Participating in Peace: Violence, Development and Dialogue in Colombia 9781529230000

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Table of contents
List of Maps and Tables
List of abbreviations
Notes on the Authors
Acknowledgements
Note on the Cover Image
Introduction
Participatory peacebuilding
A brief history of the Colombian conflict
Book outline
ONE Peace through Participation: The Colombian Experience
Peace and participation
The Colombian peace process
The double defeat
Conclusion
TWO Participation through Dialogue: Co-Producing Peace and Research
Improbable Dialogues: the research project
Participatory Action Research
Introducing diálogos socio-territoriales
Building peace in Catatumbo and Buenaventura
Conclusion
THREE Protecting Catatumbo: Dialogue as Conflict-Sensitive Environmentalism
Conflict in a ‘lawless borderland’
Regional demands and the national peace process
Contested implementation of peace and development
Community-driven river conservation
Conclusion
FOUR Transforming Buenaventura: Dialogue for Municipal Peacebuilding
A port without a community
The urban dimension of territorial peace
The 2017 Civic Strike
A strategy for peace with dignity
Conclusion
Conclusion
Learning from Catatumbo and Buenaventura
Implications for peace scholars and practitioners
A new era for dialogue in Colombia
References
Index

Citation preview

PARTICIPATING IN PEACE JEFFERSON JARAMILLO-MALÍN ET AL

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PARTICIPATING IN PEACE Violence, Development and Dialogue in Colombia

JEFFERSON JARAMILLO-MARÍN, LUZ MERY LÓPEZ-LIZARAZO, ADRIEL RUIZ-GALVAN, MATTHEW LOUIS BISHOP, JUAN MARIO DÍAZ-ARÉVALO, JUAN MIGUEL KANAI, MELANIE LOMBARD, SIMON RUSHTON, ANASTASIA SHESTERININA, HENRY STAPLES AND HELEN LOUISE TURTON

JEFFERSON JARAMILLO-​MARÍN, LUZ MERY LÓPEZ-​LIZARAZO, ADRIEL RUIZ-​GALVAN, MATTHEW LOUIS BISHOP, JUAN MARIO DÍAZ-​ARÉVALO, JUAN MIGUEL KANAI, MELANIE LOMBARD, SIMON RUSHTON, ANASTASIA SHESTERININA, HENRY STAPLES AND HELEN LOUISE TURTON

PARTICIPATING IN PEACE Violence, Development and Dialogue in Colombia

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 374 6645 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2023 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​2998-​1 hardcover ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​2999-​8 ePub ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​3000-​0 ePdf The rights of Jefferson Jaramillo-​Marín, Luz Mery López-​Lizarazo, Adriel Ruiz-​Galvan, Matthew Louis Bishop, Juan Mario Díaz-​Arévalo, Juan Miguel Kanai, Melanie Lombard, Simon Rushton, Anastasia Shesterinina, Henry Staples and Helen Louise Turton to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the authors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: blu inc Front cover image: The Somos-​Kiwie Collective/​Karen Gisela Riascos Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners. Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents List of Maps and Tables List of Abbreviations Notes on the Authors Acknowledgements Note on the Cover Image

iv v vii ix xi

Introduction one Peace through Participation: The Colombian Experience two Participation through Dialogue: Co-​Producing Peace and Research three Protecting Catatumbo: Dialogue as Conflict-​Sensitive Environmentalism four Transforming Buenaventura: Dialogue for Municipal Peacebuilding Conclusion

1 11

117

References Index

131 155

iii

36 57 83

List of Maps and Tables

Maps 2.1 3.1 4.1

Table 4.1

Political map of Colombia with PDET sub-​regions Political map of Norte de Santander with the Catatumbo PDET sub-​region Map of Buenaventura’s port, urban and municipal area

