but between justice and dignity on one hand, and exploitation and oppression on the other. As he put it, when religion makes people take human problems seriously, it is no longer religious alienation. So, in contrast to the dominant groups who blamed the socio-political turmoil on inimical outsiders or foreign conspiracies, mostly communist, Torres declared, ‘I am not, nor will I ever become, a Communist. However, I am prepared to fight together with the Communists for our common goals: against the oligarchy and United States domination; for the winning of power by the people’;¹⁰ and (3) participatory politics which represented a direct challenge to the National Front’s exclusionary politics whose ideology was phrased in terms of internal national security and had allowed the oligarchy to rule uncontested over a society which had been torn asunder.

Fals Borda’s actualisation of Camilo Torres as a utopian image for teletic – or goal-oriented – politics was by no means uncritical of Torres’s final decision. For Fals Borda (1968), the rapid spread of guerrilla warfare throughout Latin American was a ‘social fact’ that reflected the existence of acute and historical social problems in the region. Therefore, the problem of violence as ultima ratio was not so much in its justification as in the conditions and limitations of its use. Justifications had been ongoing for centuries, at least since Thomas Aquinas’s classical thesis on just war (Fals Borda 1969, 166). The problem, as Fals Borda noted, was the excessive reliance on military success that led armed groups inspired by the success of the Cuban Revolution to blindly duplicate the Sierra Maestra pattern in the early 1960s (1968, 457). The case of Torres illustrates this point. Torres saw his decision to join the guerrillas as the means to consolidate his previous political work as a leader of the Frente Unido (United Front), which had been officially launched just five months before, in May 1965. In his last letter to his brother Fernando, written from his guerrilla campsite in the mountains of Santander, Torres stated that, ‘following the work of agitation, this stage is necessary and will consolidate the previous stage. I am prepared for a long struggle but sure of victory … If I get left behind, because they kill me, I believe that the work already done will prevail’ (ACH-UN. Fondo Camilo Torres Restrepo, 81).

For Fals Borda, Torres’s self-deluding confidence in the immediate success of armed struggle, as well as that of other popular leaders in the region, was his tactical error. Aware of the need for a long-term and more complex strategy for political action, Fals Borda posited that the alternative was the creation of a popular counter-elite ethically and politically prepared to subvert the unjust social order imposed by the coalition of the National Front. This, however, posed the practical challenge of finding ‘strategic groups … akin to Torres’s ideal of service to collaborate with them in the concrete revolutionary task’ (ACH-UN, FOFB. RI, Suiza, 18).

One of these groups was Golconda, with which Fals Borda tried to engage. Led by Monsignor Gerardo Valencia Cano, the group was formed by Father René García and a group of priests of the Archdiocese of Bogotá; a group of nuns and teachers of the girls Catholic School Marymount led by sister Leonor Esguerra; and the Marxist mathematician Germán Zabala and a group of his students, with whom he led an educational experience, the Integral Educational Model (modelo educacional integral, MEI), at the Central Colombian Institute (Pérez-Prieto 2016, 92). By adopting a ‘militant pastoral methodology’, which was inspired by the see-judge-act approach of the Young Christian Workers created by the Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn (Cervetto 2017), the articulation of these three groups and their pedagogical practices in the popular districts of Bogotá sought to realise Torres’s revolutionary ideal; that is, to create the basis for ‘the political, pedagogical and spiritual unity of the popular classes’ (Pérez-Prieto 2016, 93).

However, Fals Borda’s plan to work with the ‘revolution of the cassocks’ (Restrepo, J. 1995), as Golconda was known, never came to fruition. On the one hand, Golconda rapidly lost momentum as its members scattered following persecution, the emergence of ideological differences, and the fact that some of its leaders joined the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional) guerrilla group (Zeitlin, in Torres 1972, 45–6).¹¹ On the other, Fals Borda had decided to create an independent centre for social research in which he sought to employ a group of twelve scholars from the Faculty of Sociology that he had created a decade earlier. This proposal was received with deep reservations with some of Fals Borda’s former colleagues deeply concerned about the radicalism of his ‘new ideas’.

