“The Campesino Was Born for the Campo”: A Multispecies Approach to Territorial Peace in Colombia

Abstract

ABSTRACTI draw on ethnographic fieldwork with a social movement, the Peaceful Process of Reconciliation and Integration of the Alta Montaña, to explore practices of peacebuilding in rural Colombia. I use a multispecies lens to interrogate the discourse of territorial peace (paz territorial), revealing the ways in which both violence and peace intertwine human and nonhuman lives and relations in the Alta Montaña. Through analysis of the everyday assemblages forged between people, animals, forests, and crops, I demonstrate how the multispecies approach to peacebuilding found in the Alta Montaña sharpens our understanding of the mutually reinforcing processes of violent conflict and environmental degradation. As a result, I argue that multispecies anthropological analysis also enables a capacious conceptualization of peace, one that recognizes the full life‐worlds of people as they seek, in their everyday lives, to reweave—and create anew—the social and ecological fabric of their communities. [violence, displacement, multispecies, peacebuilding, Colombia]