Major social actions/​strikes in Buenaventura, 1960–​2017

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52 61 89

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List of Abbreviations Asociación de Cabildos Indigenas Valle del Cauca (Association of Indigenous Councils, Valle del Cauca) ADF Agrarian Development Forum ART Agency for Territorial Renewal (Agencia para la Renovación Territorial) ASCAMCAT Asociación Campesina del Catatumbo (Association of Campesinos of Catatumbo) CALA Comité Ambiental de La Angalia (La Angalia Environmental Committee) CINEP Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular Programa por la Paz (Centre for Research and Popular Education Peace Programme) CORMEPAZ Corporacion Memoria y Paz (Memory and Peace Corporation) CRIC Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca) DST diálogos socio-territoriales (socio-​territorial dialogue) ESMAD Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios (Mobile Anti-​ Disturbances Squadron) FARC Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) FEDEGAN Federación Nacional de Ganaderos (National Federation of Cattle Farmers) JEP Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (Special Jurisdiction for Peace) MIA Mesa de Interlocución y Acuerdo (Bureau for Dialogue and Agreement) NGO Non-​Governmental Organization PAR Participatory Action Research ACIVA

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PATR PCN PDET

PIEDB

PNIS

UP USAID ZRC

Plan de Acción para la Transformación Regional (Action Plan for Regional Transformation) Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Black Communities Process) Programas de Desarrollo con Enfoque Territorial (Development Programmes with Territorial Focus) Plan Integral Especial para el Desarrollo de Buenaventura (Special Integrated Development Plan for Buenaventura) Programa Nacional Integral de Sustitución de Cultivos Ilícitos (National Comprehensive Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops) Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union) United States Agency for International Development Zona de Reserva Campesina (Campesino Reserve Zone)

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Notes on the Authors Jefferson Jaramillo-​Marín is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Luz Mery López-​Lizarazo is Coordinator of Pastoral Social in Popayán (formerly Coordinator of Pastoral Social Tibú), and an MA student in International Cooperation for Development at the Universidad Internacional de la Rioja. Adriel Ruiz-​Galvan is Director of CORMEPAZ and a doctoral student in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Matthew Louis Bishop is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Sheffield. Juan Mario Díaz-​A révalo is Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. Juan Miguel Kanai is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Sheffield. Melanie Lombard is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. Simon Rushton is Professor of International Politics at the University of Sheffield. Anastasia Shesterinina is Chair in Comparative Politics at the University of York.

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Henry Staples is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. Helen Louise Turton is Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Sheffield.

viii

Acknowledgements This book emerges from a large collaborative research project, ‘Improbable Dialogues: Participatory Research as a Strategy for Reconciliation’, which ran from 2018 to 2022. The project involved researchers from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, the University of Sheffield and the Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular Programa por la Paz (Centre for Research and Popular Education Peace Programme; CINEP). We were also fortunate to collaborate with local organizations in the project’s partner communities, including the Corporación Memoria y Paz (Memory and Peace Corporation; CORMEPAZ) in Buenaventura, and Pastoral Social Tibú in Catatumbo. Many researchers played active roles in the planning, design and execution of the project. In particular, the authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of: Jairo Aguilar, Paloma Cobo Diaz, Alicia Durán, Jaime Hernandez-​Garcia, Alexander Mendoza, Daniela Mosquera Camacho, Paula Ospina and the Semillero de Investigación Discursos y Prácticas de Reconciliación, Erika Parrado Pardo, Cesar Ramirez, Anamaría Rodríguez García, Manuel Salamanca, Leonardo Salcedo, Isaac Salgado, Johanna Torres, Claudia Tovar, Juan Pablo Vera and Maria Lucia Zapata (all from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana); Victor Barerra, Fernan Gonzalez Gonzalez, Magda López, John Montoya, Julio Palacios and Marco Fidel Vargas (all currently, or formerly, of CINEP); Jackie Harrison, Greg Morgan, Nicola Phillips and Stefanie Pukallus (all currently, or formerly, University of Sheffield). In addition, this project would not have been possible without the active support and participation of organizations and individuals in the partner communities and beyond. There are too many to list, but in particular we extend our heartfelt thanks to Verónica Riascos Caicedo, Jhon Erik Caicedo, María José Ruiz, the members of the Casa Social y Cultural

