Sara Koopman

My broad and longstanding interest is in global North-South international solidarity efforts, how these can fall into colonial patterns, and how they can be decolonized. More generally I am interested in how people from the global North can and do use our various privileges to support efforts to improve lives in the global South, be that through development, humanitarianism, peacebuilding, or international solidarity work.  I am also interested in fostering ways that those of us in the global North can learn from various sorts of organizing projects in the global South.

For my Masters I used innovative online methods for collaborative theorizing with core US members of the movement to close the US Army’s School of the Americas, which trains Latin American military officers.  I argued that movement unintentionally falls into colonial ‘good helper’ patterns in its work.  That research has been well received and the publications that came out of it are well cited and taught (Koopman 2008a; 2008b).

In a conflict zone some people, particularly certain outsiders, are less likely to be attacked than others. When more privileged bodies walk alongside those under threat they can serve as “unarmed bodyguards”.

The term accompaniment was first used for this work by Peace Brigades International, which sent the first international team to Guatemala in 1983. There are now international accompaniers in eleven countries. Colombia is the country with the largest number of accompaniment groups (twelve).  Accompaniment there is widely used to protect small farmers resisting or returning from displacement by paramilitaries tied to large agribusiness.  These campesinos are organized in what are often called ‘peace communities’ with alternative development plans (‘plans for dignity and life’).

For my dissertation I spent 15 months in Colombia doing fieldwork with accompaniers and going to these peace communities.  I held ongoing conversations with accompaniers from six different organizations, which gelled into workshops with each where we talked through how they ‘made space for peace’ – that is, their daily practices, productions and performances of space – and the paradox of using privilege to work for a world with more equality.

Before turning my dissertation research into a book I want to deepen my understanding of how accompaniment ‘works’ through the stories accompaniers tell about those they are accompanying.  A snapshot of one of these stories will offer a sense of this project. Martha Giraldo’s father was a small farmer who was executed by the Colombian army in 2006, dressed up as a guerrilla, and ‘counted’ as a ‘combat death’ – one of many killed this way to show ‘success’ in the long running internal war. Martha’s neighbour called her when the army entered the farm and she managed to arrive with a video camera and film the frame-up. She pressed charges and spoke publicly about the case. When she received death threats and an attempt on her life she asked for accompaniment.

The US organization “Witness for Peace” filmed her telling her story, also using her own footage. That video was sent to thousands of activists in the US who then flooded the US embassy with emails (the US is a major funder of the Colombian army). The US ambassador called a General, and the threats against Martha stopped. When the case against the army moved forward, Martha was threatened again, and yet again Witness for Peace walked with her and generated emails, and again the threats stopped. In March of 2011, five years later, an army intelligence officer was convicted of killing her father. Martha bravely continues to press charges against other officers and organize with other victims, with Witness for Peace still at her side.

I will archive and analyze the various versions of Martha’s story shared by Witness for Peace.  I will interview both Martha and the accompaniers that worked with her and discuss the process, form and outcomes of sharing her story. I will do the same for other similar stories shared by accompaniers in Colombia.

I have been compiling these stories for the past five years, and I will organize these into an online digital archive, using free Omeka software, of stories told by accompaniers in various formats (blogs, emails, video, newsletters, photo essays and articles). This site will also facilitate collaborative analysis through a password-protected section where I will ask accompaniers to discuss the stories.  I will then analyze these stories on the basis of these discussions, close readings, a quantitative discourse analysis, as well as interviews of both the accompaniers who shared the stories and some of the Colombians whose life stories were shared.   As part of the analysis I will point to best practices in the sharing of personal stories from war zones.

The digital archive, along with its analysis of the stories and proposed best practices, will be a useful tool for increasing the effectiveness of the peacebuilding work not only of accompaniers, but also of other human rights, development and humanitarian aid workers who share stories of suffering in conflict zones as part of their work.  It will also serve as a resource for other researchers interested in that sort of personal story sharing, as well as those studying the work of accompaniers and those they accompany.  I also aim, through this project, to make theoretical contributions to understandings of both geopolitics and biopolitics and how they are, and might be, done differently.

For at least five years I will annually collect, through online surveys, both qualitative and quantitative data from accompaniment organizations around the world about the work they are doing, as no such dataset currently exists.  I have already established many of the contacts for that work.  Accompaniment is a rapidly growing and changing technique and I want to both track and theorize its forms across different countries.  I am particularly interested in developing a better sense of the gender and race ratios of accompaniers around the world and how that shapes their work.  I will use the first few years of this data in the book version of my dissertation.

I also want to expand my thinking on international solidarity beyond accompaniment to other tactics and campaigns.  I am particularly interested in city-to-city solidarity, climate justice solidarity, and solidarity responses to increasing ‘natural’ disasters tied to climate change.

In the growing climate crisis increasing ‘natural’ disasters are hitting the global South hardest.  US movements that have worked in solidarity with Guatemala and El Salvador since the wars in those countries in the 80s now find themselves mobilizing in response to repeated hurricanes, floods, and landslides in those countries.  Will climate related disasters inspire, and can they sustain, the same kind of international solidarity as war? What lessons can earlier solidarity movements offer to climate justice activists? How can climate justice solidarity campaigns inform other international solidarity efforts?

One of the strongest arms of the US movement in solidarity with Central America in the 80s was the sister city network.  These were not official sister city relationships but more grassroots versions of them, and some of these relationships have lasted to this day. This tactic has also been taken up by the US movement in solidarity with Colombia.  I am interested in researching these relationships, and how they differ from official sister city connections. How have city-to-city solidarity ties been used to affect (and bypass) international relations?

I am particularly interested in the South to North flows in these relationships.  Some Guatemalan communities with a long history of community organizing and in the face of repeated flooding and landslides have come up with innovative low-tech organizing solutions for keeping each other safe when ‘disaster’ strikes.  How can cities in the North learn from and adapt these techniques? More generally, what can urban ‘community development’ projects in Canada learn from international development projects in the South?

I hope to engage in participatory research that offers those engaged in development, humanitarian, peacebuilding and solidarity work useful theoretical tools for discerning more effective practices, as well as put the thinking they are doing on the ground in conversation with academic debates.  That is to say, I aim to do research that is relevant to both theory and practice. Ultimately I am interested in using both my research and teaching to build deeper connections across difference and distance that contribute to building a better world for us all.