—Jorge González-Jacome, Associate Professor of Law at Universidad de los Andes
[Editor’s Note: This is one of our ICONnect columns. For more information on our 2025 columnists, see here.]
On June 7, 2025, Colombians seemed to relive a nightmare they had experienced in the late 1980s. While delivering a speech in Bogotá, Miguel Uribe-Turbay, a presidential candidate and senator, was shot three times. After two months of hospitalization, Uribe-Turbay passed away on August 11, 2025. The assassination of a presidential candidate has led many analysts to wonder if Colombia is entering a presidential campaign as risky and terrifying as the one in 1989-1990, during which three presidential candidates were assassinated. In a way, the question is whether history is repeating itself and whether the Colombian political and legal system has the same weaknesses that led to the crisis back then.
In this column, I would like to contribute to this debate from the perspective of constitutional law. With the benefit of hindsight, one of the lessons from the past is that political sectors in the 1980s and 1990s tried to solve the crisis with a new Constitution. The new charter transformed some of the foundations of the Colombian state and different issues were renegotiated in a Constituent Assembly. Although not all social sectors and organizations (including armed ones) participated with a voice and a vote in the Convention, the process that led to the current political charter was widely regarded as the result of a broad consensus. Colombians, generally, trusted that the Constitution could “save Colombia” (as sectors of civil society said). Whether Colombia was “saved” or not is the subject of a deep discussion. In fact, the 1990s showed a deepening of violence on various fronts. However, what seemed unique about the late 1980s was the belief that a constituent moment, which turned out to be a moment of broad consensus, could be an antidote to political violence.
The situation today is different because the faith in constitutional language, as an arena for peacebuilding or consensus, seems to have dissipated. Today, the left and the right envision the constitutional scenario as a place to be captured, or a high ground from which they can advance their positions or achieve their impositions with a legal language that will legitimize their stance. From the left, the idea of a constituent assembly has emerged as an antidote to the political and legal controls that Congress and the Constitutional Court have exerted on Gustavo Petro’s government. A constituent assembly would change those controls and privilege an idea of popular power. Meanwhile, from the right, the idea of calling for a referendum to repeal the Peace Agreement between the government and the FARC guerrilla has gained traction again. Right wingers argue that 2016 was the year of betrayal because the public voted “No” to the peace agreement in a plebiscite, but in the end the administration of Juan Manuel Santos went ahead with the agreement anyway. The right continues to flirt with the idea of calling the people to repeal the constitutional reforms and laws that came after the peace agreement. Each end of the political spectrum claims that the people have been deceived by institutions and that it is necessary to mobilize constituent power to achieve their objectives.
Perhaps the situation should not surprise us. If we follow the insights of critical legal theorists, the law has always been this battlefield, and there is no need to lament it. We simply must accept it and operate within it. However, I believe it is not necessary to withdraw from the idea that law is politics by other means and, at the same time, think that one of the faces of constitutional law is to emerge as a language for achieving consensus and not only advancing incompatible worldviews. Perhaps there are junctures or moments in which a society has greater stability and takes fewer risks when having radical debates between opposing positions. But maybe there are other moments or junctures where debates embody risks (that involve physical violence), and constitutional law must be activated as a scenario for consensus building. Most likely that was the spirit of 1991 and is the spirit of those moments in which one can have faith in constitutional law to overcome violent crises. Constitutional language could be a tool for consensus and not merely for the imposition of a one-sided peace.
This two-faced constitution is not a rebranding of states of emergency. We have learned painful lessons from unlimited emergencies that restrict the ordinary functioning of politics with draconian rules. The view of constitutional law as a language for consensus or as a language for struggle is not a matter of transforming institutions or reforming norms. It is part of the gradual construction of a shared political sensibility that can lead a political community to identify moments that make us aware of the different faces and uses that constitutional language has. It is possible that in Colombia, and I suspect this is also the case in other parts of the world, the only faith that exists in constitutional language revolves around its usefulness to impose a worldview. But looking at some constituent moments in the past might invite us to think that sometimes, even for a moment, constitutional law is not just an extended battlefield. There is some sensibility, missing in the present, that might allow us to connect constitutional language to the overcoming of violence.
Suggested citation: Jorge González-Jacome, Between Imposition and Consensus: On the Sensibilities of Constitutionalism, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Aug. 20, 2025, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/between-imposition-and-consensus-on-the-sensibilities-of-constitutionalism/
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