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del Barrio Lleras, the members of the Semillero Navegantes de la Memoria, the Escuela de Comunicación Ubuntu, Grupo IAP (all from CORMEPAZ, Buenaventura); Leila Arroyo, Danelly Estupiñan, Martha Inés Cuero (PCN, Buenaventura); Yuly Fernanda Ríos Palomeque (Centro Cultural Banco de la República, Buenaventura), Prof Carlos Palacios (Unipacífico) and Eduardo Areiza (Univalle), the members of the Comité Ejecutivo del Paro Cívico de Buenaventura; Jenny Rocío Carreño, Laydi Joahana Ortiz and Pbro Jairo Gelvez Tarazona (all currently, or formerly, Pastoral Social Tibú), John Paul Lederach, Arlene Tickner, Andrei Gomez and Gwen Burnyeat (Rodeemos el Diálogo), Mns Omar Alberto Sánchez Cubillos (former Bishop of Tibú and currently Bishop of Popayán) and Mns Rubén Darío Jaramillo Montoya (Bishop of Buenaventura). This book was co-​authored by a team of 11 authors, discussing, planning, writing and editing together in a mixture of Spanish and English. All authors played an equal role in the creation of the manuscript, and have agreed its final contents. In order to reflect the leading contributions of the Colombia-​ based co-​authors, their names appear first in the list of authors (in alphabetical order). They are followed by the names of the UK-​based co-​authors (again, in alphabetical order). We are extremely grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (grant ref: ES/​R01096X/​1) and Minciencias (grant ref: CT 276-​2018) who supported this research under the auspices of the Newton Fund, and also to the University of Sheffield which provided additional support for the project from the ESRC Impact Accelerator Account.

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Note on the Cover Image The cover image is of a mural on the wall of the Casa Social Cultural, the community centre in Buenaventura run by CORMEPAZ. It is one of a series of murals which represent a living memory of the social struggles for rights in Buenaventura. Such murals have a large cultural significance locally, and play an important role in recognizing and strengthening local communities and their ethno-​territorial organizations. This particular mural, ‘Territory’, portrays the essential elements of collective Afro-​descendant life, representing identity, spirituality and communitarian relations. It shows an Afro-​descendant girl, on whose head rests a wealth of local products such as banana, palm heart, yucca, sugarcane, star apple, fish, lemon and coconut. This symbolizes the Pacific region’s abundance of natural riches, products of its mangroves, rivers, sea and tropical jungles. These, in turn, are used by local healers (sabedoras and sabedores) to prepare ancestral drinks, food and medicine. In this way, the mural symbolizes the connection between natural and human life, a territory constructed through repairing the social fabric damaged by the violences of the armed conflict, among others. The hope that emanates from the mural is key to (re)awakening a future world in which nature and life are protected. The mural was created for CORMEPAZ by the Somos-​ Kiwie Collective and photographed for this book by Karen Gisela Riascos.

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Introduction

In August 2022, Colombians elected, for the first time, a left-​leaning government. Led by former guerrilla activist Gustavo Petro and his Vice President Francia Márquez, an Afro-​Colombian woman and well-​known advocate for human rights and environmental justice, the shift in governmental discourse was immediately striking. President Petro used his inauguration speech to promise that he would deliver Paz total (total peace), which would involve entering into talks with a wide range of armed groups to tackle the violence that has continued –​indeed, in some areas has increased –​in the years since the peace agreement between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia; FARC) was signed in 2016. Essential to total peace would be not only those new negotiations, but also fully implementing the terms of the 2016 agreement itself. Former President Iván Duque’s (2018–​22) failure to do so had caused widespread disillusionment with the peace process, and had also spurred splinter groups from the FARC to continue in arms. Hopes for a stable and lasting peace in Colombia will depend in part on Petro’s success in persuading the wide range of guerrilla, paramilitary and criminal groups still active in the country to cease the violence and lay down their weapons. But Petro was clear that total peace would also need to be a project for the whole of society: For peace to be possible in Colombia we need dialogue, a lot of dialogue, to understand each other, seek common paths, and produce change … Our future is not written. We own the pen and we can write the page together, in

