Post-conflict Colombia Research Articles

Insects for peace.

Insects such as the black soldier fly (BSF) are a nutritious feed component for livestock with high protein levels. BSF can be reared on a wide range of organic residual streams. This allows for local production within a circular agriculture, decoupling livestock production from import of expensive feed components, such as fishmeal or soymeal. Rearing of BSF can be done by smallholder farmers, thus contributing to their livelihood, economic sustainability and social status. Smallholder farmers contribute importantly to food security, which is a prerequisite for a stable society. In armed conflicts, smallholder farmers are usually the first to suffer. In countries recovering from conflict, agricultural development should focus on restoring food production by smallholder farmers, improving their socio-economic position, thereby contributing to sustainable development goals 2 (zero hunger) and 16 (peace and justice). Here, we focus on these SDGs with an example of reintegration of ex-combatants as smallholder insect producers in post-conflict Colombia.

Scaling up zero-deforestation initiatives through public-private partnerships: A look inside post-conflict Colombia

The rise of public and private zero-deforestation commitments is opening a new collaborative space in global forest governance. Governments seeking to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions by protecting and restoring forests are partnering with companies motivated to eliminate deforestation from supply chains. The proliferation of zero-deforestation initiatives is creating opportunities for policy synergies and scaling up impacts, but has led to a more complex regulatory landscape. Drawing on policy analysis and expert interviews, we explore public-private policy interactions in Colombia as a case study for tropical forested nations with interest in aligning climate, forest, and development goals. We consider how zero-deforestation priorities are set on the national agenda and scaled up through public-private partnerships. We identify zero-deforestation initiatives in three overlapping governance domains—domestic public policy, REDD+, sustainable supply chain initiatives—and highlight ten multi-stakeholder pledges that have catalyzed supporting initiatives at multiple scales. Emerging from decades of armed conflict, Colombia is pursuing a peace building model based on low-emissions rural development. The peace deal provided a focusing event for zero-deforestation that converged with political momentum and institutional capacity to open a policy window. A government pledge to eliminate deforestation in the Colombian Amazon by 2020 set the national agenda and stimulated international REDD+ cooperation. Lessons from Colombia show that governments provide important directionality among the proliferation of zero-deforestation initiatives. Public pledges and the orchestration of actors through public-private partnerships allow governments to scale up efforts by aligning transnational activities with national priorities. The case of Colombia serves as a potential zero-deforestation model for other nations, but challenges around equitable land tenure, illegality, and enforcement must be overcome for multi-stakeholder initiatives to produce long-term change.

Loose Coupling in Curriculum Reforms: Rural Teachers´ Perceptions of Peace Education in Post-Conflict Colombia

Previous research has shown how peace education (PE) mutates according to socio-political and curricular/didactic traditions, but we still need to know how PE disseminates at the school level. We surveyed teachers from 12 rural schools of the violent Amazon region of Colombia where a national Law made PE mandatory in schools and universities. Teachers working on schools affected by the armed conflict have high expectations about PE. Respondents identified PE with 21 didactic elements: (a) Approaches: values education, citizenship education, critical pedagogy; (b) Pedagogical principles: diversity and pluralism. (c) Learning processes: peaceful conflict resolution, promotion of a “life project”, political participation. (d) Topics: justice, human rights, nature preservation, culture preservation, school bullying, historical memory or peace treaties´ history, “risk prevention”. (e) Pedagogic means: “games”, multimedia, “recreation”, and social projects. (f) Teaching methods: action research and moral dilemmas. Teachers also have opposing views about the history of PE. We could not find a systematic pattern of responses about the pedagogical principles or theoretical sources of inspiration of PE. We discuss the differences between present PE reforms and the previous tradition related to classical education that promoted moral, historical, and political capacities linked to school subjects in the context of post-conflict societies.

Answering the right questions. Addressing biodiversity conservation in post-conflict Colombia

The post-conflict scenario in Colombia poses several environmental urgencies, making it necessary to identify and prioritize new challenges for biodiversity conservation and ecosystems management. It is critical to understand how government agencies, NGOs, and academics perceive these challenges, as they all contribute to fundamental decision-making on environmental issues. To achieve this objective we formulated fifty-two research questions that were edited, evaluated, and prioritized by members of each group in a dedicated workshop. Ten of these questions were identified as top priorities and shared with twenty additional members of each group. Perceptions and rankings of the ten priority questions were then compared among groups, but no statistical difference was found. These results highlight that broadly similar goals for biodiversity conservation are shared by all key decision makers in post-conflict Colombia. Namely, conservation through sustainable management practices and development of local economies previously affected by the conflict. The process of developing and prioritizing these research questions helped to identify key drivers of biodiversity loss and create a research agenda to mitigate environmental impacts in post-conflict Colombia.

