Concrete Peace: Building Security through Infrastructure in Colombia

Abstract

Public and scholarly debates in Colombia have often framed work required to achieve as la construccion del posconflicto, or the construction of post-conflict. This focuses attention on imperative to build legal and bureaucratic institutions necessary for transcending a half-century of violence and ensuring a stable and lasting transition. At same time, this framing also encapsulates work of building post-conflict Colombia in a physical sense. Focusing on a nationwide process of development aimed at laying infrastructural foundations of the Colombia of future, this article examines expectations attached to built environment at this critical conjuncture. Taking inspiration from a felicitous phrase coined by Ministry of Transport's Twitter account, #PazEnConcreto, it highlights real-and-imaginary work of building a concrete peace through construction of roads, airports, and bridges. By analyzing infrastructure projects expected to mediate transition to a new stage of history, first objective is to examine cultural, political, and economic logics according to which Colombia's future has been imagined and built. The second objective is to consider what this case suggests about political agency of material world in domain of violence, peace, and security. As a notoriously intractable armed conflict continues alongside periodic peacebuilding efforts, substances like concrete, and construction projects they support, become material and symbolic resources in struggle to control a deeply uncertain process of historical change.