A Kaleidoscope of Audiences

The Colombian government will, for the third time, try to make peace with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), a belligerent guerilla group that has fought the established government for more than fifty years. Many talks were held during the previous tries to establish an armistice, evidently, none were fruitful.

This time, it seems to be different. I believe this set of peace talks will be successful because “all the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come” (Victor Hugo). The idea of peace is ripe. Colombia is economically, politically, socially, and psychologically ready for the end of this issue that boils down to a Cold War conflict between capitalism and communism.

As a Colombian, I feel that it is a great time to learn about rhetoric. This is why I have been devouring Jay Heinrichs’s Thank You For Arguing, a rhetoric guidebook that is excellent at showing the average reader how to apply most of the theory developed by the great classical thinkers.

Using what I have being learning by reading   Thank Your For Arguing, I shall make a series of blogs in which I will analyze different aspects of the peace talks, but always  applying what is taught by Heinrich in my blogs. In this first one, I will start by examining the first thing Heinrich says that has to be done when entering a debate: determining the audience.

So, who is the audience in the peace talks?

First of all, I would say that there is no one audience. The whole negotiation process implies that the parties will be trying to convince several  audiences at the same time,  and each member in the negotiating teams will be looking to convince the audience that he-she considers to be the most important  one while cheating the other audiences involved. Also, the negotiators will be using different kind of arguments depending on who they are trying to convince.

Here is the diagram from general to specific: