Framing a Revolution: Narrative Battles in Colombia’s Civil War, by Rachel Schmidt

Abstract

When Rachel Schmidt sat down with four former commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), she began by presenting her documents—consent forms, a letter of permission from the Colombian government, interview questions—to establish credibility. “I’m interested in studying different groups of demobilized combatants,” she explained. Their response was immediate and firm: “We are not demobilized! We are reincorporated. . . . We negotiated a deal. We did not surrender” (216–17). This moment—at once rhetorical and political—encapsulates the central contribution of Schmidt’s Framing a Revolution: Narrative Battles in Colombia’s Civil War. Her project is a thorough investigation of how actors in Colombia’s long armed conflict contest the meaning of war, peace, and identity through language.Though housed in the field of international relations and comparative politics, Framing a Revolution speaks powerfully to rhetoric scholars. Its emphasis on the “framing contest” is deeply rhetorical: a struggle over language, meaning, and identity that is shaped by power, performance, and persuasion. Drawing from 114 in-depth interviews and months of participant observation, Schmidt traces how different actors—former guerrillas, paramilitaries, state officials—construct, contest, and renegotiate the frames that define the Colombian conflict and its aftermath. Ex-paramilitaries, for instance, rejected the word paramilitary and preferred self-defense forces because they did not want to be perceived as working for the military (from the Spanish para). These frames are not merely analytic tools; they are lived categories embedded in language, social practices, and the minds of those navigating the aftermath of the conflict.Framing is, for Schmidt, a dynamic process. Frames are repeated, challenged, reworked, and replaced as actors seek to shape public narratives and their own self-understandings. Her focus on framing contests allows her to analyze not only how people speak but also how language organizes their political investments, moral commitments, and sense of possibility. Especially compelling is how she shows the stakes of these contests: how they influence decisions to join and leave armed groups, shape the cohesion and hierarchy of those groups, and affect the reintegration—or reincorporation—experiences of ex-combatants.One of the most commonly recurring frames Schmidt identifies is the opposition between victims and perpetrators, revolutionaries and narcoterrorists, and loyalists and deserters. These frames are not neutral—they are political tools that define legitimacy, assign blame, and shape memory. Interestingly, she shows how many ex-combatants inhabit contradictory roles. As she notes: “[M]ost ex-combatants in this study also [saw themselves as] victims of the conflict or of abuse, neglect, or poverty in their childhood” (72). Her framing analysis thereby helps surface the contradictions and ambiguities that conventional categories obscure.Schmidt’s inquiry into how gender is framed—how narratives of brotherhood, militarized masculinity, victimhood, and equality within armed groups—is particularly thought-provoking. These gendered frames do not simply reflect social realities; they actively produce them. They shape how combatants understand their roles, how they relate to one another, and how they interpret their postconflict futures. One particularly powerful example occurs early in the text, when Schmidt recounts a conversation with a female combatant who insisted that women could not be raped within the ranks of FARC. Schmidt does not contradict her directly. Rather, she notes: “[D]ecades of military history prove this to be untrue” (3–4). This subtle juxtaposition reveals the discursive work of denial: how certain frames dismiss or erase truths in order to preserve ideological coherence.This links to Schmidt’s powerful remark: that lies—or, more precisely, the selective truths people choose to tell—are themselves rhetorical acts. “There is no truth in here,” one ex-combatant told her (262). Schmidt recounts several interviews in which combatants initially gave false or misleading information, such as claiming to have held positions they did not or exaggerating their time in the group. Yet she is not interested in catching these discrepancies to expose them. Instead, she reflects on how such distortions reveal what people want to be believed about them. “What they shared was how they wanted to represent themselves,” she writes, “and what people lie about reveals as much as what they are truthful about” (31).Indeed, framing helps reduce cognitive dissonance by organizing personal histories into narratives that feel coherent. Frames are also shown as ways to help people make sense of their experiences. For example, because FARC’s self-understanding as a victimized people’s army excluded the possibility of gender-based violence, testimonies that contradicted this frame—such as claims of rape—were often dismissed or ignored. As Schmidt notes: “That women were raped did not fit into the FARCs framing that they were a victimized army of the people” (121). Protecting the frame, in this case, meant silencing certain truths. The government’s narrative of sexual violence is also problematic because, as Schmidt mentions, it reduces women to sexualized victims, erasing them as political agents.Schmidt’s willingness to engage contradictions without imposing judgment lends Framing a Revolution an accessible, almost journalistic tone. While theory is