Speculative Fields: Property in the Shadow of Post-Conflict Colombia


 In Colombia’s attempts to bring its decades-long conflict to a close, the state engaged in a broad endeavor to bring about a new era: the “post-conflict.” Land restitution, which aims to return and title land to those who lost it in the conflict, was billed as part of the path to peace. In the shadow of the post-conflict, however, restitution has given rise to speculation on uncertain market and legal regimes, as well as regimes of violence, which I explore drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the region of Urabá. Speculative possession of land calls up historical forms of possession as well as potential futures, defining this shadow as peace is continually deferred.
 
 RESUMEN
 
 Los intentos por terminar el largo conflicto armado en Colombia incluyen grandes esfuerzos por parte del Estado colombiano orientados a producir una nueva época: el “posconflicto”. La restitución de tierras, una política que aspira devolver y titular tierras a los que las perdieron por causa del conflicto, fue promovida precisamente como parte de dicho esfuerzo hacia la paz. A partir de trabajo etnográfico en la región del Urabá exploro como, en la sombra del posconflicto, la restitución de tierras ha traído consigo diversas formas de especulación en torno a regímenes jurídicos, económicos y de violencia. En este contexto, la posesión especulativa de tierras simultáneamente invoca formas históricas de posesión así como futuros posibles, definiendo la sombra del posconflicto mientras la paz continuamente se difiere.

Concrete Peace: Building Security through Infrastructure in Colombia

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.

Victims’ collective memory and transitional justice in post-conflict Colombia: The case of the March of Light

The construction of victims’ collective memory in post-conflict Colombia is crucial to understanding the violent past and its social consequences. This article argues that victims’ initiatives, such as the March of Light, are facilitating an active role of local communities in the configuration of their memory regimes after the war. Addressing a participative action research approach, this article’s significance rests in the idea that Colombian victims’ groups from Eastern Antioquia are establishing three particular types of collective memory developing the March of Light every week. It establishes that this effort is a powerful instrument to claim truth and reparation in Colombia, helping the ongoing process of transitional justice in the country. It demonstrates that the tension between official and non-official narratives of collective memory is an essential part of transitional justice scenarios in which the clash of values defines positions of power, visibility and recognition inside contexts of social transition.

Violent Peace: Local Perceptions of Threat and Insecurity in Post-Conflict Colombia

ABSTRACTCountries that sign a peace agreement to emerge from protracted violent conflict often begin reconstructing their societies amidst continued high levels of violence. Responding to this situation, national security policies often identify core threats primarily from a state perspective, disregarding local community perceptions of threat and insecurity. This paper is based on interviews conducted in Colombia with members of three rural communities that have undergone and still suffer from different forms of post-accord violence. Differentiating between measurable and lived security threats, it identifies the communities’ perceptions of threats to their current security situation and compares them to those of the state security actors stationed in the communities. Embedded in the call for more pragmatic, bottom-up peacebuilding, we argue that security is context-specific and stress the importance of understanding the diversity of local community perspectives on security for building sustainable peace under conditions of ongoing violence. Final policy recommendations thus underline the need for a more differentiated approach towards improving security levels that meets the specific threat perceptions and security concerns of local communities and improves cooperation between the communities and state security actors to bring sustainable, localized peace to context-specific security environments.

The psychosocial management of rights restitution: Tracing technologies for reparation in post-conflict Colombia

Psychosocial assistance is a crucial aspect of recent state reparation and human rights restitution policies in post-conflict Colombia. Drawing on the methodological tools offered by Science and Technology Studies (STS), we follow the trajectories of a psychosocial protocol for emotional recovery as a technology of reparation deployed in rural communities between 2013 and 2017. We ethnographically describe how psychological and administrative projects are merged in practice and come to shape practices and emotional self-valuations. Building on Serres’ concept of betrayal, we reflect on the potential contours of quantifications embedded in psychosocial assistance as opportunities for different forms of reparation to emerge. These forms of reparation coexist in intertwined epistemic practices of psychosocial assistance. We claim that a potentially alternative form of reparation arises despite the predominance of an administrative design mainly concerned with quantification and efficient policy management.

Disarming Ex-Combatants' Minds: Toward Situated Reintegration Process in Post-conflict Colombia.