The ideas that surprised some of Fals Borda’s former colleagues were those espoused in his conception of sociología del compromiso (engaged sociology) with which he sought to respond to Marx’s invitation to change the world instead of just contemplating it (Bonilla et al. 1972, 19–33). Fals Borda’s engaged sociology had reached academic prominence at the 9th Latin American Congress of Sociology in Mexico, 1969, where the debate between engaged and objective sociology was at the core of the congress. Arguing that claims to non-involvement, neutrality and objectivity in social inquiry served consciously or unconsciously to preserve social injustice, Fals Borda (1970) spearheaded the arguments in favour of engaged sociology against Aldo Solari’s value-free sociology (2011 [1969]). The former’s ideas provided the key lines adopted by the conference’s final declaration, which defined engaged sociology as a current that sides with the underprivileged, seeking to contribute to empowering key groups for social change while contesting the underlying values of instrumental positivism – chiefly, its self-delusionary notions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ and its methodological practice restricted to functionalist research methods (Fals Borda 1970).

Fals Borda’s engaged sociology resonated with social researchers, popular educators, Protestant and Catholic theologians and activists, who had all gathered under the emerging ecumenical umbrella of the liberationist paradigm. In fact, Fals Borda’s Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual (1971) – a series of essays in which he further expanded his ideas on engagement, decolonialism and the sociology of liberation – came out at the same time as Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez’s seminal Teología de la liberación (1972 [1971]).

Gutiérrez, a classmate of Camilo Torres at Louvain, had participated in the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965 and was the key ideologue of the Medellín CELAM (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano y Caribeño) Conference (Hart 1978, 196). Resident, as he was, of a Lima shantytown, Gutiérrez claimed that neutrality was impossible and that denying the existence of the class struggle was ‘to put oneself on the side of the dominant sectors’ (1998 [1973], 158). In contrast to dogmatic theology, which prioritises doctrine over mundane realities, Gutiérrez argues that theology, as reflection, is the ‘second act’ since the first act is ‘commitment to the poor’ (1973, xxiii). Gutiérrez’s experience, like that of many liberation theologians and activists living in marginalised areas across Latin America, fostered the creation of popular biblical circles and ecclesial base communities. The analysis of ‘institutionalised violence’, similar to what sociologist Johan Galtung would term ‘structural violence’ a year later (Guardado 2022), led those engaged with the poor to interrogate their own contexts against the teachings of the Gospel (Berryman 1987) and, vice versa, to question, as Fray Antonio de Montesinos did in his sermon on the Sunday before Christmas 1511 in Hispaniola (now Haiti/Dominican Republic), ‘For whose benefit?’ ‘In whose interest is it to make such and such a claim about God?’ (in Bradstock and Rowland 2002, 62–3).

Engaged research and the theological question of social ethics

In July 1970, on his return to Colombia after almost three years in Europe, Fals Borda officially resigned from the National University of Colombia in order to dedicate himself to radical activism. One year later, with the aim of advancing social research that supported marginalised groups in their struggles for social justice, Fals Borda established La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (the Circle of Research and Social Action; henceforth La Rosca) along with the theatre director Carlos Duplat and three fellow Presbyterians, namely: Víctor Daniel Bonilla, a journalist and ethnographer, who worked with the newly created Indigenous council of Cauca; Gonzalo Castillo-Cárdenas, a sociologist and pastor; and Augusto Libreros, an economist and Presbyterian pastor.

