Abstract
Abstract On 12 November 2019, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), handed down a landmark decision in the case of ‘Katsa Su’ concerning the Awa indigenous group in Colombia. The Colombian conflict has particularly affected indigenous groups, such as the Awa people, and has also affected the territory in which they live. In this article, we explore the decision of the JEP, within a broader analysis of the Colombian peace agreement and consider how it might help us to think about the place of the environment in the Women, Peace and Security agenda and in international law. We call for a gendered and intersectional approach to environmental peacebuilding which is attentive to the importance of gender and different groups. Further, we highlight how the Colombian example shows how concepts such as relief, recovery and reparations are often confined in international law to women's recovery and redress with respect to sexual violence and yet, this conceptualization should be much broader. The Katsa Su case provides an example of the fact that reparations and redress must address other forms of violence, spiritual and ecological, which women also suffer in times of conflict.
Highlights
The rise of environmental peacebuilding as an emerging field of both practice and research has evolved in parallel with, but separately from, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda.[1]
Environmental peacebuilding has developed in what Tobias Ide has described as five broad and growing fields of research, covering how the environment relates to conflict prevention, the management of natural resources, climate security, disaster risk reduction and post-disaster reduction, and peacebuilding efforts between communities.[2]
It is imperative when we are talking about gender that both environmental peacebuilding and the WPS framework should adopt an intersectional perspective in both scholarship and practice.[9]
Summary
Despite the attention that feminist scholars have paid to accountability, including prosecutions and reparations for gendered harms, there has been little consideration of the importance of broader reparations, and in particular of how gendered harms intersect with women’s lives, livelihoods and relationships with the natural environment. As Dunn and Matthew have argued, the intersection of the natural environment and gender ‘demarcates a crucial area for further consideration of the ways in which violent conflict begins and endures, and of the prospects for a transformative approach to peacebuilding and justice in transition’.77. In this final section of the article we turn to the courts and an important part of the peace process: justice and accountability. II informe de seguimiento al enfoque de género en la implementación del acuerdo de paz en Colombia (Bogotá, 2020), http://peaceaccords.nd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/112719-Informeg%C3%A9nero-versi%C3%B3n-digital.pdf. 78 Sentencia SU-599/19, 11 Dec. 2019, available in Spanish at https://www.womenslinkworldwide.org/files/3105/ decision-corte-constitucional-caso-helena.pdf
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