Collective violence in the context of armed conflict impacts the economy, health systems, and social stability of affected countries. This is considered a complex phenomenon with interwoven biological, psychological, social, cultural, and political factors. However, most of the research on this topic still lacks suitable established integrative approaches to assess multilevel perspectives. Social, cognitive and affective mental processes (SCAMP) are critical factors that should be considered in multilevel approaches. In this article, we critically discuss some of the classically isolated approaches used in violence research, the absence of successful interventions for ex-combatants reintegration, and the specific neglect of SCAMP in these interventions. We present the case of post-conflict Colombia as a unique opportunity to study the different roots of collective violence, and we call for a more robust and situated approach to understanding of and intervention in this multifaceted phenomenon. In addition, we suggest a two-stage approach for addressing ex-combatants’ reintegration programs, which considers the situated nature of post-conflict scenarios and the urgent need for evidence-based interventions. This approach focuses on the comprehensive scientific assessment of specific factors involved in violence exposure and the subsequent design of successful interventions. The implementation of this approach will contribute to the effective reintegration of individuals who have been exposed to extreme violence for more than 50 years.

Disentangling war and disease in post-conflict Colombia beyond technoscientific peacemaking

ABSTRACTIn November 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed a peace agreement to end a 52-year war. In the context of the peace deal implementation, I ethnographically traced entanglements of biomedicine, public health and the armed conflict across shifting temporalities and realities of war and peace. Through an exploration of past, present and future (dis)entanglements of war and leishmaniasis – a vector-borne disease known by many in Colombia as “the subversive disease” or the “guerrilla disease” – this article traces a discourse that frames health problems, like leishmaniasis, only as scientific or technological challenges. Drawing on STS critiques of future-oriented timelines in technoscience and the concept of pharmaceuticalization, I argue that the expectations embedded in technoscientific innovation problematically limit the possibilities of disentangling leishmaniasis and war in post-conflict Colombia. In contrast, ethnographically exploring how health policies and biomedicine have nurtured violence and exclusion helps us destabilize the warfare-loaded meaning and experience of leishmaniasis. This approach enables us to move beyond imaginaries of technoscientific peacemaking, which I define as the excessive trust endowed to technoscience to (re)build a peaceful future, especially when we are faced with failures in understanding the involvement of technoscience in the production and perpetuation of violence.

Involving victim population in environmentally sustainable strategies: An analysis for post-conflict Colombia

Environmental objectives tend to receive a push to the background in post-conflict scenarios. On the other hand, the processes displacement and refugee's relocation in post-conflict countries have been associated with different environmental impacts. Currently, Colombia faces a post-conflict scenario, which brings about relevant socio-environmental challenges: it is a mega-biodiverse country, it has millions of displaced people and is one of the most inequitable country in the world. Since there is a gap in post-conflict studies regarding the exploration of victims' involvement in environmental strategies, this paper aims to analyze victims' willingness to participate (WP) in Land Recovery Strategies (LRS) in post-conflict Colombia. This research (1) describes the socio-economic characteristics of forced-displacement victims from a Caribbean municipality of Colombia; (2) analyzes the victims' WP in hypothetical LRS and their preferred type of participation in the project, (3) identifies the way of grouping victims according their WP. Finally, (4) it analyzes the kind of benefits victims would prefer to receive in exchange for their participation in the LRS. Our results made evident that the majority of the consulted victims are willing to participate in LRS by giving up manual work time or in exchange of local ecological knowledge. We also found that the victims' participation in LRS associates to the age of the respondents, and whether they have benefited from government programs previously. Victims would prefer monetary retribution in exchange for their involvement in LRS, which may be explained by their vulnerable socioeconomic conditions. This research also demonstrates that victims with positive WP in LRS are a heterogeneous group. We highlight the need of actively involving women in LRS and other post-conflict projects in order to ensure their wellbeing. The results of this research are valuable, because they put forward the population of victims as an active performer within environmental sustainability.