Elsewhere, I have analysed the impact that the 1966 World Conference of the World Council of Churches had on Fals Borda’s critical thinking (Díaz-Arévalo 2022a). For our present purpose, however, it is sufficient to note that this progressive movement led by the theologian Richard Shaull raised concerns regarding the role of traditional theology in times of global challenges such as the nuclear threat, the war in Vietnam and the poverty in which two-thirds of the world population lived, leading to the realisation that renewal of the Church’s mission must include concern for the people involved in revolutionary struggles for social justice (ACH-UN, FOFB. Congreso Mundial Iglesias, 65). True to these considerations, La Rosca set its base in the western plains of the Atlantic Coast where the struggle of smallholders and land workers against large landowners was more intense and had a major impact in terms of land distribution (Rappaport 2017; 2020). In 1972, when Fals Borda joined the peasant movement’s struggle for land, President Misael Pastrana (1970–74) had begun dismantling the official machinery that had been set up by the former administration to carry out an ambitious agrarian reform (Rivera Cusicanqui 1982; Zamosc 1986). The peasant movement responded to Pastrana’s counter-reform with hacienda occupations which were, in turn, violently suppressed. Indeed, along with many others who joined the peasants’ action, Fals Borda was jailed for his participation.

La Rosca, however, not only raised concerns within the establishment but also sparked confrontation within the Presbyterian Church over the funding that Fals Borda had secured for La Rosca from the National Committee on the Self-Development of People (NCSDP), an organisation of which Fals Borda was a co-founding member and that works under the auspices of the United Presbyterian Church of the US (Moreno 2017, 141).¹² The Colombian Presbyterian Synod decried the fact that the US Church had funded La Rosca, ‘a Communist revolutionary organisation dedicated to promoting class struggle’, as they saw it (ACH-UN, FOFB. IAP [Investigación Acción Participativa], 126). Through open letters and leaflets distributed by hand at the NCSDP annual meeting, the National Synod, led by Emery Lorentz, a US missionary based in Colombia, protested against what they saw as NCSDP’s interference in national affairs and demanded the US Church revoke its decision. Fals Borda ultimately resigned as a member of the NCSDP and a second instalment of $75,000, due to be paid in early 1974, was suspended. In addition, the conflict with the Synod escalated to the point that Fals Borda was excommunicated because of his alleged communism. Nonetheless, Fals Borda found a generous source of financial support for La Rosca in the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and, despite his excommunication, also obtained help from the Dutch Churches’ Foundation, Cross the Bridge.

The feud with the Presbyterian Synod of Colombia over the NCSDP grant serves as a backdrop for examining the question of social ethics; a crucial point of contention between the liberationist paradigm and what Fals Borda viewed as the churches’ old paradigm. While the former was aligned with the principles of engagement with the poor previously mentioned, the latter was crudely described by Fals Borda as characteristic of ‘institutions loaded with the most conservative views, far from the genuine interests of the people in need [and] adept at giving moral support to an unjust system’ (ACH-UN, FOFB. Alterantiva, 50).

The discussion of the relationship between religion and social action had been addressed by Fals Borda and theologians such as W. César and Richard Shaull in the book Protestantismo e imperialismo (César et al. 1968). However, the specific question of social ethics became an issue of analysis for La Rosca after some leaders of the peasant movement expressed their concern about the influence of fast-growing evangelical groups which were indifferent or even opposed to the peasants’ struggle for land in the region (CDRBr//M, fol. 0731, 4081). La Rosca therefore launched a research project on the experience of participation in the Pentecostal community in Córdoba, on the Atlantic Coast, an area under the influence of the peasant movement.

The research project, coordinated by María Cristina Salazar, Fals Borda’s wife, explored the socio-historical and theoretical basis for the traditional conservatism of the Protestant churches in Latin America, given that their members seemed uninterested in the socio-political destiny of their countries (CDRBr//M, fol. 0731, 4099). Through a comparative analysis of the development of Protestantism in Colombia, Chile and Brazil, and the adoption of the critical views of theologians such as Rubem Alvez (1970), César Waldo (1968) and Lalive d’Epiney (1967), Salazar argues that the lack of a clear social ethics in Protestant churches relates to the fact that their message appeals to the individual, requiring him or her to make a decision of a religious nature, yet leaving them to their own devices in the political and social spheres (Tilich 1962, in Salazar CDRBr//M, fol. 0731, 4082). Moreover, as Libreros (1969) argues, the relationship between the individual and the social is presented as a duality, not a dialectic. While the latter suggests a tension that demands the active engagement of the individual to transform society, the former suggests an irreconcilable either/or type of relation.