not the main narrative, the book reads with the clarity of an ethnography. It is honest, often raw, and refreshingly personal. Schmidt does not hide her presence as a White, Canadian woman in rural Colombia. Instead, she foregrounds it, recognizing the ways in which her identity shaped her access, her interviews, and the assumptions her interlocutors made about her—particularly that she might be able to offer money or aid or that she represented an international institution. In one striking anecdote, she describes how former combatants explained that the crooked roofs and slanted walls of their ETCR (Territorial Spaces for Reincorporation and Training) camp were the result of their having pocketed the government money meant for an engineer and building the houses themselves (2). These moments—human, humorous, vulnerable—underscore how war and peace take form in stories, symbols, and speech.This reflexive positioning—foreign in Colombia and foreign to rhetorical studies—becomes a productive site of inquiry. It allows Schmidt to perceive and make visible the rhetorical contours of war that might otherwise go unnoticed. One of the most powerful examples of this sensitivity comes in her treatment of Colombia’s mandatory military service. She reframes what might appear to locals as a simple fact of life as a generator of “entrenched notions of militarized masculinity,” where poor men come to believe that “real men are soldiers, and soldiers are real men” (133). These insights remind us of the importance of attending to what is culturally taken for granted.While Framing a Revolution includes theoretical reflection, its methodological foundation lies in interviews—rich, textured, and often contradictory—which Schmidt uses not to extract universal truths but to surface the multiplicity of meanings that structure conflict and peace. Her analysis moves fluidly between individual stories and broader discursive patterns, allowing readers to see how frames emerge from and shape lived experience. Testimonies are treated not only as sources of data but also as carefully curated performances of self and history. When one combatant reflects that life in the reintegration camps feels like being “put in here to waste time . . . so that we will get bored and leave” (98), she reads this not as a complaint but as a commentary on how policy frames postwar life.Framing a Revolution also sheds light on how internal divisions within armed groups generate new discursive battles. Schmidt describes how FARC loyalists frame deserters as “traitors, military plants, and liars” even when they privately acknowledge that not all deserters were traitors (229). Meanwhile, the broader public does not distinguish between deserters and loyalists—they are all simply ex-combatants. This dissonance between internal and external frames opens rich questions about truth, labeling, and the public uptake of rhetoric. What makes some frames stick while others are disregarded?Though I missed more testimonies from state voices or media representatives, this absence ultimately works to the book’s advantage by centering perspectives often marginalized or silenced in public discourse. By focusing primarily on ex-combatants, Schmidt intentionally shifts attention away from official narratives and reveals the fragility and contingency of dominant frames shaping policy and media. For instance, the government’s framing of FARC as “narcoterrorists” helped secure American support by linking Colombia’s internal conflict to global wars on terror and drugs (194). Yet, as Schmidt shows, this frame often fails to resonate with those who experienced the conflict firsthand.While Schmidt conducted her research prior to the 2022 election of Gustavo Petro—Colombia’s first leftist president and a former guerrilla himself—Framing a Revolution offers crucial insight into why the 2016 peace accords with FARC have proved so difficult to implement and why new negotiations with groups like the National Liberation Army (ELN) remain fraught. Schmidt shows how mistrust of the state is not merely political or strategic but deeply rooted in the language used by institutions and the frames they impose. One official even tells her, chillingly, that, if FARC reintegration process fails, the ELN is unlikely to engage at all (101).As a rhetoric scholar, I find this book useful not only for its contribution to framing theory but also for its demonstration of how rhetorical practice operates in conflict zones. Schmidt shows that framing is not just something analysts do; it is something combatants, commanders, bureaucrats, and civilians do every day, in the ways they describe themselves, their enemies, their pasts, and their hopes for peace. Her analysis of how credibility and salience function as persuasive resources in these framing contests opens new avenues for research in peace studies and public memory. Her work also resonates with rhetorical theory more broadly: Kenneth Burke’s concept of terministic screens, Celeste Condit’s framing analysis of abortion debates, and Dana Cloud’s rhetorical realism offer parallel lines of inquiry that Framing a Revolution engages implicitly.In conclusion, Rachel Schmidt’s Framing a Revolution offers a timely window into the lived practice of framing in the aftermath of civil war. As both an outsider to Colombia and to rhetorical studies, Schmidt is able to perceive—and foreground—discursive dynamics that are often hidden in plain sight. Framing a Revolution reminds us that the stakes of rhetoric are not only academic and theoretical but also material, emotional, and deeply political.