Mental health in post-conflict Colombia

Maria is one of millions of victims of Colombia's civil war. 15 years ago, she was sexually assaulted in front of her family and neighbours by armed paramilitaries looking to purge her village of left-wing rebels. She was then forced to flee, one of over seven million people internally displaced by a conflict that began in 1964 when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) took up arms against the state. Terrorism and conflict: effects beyond traumaThe 2017 Global Burden of Disease data published in The Lancet show that conflict and terrorism is one of the fastest-growing causes of death globally, having increased by 118% between 2007 and 2017. Although the figures are precise, the language used is, of necessity, somewhat blurry. When does terrorism become conflict (and vice versa)? And what does terrorism mean anyway? Use of the word is rarely neutral: it implies a judgement as to the motivations and characteristics of the perpetrators, and is applied both widely and unevenly in social discourse. Full-Text PDF

Memory and resilience: A two-pronged approach to natural spaces in Colombia’s transition to a peaceful society

The analysis of spontaneous environmental initiatives undertaken by individuals and communities in cases of conflicts has led to a growing research field in social science, according to which the community-based stewardship of nature seems to conduce to the resilience of co-evolved social-ecological systems. In Colombia, where no such research exists so far, the conflict which officially ended in November 2016 has led to massive internal migration due to forced displacement, as well as to widespread degradation of the environment. Based on evidence provided by case studies of top-down and bottom-up living memorials and urban agriculture initiatives, the article explores the potential of urban greening in the process of memorialisation and in generating new social cohesion, as well as better living conditions in urban areas. It analyses cases both where the conflict has taken place and in the cities where refugees have settled, in order to explore avenues for public policies in post conflict Colombia. The author concludes that greening initiatives offer manifold, so far overlooked, opportunities to restoring social and ecological resilience in urban areas and thus contribute to a lasting peace in Colombia.

Technological education in post-conflict Colombia: characteristics and challenges to be met

Technological education in post-conflict Colombia: characteristics and challenges to be met

Democratising land control: towards rights, reform and restitution in post-conflict Colombia

ABSTRACT Colombia’s contentious agrarian dynamics have been at the centre of both the armed conflict and peace process. This article reveals the discrepancies between land-tenure legislation and actual outcomes. While the peace agreements offer new opportunities for democratic land control, new institutions may end up reinforcing existing power relations. This article argues that linking land rights with human rights can be a powerful strategy for rural social justice and accountability. As the struggle for democratic land control moves from armed conflict to the political arena, mobilising from below will be a decisive factor as to whether rights, reform and restitution become a reality in post-conflict Colombia.

Imaginaries of the Return to Post-Conflict Colombia Discourses of Colombian Refugees in Ecuador

This paper aims to identify the imaginaries regarding the return of Colombian refugees residing in Ecuador by describing their migratory trajectories and the conditions under which these people –who left the country due to causes related to the armed conflict– would consider returning after the implementation of the peace deal. Empirical evidence was mainly collected through eleven focus groups in the city of Quito. The conclusion is that the end of the war is just the starting point for the return since refugees demand comprehensive and effective social support from the Colombian State in order to go back to the country.

The Post-Conflict Colombia Public Health Project: A Global Health Diplomacy Case Study

The Post-Conflict Colombia Public Health Project: A Global Health Diplomacy Case Study

Environmental sustainability in post-conflict countries: insights for rural Colombia

Post-conflict countries (PCC) guide their priorities toward restoration of socioeconomic conditions and relegate sustainability objectives to the background. With the aim to provide insights for the current discussion on rural environmental sustainability in today’s post-conflict Colombia, we analyzed the environmental dynamics of seven PCC. We found that (1) deforestation and land use conflicts were frequent impacts in both conflict and post-conflict scenarios, that (2) return of displaced population, the infectiveness of land use planning, and the dependence on the primary sector were frequent drivers of environmental change; and that (3) natural resources extraction tends to be intensified in post-conflict period. We discuss these findings in light of the current environmental problems of Colombia and the post-conflict environmental challenges. We conclude that in order to ensure environmental sustainability in post-conflict scenario, Colombia should act on structural aspects that go beyond the environmental objectives proposed in the peace agreement between the government and FARC: strengthening environmental institutions, integrating long-term environmental objectives across all sectors, and deintensifying the dependence of the economy in the extractive sector.

Economic and Conservation Potential of Bird-Watching Tourism in Postconflict Colombia

Ongoing conflict resolution in Colombia brings an opportunity for economic development of impoverished communities and a conservation threat of deforestation in newly accessible rural areas. Ecotourism is often proposed as a “win–win” solution for developing countries to meet both economic and conservation needs. With the highest number of bird species of any country, including 443 rare species highly valued by bird-watchers, Colombia has a unique opportunity to develop a lucrative and conservation-friendly bird-watching tourism industry in postconflict areas. Through geospatial analysis of conflict zones, bird distributions, protected areas, forest cover, and bird-watching activity, we identify areas of Colombia with unrealized bird-watching potential that are ripe for the development of synergistic conservation-ecotourism projects. An investment in ecotourism infrastructure and training by the Colombian government may be a conservation-friendly alternative to natural resource extraction that could allev...