For d’Epiney the reactionary role of Protestantism in Latin America (a sort of ‘Latin American McCarthyism’ or passive socio-political strike) resulted from the attempt to shift the Protestant groups too quickly towards structures and conventions that had dominated the older churches in Latin America. As d’Epiney had concluded at the Conference of Church and Society held in Uruguay in 1967, these older churches were founded on the same principles as the traditional hacienda in Latin America: ‘they offer men a possible escape from their historic situation, from their responsibility as men, from their solidarity with other men’ (ACH-UN, FOFB. Congreso Mundial Iglesias, 384).

For Rubem Alvez, head of the Union Theological Seminary and new director of studies of the Latin American Committee of Church and Society, the roots of the problem of the churches’ conservatism were not only socio-cultural. He argued that they were also part of the spiritual inheritance of Latin American Protestantism, which is encapsulated in the motto ‘convert the individual then society will be transformed’ (1970, 10). Social ethics based on this principle can hardly produce categories for understanding problems of a structural nature. According to Alvez (1970, 11), the mutation of the political character of Calvinism (transformation of the world for the glory of God) into individualistic ethics, based on the consciousness of being morally different or superior, had stripped Calvinism in Latin America of its social ethics. Hence, for the Latin American Protestant, man does not change his world, he rejects it: ‘Criticism of the structures is avoided, and criticism of the individual takes its place. It is the same ideology which in the US ascribes the plight of the poor to the fact that “they do not try hard enough”’ (1970, 11–12).

Salazar concludes by arguing that by replacing the critique of the structural with the critique of the individual, Protestant ethics manage to create an illusory happiness that is stronger than in traditional peasant Catholicism due to its emphasis on emotions and very intense sentimental experiences (CDRBr//M, fol. 0731, 4112). Therefore, under the current social structures of the country, the lack of social concerns in Pentecostalist groups appears to be detrimental to the historical tasks of the Colombian peasantry for its own liberation (CDRBr//M, fol. 0731, 4113).

In search of a methodological approach to Praxis

Fals Borda and his associates were aware that an ethical framework for social action also required methodological strategies able to connect theory and practice. Therefore, they also found the attitude of left-wing groups towards the fast-growing influence of evangelical groups in the region extremely concerning. As Fals Borda wrote, ‘there is no known concrete plan of action to counteract this counter-revolutionary influence, except to bemoan it or ignore it; that is, to underestimate it’ (CDRBr//M, fol. 0731, fol. 4162).

Seeking to render their action-oriented research agenda into methodological approaches to work with the marginalised became one of the major epistemological questions with which La Rosca was confronted. The various labels created to name their work as engaged social researchers, such as engaged sociology, committed sociology and the sociology of liberation, among others, are indicative of their efforts to connect Freire’s ongoing spiral of praxis with scholarly inquiry and theorising, as well as with their pastoral work.

The same was true for most theologians and social researchers seeking authentic engagement with the poor. The creation of ecclesial base communities and cadres demanded novel methods and strategies of participation, which resulted in an intense period of experimentation in action-oriented research and reflection undertaken with the bases. With their multiple variations, approaches such as the action-research cycle (inquiry-reflection-action) and the militant pastoral methodology (see-judge-act), then widely adopted by liberation theology (Girardi 2012, 5), developed in parallel within the framework of praxis defined by Paulo Freire. This demanded that the oppressed engaged in reflection on their own reality: ‘reflection – true reflection – leads to action’, wrote Freire. As he continues, ‘when the situation calls for action, that action will constitute an authentic praxis only if its consequences become the object of critical reflection … Otherwise, action is pure activism’ (2005 [1970], 66).

