Encountering Otherness
Emine Mulgrew, Malula Remote Intern
7/27/20266 min read
There is a moment, in the testimony of nearly every Malula volunteer, when they are able to listen to a story or experience vastly different from their own and find common ground.
I met that moment myself in Colombia. Over the course of my time as a volunteer with Malula, I sat with people the country had spent half a century learning to hold at arm's length: members of the Embera Indigenous community, members of Afro-Colombian communities, and former FARC combatants who had laid down their weapons under the 2016 peace accord. These are groups that a single narrative would keep firmly on opposite sides of a line, victims here, perpetrators there, the marginalised over there. To go beyond dividing lines was itself a step toward togetherness.
The comfort of the single story
Othering is easy. Across most contexts it appears to be the default action of governments, societies and groups. It could especially be understood as the default setting of a country that has lived through decades of armed conflict. To make someone other is to draw a line: us on this side, them on that side, and across the line a distance wide enough that the person on the far side stops being fully real or tangible. Distance of this kind is not neutral. It is what allows indifference. And indifference, as more than one Malula volunteer came to understand, is the ground on which violence is built. "Peace and memory cannot be built from indifference" - Lina, Malula’s President, reflected after a season of encounters that changed how she understood the conflict. The line dividing self from other is not just a description of difference; it is a decision about how much of another person we are willing to let in or build understanding with.
This division or imposed distance is created; it isn't inherently ingrained into human thought, but rather a consequence of socialisation. It works less like a conscious decision than an inherited framework, one that is rarely taught explicitly, yet supplies an often unquestioned lens through which we view and judge others. And once such a framework takes root, ideology and behaviour become difficult to separate, each quietly reinforcing the other: the distance we assume justifies the way we act, and the way we act deepens the distance. This is what makes othering feel like a default rather than a choice.
Othering depends on the single story, the view from one side only. This is why the encounter with the ex-FARC members stayed with me most. I had arrived carrying the abstraction the word "guerrilla" hands you. What I met instead were people of striking ordinariness and fluency, plainly well educated, able to articulate their perspectives with a precision that unsettled every assumption I had brought into the room. Despite living now in genuine precarity, many under continuing threat, they had travelled widely to speak about what they had done and what they hoped to build. The other side did not stop being the other side. But the people on it stopped being an abstraction.
Lina describes the same pivot from her own encounter with signatories of the peace agreement. "I heard for the first time from those who had been on the other side," she said, "and I perceived them as human, rebuilt, and concerned about the country and their own possibilities of rebuilding their lives." Understanding the conflict, she concluded, "also means recognising the complexity of those who lived through it, and accepting that history can rarely be understood from just one side." That last phrase is the quiet argument at the heart of all of this. Encountering otherness means surrendering the comfort of the single vantage point and accepting that the fuller picture will be more complicated, and more human, than the one we arrived with.
Where peace is actually built
What struck me in Bogotá was not simply that these encounters were possible, but that spaces had been built for them to happen. Casa de la Paz, is run by former FARC members and victims of the armed conflict; it houses a museum of the armed conflict and offers ex-combatants economic opportunities and, just as importantly, a platform to tell their own stories and work toward reconciliation. Not far away, the Centre for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation exists to hold the memory of the conflict in public rather than let it curdle in silence. These are not grand political gestures. They are ordinary rooms where the work of un-othering is done face to face, one conversation at a time. Events and discussions are regularly hosted in both spaces to continue to work towards reconciliation.
The scale of what the accord set in motion is worth stating plainly. More than 13,000 FARC members formally demobilised after 2016, and much of the movement chose a collective reincorporation, gathering in rural settlements and building cooperatives, football clubs, breweries, demining organisations, and social enterprises rather than dissolving quietly into anonymity. It is an imperfect process. Colombian society was, and remains, deeply divided about it; the peace deal was narrowly rejected in a 2016 plebiscite before a revised version passed through congress, and dissident groups did take up arms again. But the impulse to build reconciliation at community level, in the open, is real and visible.
An outsider's comparison
Coming to this from the United Kingdom, I could not help comparing it with the peace I had grown up near. Northern Ireland reached its own settlement, the Good Friday Agreement, in 1998, and by most measures it succeeded: the violence largely stopped and has not returned at scale. But the texture of that peace is strikingly different from what I saw in Colombia, and the difference maps almost exactly onto the theme of encountering otherness.
Where ex-FARC combatants travel to narrate their experiences publicly, their Northern Irish counterparts have largely kept to a code of silence. The clearest illustration is the Boston College "Belfast Project," an oral-history effort that gathered candid testimony from former republican and loyalist paramilitaries only by guaranteeing that no interview would be released until the speaker had died. When that seal was breached and police obtained some of the recordings, the result was not reconciliation but death threats, arrests, and a long legal battle. Researchers comparing ex-combatants in both conflicts have noted the same contrast: the reluctance of Northern Irish republicans to speak on the record is, as one account puts it, self-evident.
I do not raise this to flatter Colombia or diminish Northern Ireland; each peace carries its own scars and each remains fragile in its own way. But the comparison sharpens the point. A peace can hold politically while leaving the deeper work of un-othering largely undone, the former enemies still sealed off from one another, their stories locked away until death. This secrecy on both sides of the conflict can encourage resentment for lack of clarity and ‘truth’. What I saw in Colombia, still raw, still contested, only years old, was a local community level attempt at the more difficult approach: to place former ‘enemies’ in the same room and let them be heard while they are still alive to be answered. Obviously on a national level there are still complexities and disagreements about how to move towards a peaceful society, but from the examples that I witnessed this approach seemed to be working for those involved.
The practice, not the event
None of this is automatic. Encountering otherness is not the same as being near it. Lina had studied the history of Bojayá, one of Malula's partner communities, from an academic distance, through photographs and videos. It stayed distant until she heard it differently, through the testimony of someone who had lived within the community, the River Atrato, the canoes, the songs, the loss that still inhabits that place. Proximity of information is not proximity of the heart. The first can be had from a library; the second has to be practised and experienced in person.
And practised is the right word, because the encounter with otherness is a skill, not an event. It asks for something uncomfortable: the willingness to let another person's reality revise your own. Alejandra names the movement and points it toward hope. Peacebuilding in Colombia, she says, "is a path that begins by listening to the stories of people we perceive as radically different from ourselves." Notice the word perceive. The radical difference is not simply given; it is something we create and assign. And what listening reveals, in her account, is that the perception was overdrawn: "there are more stories and memories that unite us than those that divide us."
Every time a stranger becomes a person, every time an enemy becomes complicated, every time "them" loses a little of its solidity, a small piece of the architecture of conflict is taken apart. That is not a soft addition to the work of peace. It is the work. As the NGO President Lina put it, in a phrase that could stand as the whole method: “have fewer assumptions, and listen more.”