Abstract
Colombia's peace process prioritised conflict-torn geographies ostensibly suffering from historical state absence. We examine the origins and afterlives of this 'territorial' peace using discourse analysis, archival research and field interviews. The state-initiated agenda exceeded the objective of structuring negotiations with FARC guerrillas, pointing to the transformative potential of social dialogue. The negotiating parties co-sponsored participatory rural development forums, which attracted numerous collectives. These diverse actors' visionary proposals to address neglected claims and conflicts influenced the government's and FARC's respective discourses, ultimately informing the 2016 peace agreement. Yet, state priorities for peace centred on international legitimation and post-conflict infrastructure development to accelerate foreign investment in export-oriented mining, oil extraction, and agri-business. The beleaguered FARC challenged government's narratives while struggling to rebuild organisational legitimacy and prevent fragmentation. Subsequent disappointments with fraught territorial development plans, a new government's securitization of peace programmes, and continuing violence mar the post-agreement period. Prior contributors to participatory forums have joined contentious actions against neglectful austerity, extractivist maldevelopment and targeted assassinations. Thus, we argue that Colombia's international lessons may reside less in governmental pacification programmes - the potential of state-sponsored participatory dialogues notwithstanding - than in resilient (post-)conflict communities open to exercising their peace imagination while remaining mobilised against new-and-old violences. Furthermore, the territorial peace saga illustrates productive overlaps between critical peace geographies and socio-territorial analysis - especially the territorial restructuring induced by neoliberal economic policies, the violent multiple territorialities of differentiated state presence in geographical peripheries and pluriversal struggles against ontological occupation addressed herein.
Highlights
Once the object of international expectation and local hopes, Colombia’s peace process risks derailment
This paper focuses on the ‘territorial peace’ pillar of the ambitious peace process and its post-agreement disappointments
If geographies of peace is to incorporate multiple perspectives – to become a “deliberately broad umbrella” (Williams et al, 2014: 27) – it is imperative from them to consider the contributions of socio-territorial analysis to crtiquing state-led pacification schemes, and the actual territorial struggles of people striving for peace in Colombia and beyond
Summary
Once the object of international expectation and local hopes, Colombia’s peace process risks derailment. The Colombian government ostensibly sought to transcend the standardised and muchcritiqued ‘liberal peace’ framework by delivering an internationally exemplary program with geographic ‘differentiation’ and socially transversal transformations, thereby benefiting the people and territories most affected by conflict (see Koopman in Cairo et al, 2018). They took few effective steps to overcome the assumption that “democracy and economic development create peace” (Brauchler and Naucke, 2017: 422), and the project exhibited built-in limitations from its inception. If geographies of peace is to incorporate multiple perspectives – to become a “deliberately broad umbrella” (Williams et al, 2014: 27) – it is imperative from them to consider the contributions of socio-territorial analysis to crtiquing state-led pacification schemes, and the actual territorial struggles of people striving for peace in Colombia and beyond
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