According to Fals Borda, the link that allowed engaged groups to combine thought and action in the praxis research process was the adaptation of Marxism to local conditions (1974, 61). Following Mariátegui’s refusal to abide by dogmatic or mechanical Marxism while seeking to adapt Marx to Peruvian reality (Munck 2022), La Rosca, as its funding act indicates, sought to adopt the technical-practical aspects of Marxism as a working method, not as ideology and even less as dogma, with the aim of adapting it to Colombian rural reality (ACH-UN, FOFB. IAP, Rosca, 202). Something similar applied to most liberation theologians, who did not adopt Marx’s ideas wholesale but, always within the modus cogitans of religious epistemology (Lamola 2018), borrowed concepts and methodological pointers which they found helpful.

This section focuses on three techniques developed by La Rosca which are illustrative of at least two aspects: first, an intense period of methodological exploration of theologians and sociologists united by their commitment to the struggle of the marginalised; and second, efforts to integrate practical aspects of Marxism into a methodology that, at the same time, responded to a theologically informed framework of social ethics.

PAR and liberation theology: epistemological differences and common challenges

Thus far, this chapter has examined three stages of Fals Borda’s intellectual journey: that of the analyst of political violence in Colombia, of the theorist in search of a subversive framework for sociological analysis, and that of the militant researcher who sought to put into practice his own radical sociological ideas.

In the face of the widespread emergence of violent revolutionary movements fighting against exclusion and domination, Goulet defined the late 1960s as the period when many Latin American intellectuals fought their battles around ‘conflicting loyalties’ (1974). Similarly, he points out, Fals Borda faced three crucial options: ‘that of the detached scholar versus the active revolutionary intellectual; that of the institutionally successful professional versus the marginalised outcast; that of the “marker of history” versus the Christian witness to transcendence’ (1974, 53). Bringing together three different aspects of Fals Borda’s work, this chapter has highlighted that his radical ideas and activism were much less the result of his abandoning the functionalist framework of analysis than a consequence of the vision of social justice that had led him to break the silence surrounding la Violencia.

Along the same lines, this chapter has indicated that Fals Borda’s engagement with the struggle of the poor designated both a field of action and an epistemological crossroads at which theologians, social scientists, educators and activists converged. Echoing Gutiérrez’s (1973, xxiii) theological perspective, according to which commitment to the poor was the ‘first act’ of the praxis of liberation, the founding act of La Rosca stated that its aim was ‘to make of the very politically engaged action with the landless (or militancy) a scientific experience’ (ACH-UN, FOFB. IAP, La Rosca, 248).

Looking at the origins of PAR, this chapter has examined a series of overlapping concerns, both conceptual and methodological, between engaged social researchers, activists and theologians. Nonetheless, there are important differences between PAR and liberation theology, as well as common challenges.

As one may imagine, the main difference between social science and theology is of an epistemological nature; that is, the way questions such as what is understood by knowledge, how it is acquired, and how it is justified, are addressed. For all its contributions to validate and legitimise the knowledge-creating capacity of people outside traditional models and institutions (Díaz-Arévalo 2022), PAR, as most approaches within the participatory paradigm, belongs to the sphere of the scientific paradigm, in which knowledge is gained through the process of data collection, empirical verification and analysis. As indicated earlier, Fals Borda’s search for methodological approaches to transform reality were meant to validate action as a locus of scientific knowledge production, and not only as the means to support a political struggle.

The modus cogitans of liberation theology is instead grounded upon religious epistemology and, hence, mediated through religious notions of social practice. By looking through the epistemological lens of the poor, liberation theology departed from the classical models of theological production, helping to create an alternative way of doing theology within the Christian tradition (Boff 1989). Lamola, however, contests the assumption that this represented a materialist-transformative epistemological break, and goes even further by questioning the possibility of liberation theology becoming a theoretical tool for socio-political transformation (2018). Given its commitments to metaphysics, ecclesiastical orthodoxy and fidelity to biblical reflection, liberation theology’s concept of orthopraxis, Lamola argues, results in a mystification of historical reality (2018, 2). For others, liberation theology’s concern with human suffering and social injustice represents a novel framework for theological analysis. However, as Alberto Parra has pointed out, Gutiérrez’s liberation theology’s singular merit is not the inclusion of ‘new topics’ for theological reflection but ‘a new way of doing theology whose principle, means and end is the praxis of liberation’ (2021, 58 and 228). Such an innovation spread beyond Latin America and Roman Catholicism, giving way, for instance, to Black theologies of liberation and Islamic liberation theology, or influencing the emergence of other critical theologies such as feminist and eco-theology (Guardado 2022).

