Abstract
Abstract. This article observes the Latin American debate on “territory” through the lens of the “territorial-peace” approach agreed in the peace accord between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas in 2016. It explores the different notions of territory entailed in this concept and shows that the territorial-peace approach builds on a political-programmatic understanding of territory due to its rural focus. An ethnographic analysis of the urban renewal programme PRIMED, implemented at the disputed urban periphery of Colombia's second city, Medellín, in the 1990s, demonstrates how this programme anticipated the idea of territorial peace in a conflictive urban context. The ethnography reveals the ambiguities and inconsistencies of the production of urban territory, both as state space and as the space of subaltern social groups, through territorial peacebuilding. The discussion why PRIMED challenges the political-programmatic understanding of territory in the territorial-peace debate concludes with highlighting why it makes a difference approaching territorial peace as a “political project to be achieved” or as an unpredictable process of territorialisation and why this distinction matters if the territorial-peace approach is to be extended to urban contexts.
Highlights
During the last 2 decades the dispute over land has taken on a marked particularity in Latin America in that peasant, indigenous, and Afro-descendant movements have come to claim “territory”
It is important to know that Colombia’s reformed 1991 political charter was drafted by a constituent assembly that had been elected by popular vote and was integrated, among others, by delegates of grassroots organisations, ethnic minorities, and demobilised former leftist guerrilla organisations
In the territorial-peace debate, territory is typically conceived through the lens of these antagonistic political projects which collide in Colombia’s rural space: on the one hand, the project of the Colombian government of consolidating state space to expand the export-oriented capitalist development model based on extractive economies, on the other hand, the collective projects of peasant communities to establish counter-sovereignties and expand non- and anticapitalist relations of agrarian production as existential support of a dignified, self-determined life
Summary
During the last 2 decades the dispute over land has taken on a marked particularity in Latin America in that peasant, indigenous, and Afro-descendant movements have come to claim “territory”. The conceptual and political implication of claiming territory rather than land has been interpreted as a shift from the demand of individual possession of land to the more political demand of collective possession, administration, and control of the means of production and to the struggle for collective sovereignties within the nation state (Vacaflores Rivero, 2009; Silva Prada, 2016; Salcedo García, 2015; Fernandes, 2013; Wahren, 2011; Sánchez, 2010) Against this backdrop, it is significant that the peace agreement achieved between the Colombian government and the country’s largest guerrilla organisation, the communistinspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARCEP), in 2016 introduced the concept of Paz Territorial, (“territorial peace”). (social and political) praxis” and “categories of (social and political) analysis”, in the concluding section, I discuss why it makes a difference approaching territorial peace as a “political project to be achieved” or approaching territorial peacebuilding as an ongoing process of territorialisation, which is unpredictable and produces unexpected social and political outcomes
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