Building Peace Amidst Violence: An Analysis of Colombia’s Policies to Address Security and Development Challenges

Abstract

Building peace in societies where levels of violence continue to be high is one of today’s biggest challenges for countries like Colombia that are emerging from decades of protracted social conflict. The article examines how the Colombian state reasons about the challenges of re-establishing security and development as two core pillars for sustainable peace. It is embedded in the international debates on the security-development nexus within the statebuilding-peacebuilding discourse and based on an in-depth analysis of government policy documents, complemented by field interviews conducted between 2013 and 2017. It evaluates the Colombian government’s perception of the nexus between security and development as a first step towards understanding how state actor perspectives in post-conflict societies with high levels of violence compare to international peacebuilding perspectives. The findings underline that while Colombia’s national consolidation and reconstruction policies definitely display a belief in the existence of a nexus between security and development, that understanding differs significantly from international peacebuilding perspectives. It places heavy emphasis on a security-first approach that aims at statebuilding and subordinates development concerns to that overall goal, which creates an imbalance that translates as well into actor choices for the peacebuilding policies to be applied locally.