The widespread legacies of both militant action research and liberation theology suggest that a good way to conclude this chapter is by pointing to a challenge that both PAR and liberation theology, each within their own epistemological spheres, have faced since their origins: the participation of the marginalised.

Looking at the links between liberation theology and PAR, Girardi recalls that liberation theology’s option for the poor was to be only an initial stage, whereby the Christian community should commit to a moral and intellectual conversion; that is, to promote the full realisation of the people as the subject of theology (2012). ‘Ultimately, we will only have an authentic Liberation’, Girardi states, ‘when [the oppressed themselves] become the protagonists of theological reflection and research’ (2012, 5) and the role of specialists be that of stimulating and promoting their initiatives.

The challenge to liberation theology was not simply to create more inclusive hermeneutical communities but to contribute to the genuine participation of those traditionally marginalised and excluded from theological elaboration. This meant nothing less than critically analysing and transforming the docente-discente divide on which the churches had established their prerogative to teach, preach and indoctrinate. For Presbyterian theologian Richard Shaull, recognising the hermeneutical privilege of the poor is the task of a new generation of liberation theologians (Barreto 2004). They do not want simply ‘to be with the poor and do theology for them’, Shaull argues: ‘instead, they wanted theology to rise from the poor themselves’ (cited in Barreto 2004, 169). In order to take up this task, one would have to take into account the socio-historical analysis of the development of liberation theology and its influence on contemporary critical thinking within and beyond the theological realm.

The history of PAR has been beset by similar concerns. As argued in the introduction, PAR developed out of Fals Borda’s militant research and hence its evolution was conditioned by a conflictive context that demanded radical socio-political action. Retrospectively examining his own engaged (value-oriented) sociology, Fals Borda pointed out that the relation between research and action depended very much on the ability of the conscientious researcher and committed cadres to ‘work at the level of political consciousness of the masses to successively bring them to “good sense” and revolutionary class consciousness’ (Fals Borda 1979, 46). Alfredo Molano, one of La Rosca’s close collaborators, thus stated that militant research was ‘a politicized version of participant observation […] a form of “profane evangelisation”’ (ACH-UN, FOFB. IAP, Rosca, 208), while others have stressed that the implementation of techniques of militant research, such as the analysis of class struggle and the ideological formation of revolutionary cadres, were not immune to reproducing subject–object asymmetries (Poggi 2015; Rivera Cusicanqui 1987, 51; Sousa Santos 2018, 262). However, ‘engagement’, which was much more a watchword of the researcher’s commitment to the peasant struggle than a methodological guide, served as a first step towards rejecting the traditional distinction between ‘observers of the process’ and ‘people under observation (as in a laboratory)’ to start seeing them both as ‘thinking and acting subjects within the research task’ (Fals Borda 1974, 65).

The popularisation of PAR in the 1980s and 1990s and its use, misuse and abuse by development organisations and donors sparked radical criticism of PAR as instrumental, co-opted and trendy (Cooke and Kothari 2001). However, looking at the guiding principles of Fals Borda’s militant research and the techniques tried in the field, it is possible to discern the germ of the three ontological bases that later came to define PAR: a method of social research, an educational act, and a means of taking transformative action (Hall 1975, 1982). Drawing on these pillars, and with an emphasis on participation, Fals Borda redefined the methodological approach of his action research, laying the basis for what became known as PAR: (1) collective and dialogical research through traditional ethnographic techniques as well as art-based approaches including graphic stories, puppet shows and drama; (2) critical recovery of history through exercises of collective memory and analysis of archivos de baúl (kitchen archives); (3) valuing and fostering local culture to promote action and participation; (4) co-production and multi-level dissemination of knowledge made accessible through different formats to local communities, organisations and researchers; and (5) systematic devolution that facilitates what Swantz (1975, 45) calls a ‘two-way educative communication’. Rather than a fixed set of methodological techniques, these also operate as epistemological principles which aim to challenge the hegemonical distinction between researched and researcher and hence break with the monopoly of knowledge (Díaz-Arévalo and Ruiz-Galvan 2024).