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peace and togetherness. Today, we start the Colombia of the possible. (Petro, quoted in Emblin, 2022) This book is interested in how, in the years before and since the 2016 peace agreement, communities have been using dialogue as a way of participating in the building of peace, often in relatively unpromising circumstances. Seeking to understand the dynamics of community-​level dialogues that aim to deal with the legacies of earlier violence and overcome ongoing conflicts, the book takes a ‘bottom-​up’ look at the building of peace. We focus, in particular, on local processes of dialogue in two regions that are extremely different in their social and economic contexts, but which have, in different ways, seized the initiative following disappointment at the failure to achieve real progress through the public participation mechanisms that were created as part of the national-​level peace process. Yet in the book, as in the wider project from which it emerges, our aim is not simply to document these processes, but also to examine the ways in which researchers can contribute to them. Building on the Participatory Action Research (PAR) tradition developed through the work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, we combine our examination of local dialogues with reflections on the potential for PAR to support those processes. In doing so, the book is intended to contribute not only to discussions of local peacebuilding in Colombia, but also to the wider literature on ‘local’ peacebuilding, as well as to the burgeoning literature on PAR. Participatory peacebuilding Conceptually, this book focuses on what we call diálogos socio-​ territoriales (socio-​territorial dialogues; DSTs. See Chapter Two). Embedded in two recent ‘turns’ –​the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding and the ‘territorial turn’ taken by Latin American social movements –​these DSTs are at once quintessentially

2

Introduction

Colombian, but also of wider relevance. As we discuss in Chapter One, the peace agreement of 2016 was in many ways a farsighted one. It attempted to incorporate three decades of international learning about the importance of ‘the local’ in building peace, not least through the creation of opportunities for citizen participation in the process. But what the architects of that process perhaps under-​recognized was the extent to which communities across the country had already invented their own ‘popular’ spaces of dialogue. These continued, and in some cases were strengthened by the national-​level peace agreement. They also went far beyond seeking an end to violence (although that, of course, was one of their purposes): their participants pursued a wide variety of other aims including local infrastructural development; justice for victims of the armed conflict; environmental protection; life with dignity; the creation of new economic opportunities and an end to the military repression intended to solve the long-​ standing problem of illicit crops. Social movements of various kinds have played key roles in convening and supporting these DSTs, but what distinguishes them is that they have remained separate from, and parallel to, formal government-​sponsored structures. As President Petro launches a new round of regional dialogues to support the move towards total peace, these DSTs (and, we hope, this book) have an important role to play. Empirically, through our detailed examination of DSTs in Buenaventura and Catatumbo, we show how deeply rooted in local histories and political, economic and social dynamics these processes are. These DSTs are not only examples of local actors exercising agency to shape their own futures (although, to be sure, that is an important element), but are tightly bound up with local and regional identities. In particular, these identities are expressed in the idea of ‘territory’, which is a relational rather than just a spatial concept, and which incorporates both human and non-​human elements (including, importantly in the cases we examine in this book, nature and natural resources) (Lombard et al, 2021; Barrera et al, 2022). Territory, according

