Sociopolitical Violence and Stigmatization in Bolívar in the 2025-2026 Electoral Cycle: Discursive Dynamics and Political Polarization

Abstract

Sociopolitical violence and stigmatization represent persistent risks to democracy in Colombia, particularly during pre-electoral periods when polarization, territorial disputes, and tensions between political and armed actors tend to intensify. In the department of Bolívar, these dynamics take on a particular expression due to the combination of armed conflict, institutional weakness, and disputes over local political control, shaping a vulnerability scenario that the 2025-2026 electoral cycle has made especially critical. This study generates an integrated analysis of the factors affecting electoral risk in Bolívar, articulating territorial, discursive, and socio-legal dimensions through a qualitative case study design with a socio-legal orientation. A total of 82 structured surveys and five semi-structured interviews were conducted across the department's seven subregions, and a digital discursive corpus of at least 60 interventions by five high-circulation political and opinion leaders was constructed and analyzed through Critical Discourse Analysis. Results show that 91% of respondents identified symbolic violence as the most probable form of electoral threat, and 87% perceived polarizing discourses as frequent or very frequent in media and social networks. The discursive corpus recorded an increase in polarizing categories from 85% to 92% between July and December 2025, reflecting a sustained escalation throughout the pre-electoral period. The analysis identified three distinct discursive functions -confrontation and mobilization, production of ethical and institutional legitimacy, and political reconfiguration- which, despite operating through ideologically different repertoires, converge in representing political disputes as an existential confrontation between incompatible national projects. The study concludes that electoral risk in Bolívar is multicausal and multidimensional, and that the articulation between the territorial dimension of risk and the discursive dimension of polarization constitutes a pending analytical and institutional gap, both for academic research and for the design of electoral violence prevention policies in Colombia.