For all the epistemological differences in the ways theological knowledge and social knowledge are produced and validated, the common historical grounds of PAR and liberation theology reminds us that praxis, understood as the coherence between knowing, saying and doing (Parra 2021) is the crossroads at which efforts to support people’s own struggles through collectively self-deliberated action converge.

Notes

1. 1. Drawing almost exclusively on Fals Borda’s Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual (1970), a book written before his engagement with the peasant movement, Sousa Santos argues that: ‘Fals Borda distinguishes between participant-observation, observation-intervention, and observation-insertion, the last one corresponding to PAR’ (2018, 331). Sousa Santos’s (2018, 247–67) account of Fals Borda’s pioneering work paradoxically presents PAR as synonymous with a technique that Fals Borda himself described as outdated and surpassed by his own experience in the field and theoretical elaborations on more mature ideas on action research (1979).

2. 2. President Alberto Lleras stated in his speech on the day he took office: ‘We saw with amazement how there had been a reserve of savagery in our people which defied entire centuries of Christian preaching, of civil order, and of advanced communal existence’ (in Fals Borda 1964, 28).

3. 3. The bulk of the first volume of LVC (Guzmán, Fals Borda and Umaña 2005 [1962]) deals with the antecedents, history and geography of la Violencia (part 1) and the socio-anthropological characterisation of the groups in conflict (part 2), and was mostly written by Guzmán. With its comprehensive chronology and painstaking descriptions, these two parts made it a ‘book-archive’ (Sánchez 2007, 21), which remained the main empirical source for academic research on la Violencia until the late 1970s. The third part consists of three chapters, the first discussing the social consequences of la Violencia. The second, authored by lawyer Eduardo Umaña, examines what Martz (1975, 304) described as ‘the total inadequacy of the Colombian judicial system in dealing with [it]’, which explains impunity as one of the main causes of the escalation of political violence. The book closes with Fals Borda’s sociological analysis of the phenomenon (399–420).

4. 4. For the functionalist framework, the ‘anomical stage’ defines a dialectical process according to which the collapse of a system of values does not occur without a corresponding series of values in predicament or transition (Cfr. Fals Borda 1964, 29). In the Colombian case, Fals Borda argues, this transition was accelerated by the drastic changes that conflict imposed in rural areas. Estimates suggest that the number of self-defence guerrilla fighters – men, women and children, mostly former rural workers – was between 40,000 and 55,000 by 1953. The police and paramilitary squads, which also massively recruited among the rural population, according to Ramsey, numbered no more than 25,000 men (Molano 2015, 26; Ramsey 1981, 206).

5. 5. Elsewhere, I have examined the convergence between Fals Borda’s historical dialectic between utopia and subversion (1969, xii) and Benjamin’s dialectical image insofar as both carry a sense of urgency, as if they were to rescue a memory in danger of sinking into oblivion – something like the ‘tiger’s leap into the past’, as Benjamin wrote in his Thesis XIV, trying to ‘seize a momentary flashing image at the moment of its recognisability’ (Benjamin 2006, 390–91).

6. 6. The first three social orders are: (1) the rule of the pre-Colombian group, the Chibchas, and its domination by the Spanish conquest; (2) the three-century seigniorial order with its Hispanic peace, and its partial liberal-democratic transition in the mid-nineteenth century; (3) the seigniorial-bourgeois order after the Conservative hegemony, 1885, and the socialist transition, stemming from the ideology that appeared in Colombia after 1925.