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to this understanding, does not simply exist: it is socially created and utilized by community-​level actors as the basis for resistance and the making of political demands. To say that DSTs are territorially rooted, therefore, is not just to say that they are local processes involving local actors (the focus of much ‘local turn’ work in peacebuilding), but that they are processes in which territory is both being created and defended, against a wide range of powerful forces, including armed and criminal actors, corporate interests and the government. This focus on identity and the defence of territory raises important questions, which this book also seeks to address, about the roles that outsiders –​in our case researchers from elsewhere in Colombia and from overseas –​ can play in supporting DSTs. The Improbable Dialogues project from which this book emerges (discussed in more detail in Chapter Two) aimed to do exactly that. Yet the engagement was inevitably, and rightly, a complex and continually negotiated one. Although the project’s description of itself included funder-​friendly notions such as ‘local-​level capacity-​building for peace’, this was certainly not a one-​way process. On balance, the people of Buenaventura and Catatumbo had more to teach the members of the research team than the other way around. As Alfredo Molano (1998: 8) noted in reflecting on the history of PAR, ‘The idea that the people need to be led has fortunately been replaced by the excitement of being among the people and the wonder of their creative ability.’ The circumstances in which DSTs were taking place at the time of the project’s inception in 2018 were undoubtedly new in important ways. Community-​driven dialogues of various kinds had been ongoing for many years, but the context of the peace process, however imperfect its implementation, had raised new hopes for a better future in Colombia. At the same time, it had implications for the interactions between researchers and communities, and for the relationship between popular DST processes and the government-​led ‘invited spaces’

4

Introduction

of the national peace process. All of which we explore in detail in this book. A brief history of the Colombian conflict Although our focus is on the recent history of Colombian efforts to move away from armed violence, readers less familiar with the country will benefit from at least some understanding of the history of the conflict between the Colombian government and the FARC that the 2016 agreement brought to an end, and of previous efforts to negotiate peace. The FARC –​ Latin America’s longest-​running armed insurgency –​emerged in the mid-​1960s. Its roots lay in the period known as La Violencia, a 10-​year civil war from 1948 to 1958, which gave way to government attacks on areas of the country under the control of communist groups and the emergence of the FARC as a more unified and larger scale guerrilla movement. From there, Colombia’s conflict almost inevitably became enmeshed in the 20th century’s core global ideological clash. The FARC drew inspiration from the Cuban revolution as well as material and strategic support from Venezuela. On the government side, a strong US–​Colombian alliance emerged, and successive governments employed anti-​ communist discourses to cement US support for their pursuit of military victory (Rojas, 2009). The first comprehensive peace effort began under President Belisario Betancur (1982–​86). Betancur called for a ‘historical debate’ about the country’s future, pursued decentralization of power through granting new authorities to municipal governments, and introduced an Amnesty Law, a Peace Commission and a National Rehabilitation Plan promising increased investment in rural regions (Villamizar, 2020). Letters were exchanged in secret with four guerrilla groups, including the FARC. But the FARC’s ideological leader, Jacobo Arenas, was sceptical about the government’s credibility and fearful of betrayal (Dudley, 2006: 56).

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However, Arenas eventually agreed to engage with the government, leading to the formation by the FARC and the Colombian Communist Party of the Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union; UP). The UP took part in the 1986 and 1988 elections, securing five seats in the Senate and nine in Congress. Yet drug and proto-​paramilitary gangs, in allegiance with the military, assassinated approximately 3,500 members of the party including presidential candidates, governors and mayors. By 1990, the threat of violence had all but destroyed the UP. Still, while ultimately a failure, the attempted peace process of the 1980s underscored the importance of societal participation in conflict resolution (Heinz, 1989). Ensuing debates eventually culminated in the 1991 Constitutional reforms, which extended the economic, social, cultural and political rights of all Colombians, and the collective territorial rights of indigenous and Afro-​ Colombian communities. Meanwhile, after initial hesitance, throughout the 1990s the FARC leadership secured dominance over coca production and distribution in several regions. Drug revenues did not only strengthen the FARC: they also financed paramilitary organizations who opposed them militarily, fuelling further armed conflict. By 2000, Colombia was the US’s strongest Latin American ally, with Washington seeing the Colombian government as a key partner in its war on drugs, which was taking an increasingly militarized turn. After the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre, global terrorism replaced communist revolution and narcotics as the US’s central foreign policy concern. The US State Department quickly added the FARC to its list of proscribed terrorist organizations, while within Colombia, President Uribe (2002–​10) re-​invigorated the internal enemy doctrine with his ‘democratic security’ framework. However, many of the policies that were developed under Uribe’s anti-​narcotics drive in practice targeted people at the very bottom of the drug-​producing pyramid, including peasant coca growers and their rural communities.

