How can we study the politics of human rights activism in violent social conflicts? International Relations scholarship has long neglected the ambiguous political relationships between human rights activism and violent social conflicts. Addressing this gap requires new research methodologies that place the focus not on the normative or legal dimensions of human rights, but in how their usage constitutes the political. In this article I argue that using post-foundational discourse theory makes visible ‘politics-as-ruptures’ that locate the political function of human rights activism precisely in the resistance to representations of violence in conflict discourses. I analyse this political function by asking how activists translate human rights norms, transform conflict discourses, and thereby contest power relations. As examples, the article presents three types of discursive politics that I studied in Colombia. These examples point out further pathways to pose empirical questions about the roles of human rights activism in transforming social conflicts.

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How do human rights activists imagine transitional justice amid sociopolitical conflicts that surface after peace agreements? Since its inception in the 2016 peace accords, Colombia's renewed endeavor to come to terms with its violent past has been overshadowed by massive protests and political polarization. In this article, I argue that populism, defined as a grid of intelligibility to make sense of frustrated demands and engage in politics, can help us understand the protest discourses of human rights defenders on transitional justice as they emerge from experiences with political marginalization and broken state promises. Based on interviews during six months of fieldwork in different conflict-affected regions, I contend that human rights defenders imagine transitional justice in terms of a larger political struggle that exceeds justice for past atrocities and can be described through three tropes that both resound with and challenge populism debates: truth as the frontier of political confrontation with right-wing elites, the “rights-defending victim” as a form of popular subjectivity and political underdog, and liberal overhaul of corrupted democratic institutions. Conceptually, my reconstruction of activist discourses serves a two-fold purpose: it bridges debates on transitional justice and contentious politics, and constructively challenges the ostensible incompatibility of human rights and populism.

This article explores how disruptive political conflicts evolve in peace processes by studying Colombian human rights defenders’ discourses about the peace process with the FARC-EP. While post-conflict scholarship has predominantly discussed violence and societal frictions as caused by legacies of war or flawed peace governance, I focus on the confrontations over political imaginaries that are endemic to peace processes. Through the lens of post-foundational discourse theory, I read the peace process as hegemonic crisis. This allows me to unpack the entanglement of political change and conflict, to which my discussions with human rights defenders allude: On the one hand, the peace agreement opened a political moment, in which it seemed possible to leave behind the hitherto hegemonic imaginary of the conflict as terrorism that had protracted the ‘state of war’; the advocacy for peace with social justice, on the other hand, it restaged historical confrontations with elites of the political right as antagonistic conflict over the meaning of peace. My analysis not only challenges the paradigm of war-to-peace transition, but also defines discursive conditions under which disruptive conflicts turn a peace process into an enduring interregnum, where the dawn of the post-conflict epoch is perpetually deferred and activist lives are threatened.