Stories of Divided Politics: Polarisation and Bridge-Building in Colombia and Britain

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Colombia and Britain both held referendums in 2016-in Colombia on a peace accord, in Britain on Brexit-leaving enduring identity divides, and fostering widespread narratives about each society being more divided than ever. This project aims to re-shape academic and popular understandings of how people live with political divisions and build bridges across them. It will be anchored in the anthropology of politics, which studies the role of culture in people's political opinions, ideologies and identities, and will draw also on political science studies of polarisation, which examine broader pictures of societal divisions. It will document and analyse the ways that people experience and (re-)produce political divisions through everyday stories using two complementary methods. First, an ethnographic case study in a socio-economically, racially and politically diverse locality in each country, to understand how different sectors perceive the differences and divisions they experience in their community, and how they connect these local experiences with their view of national politics. Second, ethnographic fieldwork with organisations that seek to build bridges across political divides, doing participant observation at their events around the country, and co- convening dialogues and workshops with them, to develop broader cross-cutting views of political divisions and people's stories about them in different regions and sectors. By analysing the role of stories in polarisation and bridge-building, the project will add nuance and complexity to current theories about divided societies, develop a ground-breaking multi-scale framework for comparative research on political divisions, and inform global policies on the increasingly urgent problem of polarisation and the many kinds of violence and hostility it can engender.