7. 7. According to Fals Borda, ‘scholars tend to jump from one stage of historical development to another’, without giving systematic information about the factors that influenced the transition between social orders (1969, 4). Within the framework of the sociology of conflict, Fals Borda draws on Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1960) and Ernest Gellner’s Thought and Change (1965) in search of a ‘master theory’ to enable analysis of periods of transition leading to or preventing the emergence of new social orders in Colombian history. Following Gellner’s socio-historical approach, Fals Borda seeks to understand how hegemonic power is eroded by collective endeavours in Colombia, to which end he considers four components: social values, social norms, social organisation and techniques. The process undermining the old order is ‘subversion’: a condition reflecting the internal incongruities of the social order recognised during a specified historical period in the light of new, more highly valued goals.

8. 8. Fals Borda traces the origins of the concept subvertere as synonymous with violent and destructive actions back to Gaius Sallust’s Catilinarian Conspiracy (circa 44–40 BC). Sallust, an aristocrat accused of corruption, described Catiline (who attempted to overthrow the power of the aristocratic Senate) as a deliberate foe of law, order and morality, which allows Fals Borda to argue that this definition, introduced in Western dictionaries, ignores genuine cases of subversion, the promoters of which have over time been recognised as heroes or even saints, especially in Jewish and Christian cultures. As Rev. Castillo-Cárdenas wrote to Fals Borda, the subversion, led by Moses and legitimised by Jehovah himself against the tyranny of the Pharaohs, and the prophetic voices against injustice and oppression in the Old Testament are the backbone of the Judeo-Christian tradition (ACH-UN, FOFB. Subversión, 63). Along these lines, Fals Borda questioned the medieval perception which associated subversion with evil or heresy, as was seen at the trials of advocates of ‘social equality and freedom of thought’, such as Jan Hus (1415) and Thomas Münzer (1525) (ACH-UN, FOFB. Subversión, 47–51). Ironically, Fals Borda (ACH-UN, FOFB. Subversión, 82) noted, in the Latin American republics, which were established after radical subversions, those who challenge the social order are considered anti-social, no matter how just their causes are.

9. 9. The rebel groups were the Movimiento Revolucionario Liberal (MRL), founded by Alfonso Lopez Michelsen, son of President Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo, and himself later president from 1974 to 1978, and El Grupo de La Ceja, whom Fals Borda had contacted to offer his intellectual support. Fals Borda’s attempts to liaise with a new politically dissident movement within the Liberal Party soon met with disappointment. The La Ceja group disintegrated and the MRL’s dissidence was revealed to be a strategic move designed to channel popular frustration, and hence it served to prevent many liberals dissatisfied with the National Front from abandoning the party (El Espectador 11 May 1965).

10. 10. Camilo Torres, ‘Message to Communists’, in Camilo Torres (1971, 371).

11. 11. The group’s second meeting in the city-port of Buenaventura was followed by the Golconda Declaration (1968), which reflected on the practical implications for the Colombian Church of the official declaration issued by the Conference of the Latin American Bishops that had been just celebrated in Medellín and inaugurated by Pope Paul VI. Golconda’s declaration echoed the Conference’s conclusions regarding the need for a Christian theology grounded in critical analysis of the socio-political situation of the region. But the fact that the Colombian hierarchy had delivered their own document rejecting the Conference’s final document resulted in the condemnation of Golconda’s declaration and, soon after, of the group itself, which was seen as an instrument of Marxist infiltration in the country (Funk 1972, 85).

12. 12. Cintya White, co-founder of the NCSDP, recalled that the concept of self-development entailed that the poor were the real experts of their own reality and knew how to solve their problems: ‘They might need financial and expert help but they should remain in control of the solutions’ (in Moreno 2017, 144).

13. 13. Rappaport focuses on the experimental nature of the pamphlets and analyses the level of epistemological control taken by the participants over the process of production. Escucha Cristiano, she argues, provides us with a good example of early action research methodological experimentation: ‘[it] is not research in any standard sense of the word, although it constituted research in the [participants’] new understanding of the investigative process’ (2020, 64). Poggi, who looks at this graphic story with a focus on the content and use of the material, sees it as a partisan ideological instrument that contributed to reproducing the subject–object asymmetry (2015, 76).

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