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Introduction

It was no coincidence that, amidst this repression, social mobilization for peace increased, especially among some of the most marginalized sections of Colombian society. In 2008, for example, the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca; CRIC) united 50–​ 60,000 indigenous people, campesinos, Afro-​Colombian cane cutters, members of urban barrio associations and human rights activists in a large-​scale protest against the violence perpetrated both by the FARC and the state. The next year, the National and International Meeting for Humanitarian Agreement and Peace took place in Cali, providing the main antecedent for a 100,000-​person ‘Patriotic March’ on Bogotá in July 2010. The inauguration of new President Juan Manuel Santos the following month brought new possibilities to seek a negotiated peace with the FARC, and indeed in 2012 Santos revealed that exploratory discussions had taken place. Later that year, the peace talks began in earnest in Havana, Cuba. Eventually –​after many setbacks to the process –​the negotiations culminated in a final agreement in 2016. We discuss this process in more detail in Chapter One, but at this point it is important to highlight two elements of the peace agreement negotiated between the government and the FARC in Havana. First, that the agreement recognized, and sought to address, the very different ways in which regions and territories had been impacted by the conflict. Second, that the process placed an emphasis on the participation of the public in building peace and making decisions about the future social and economic development of their communities. In so doing, the agreement incorporated some key elements of learning from the so-​called ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding. In practice, however, the action that followed did not always live up to expectations. Book outline Chapter One extends this brief discussion of the 2012–​16 peace process, and places it within the wider context of international

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ideas about how peace can be successfully built. Examining the development of peacebuilding discourse in the post-​Cold War era, the chapter charts the development of theory and practice, focusing on the role of local actors and debates over the ways in which such actors can play a part in creating peace (or not). Building on that literature, we examine the process that led to the 2016 agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC. We show the ways in which public participation was central to the design of the peace process, both during the negotiation phase and during implementation; and also that the text of the agreement itself sought to incorporate key elements of learning from the ‘local turn’ debates. These entered into Colombian political discourse via the concept of ‘territorial peace’. Finally, we discuss what we call the ‘double defeat’ of the peace agreement: first, its narrow rejection by the public in the 2016 referendum; and second, the non-​implementation of key parts of the agreement –​especially after the change of administration from President Santos to President Duque in 2018. This double defeat sets the scene for widespread disillusionment and the creation or reinvigoration of the more organic, locally led dialogue processes that are the main focus of the book. Chapter Two provides both the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the book, reflecting on the wider project from which it emerges, and in particular the PAR approach which was the basis of our engagement with (and co-​production of     ) community-​led dialogue processes. Unlike research that may use participatory methods in a more limited way (for example, as a means of collecting ‘data’), this was a project that emphasized genuine and ongoing –​albeit imperfect –​partnership between researchers and participants to deliver change, based on their respective skills, knowledge and experience. Chapter Two also introduces the concept of diálogo socio-​territorial (DST) which we describe as having four essential characteristics: 1) DSTs are ‘territorial’ in the broad sense in which that term is used in Latin America, which

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Introduction

incorporates not only notions of land but also of local identities, histories, power relations and knowledge; 2) they are locally led, but nevertheless maintain connections with ‘outside’ actors (including the state); 3) they can vary in their explicit topic of focus, but nonetheless through the dialogue process itself they serve as forms of peacebuilding practice and 4) they require significant local skills and capacities to develop and sustain. It is around this latter characteristic that PAR-​based research can make a contribution –​although even here the learning is far from a one-​way process. Finally, the chapter introduces the two examples of DST on which Chapters Three and Four focus. Chapter Three examines Catatumbo, a historically marginalized region located on Colombia’s north-​eastern border with Venezuela. Looking historically at the complex and interlocking set of issues that have fuelled conflict in the region, the chapter examines the recent history of collective action through the example of the agrarian strike that took place during the Santos government’s negotiations with the FARC, leading to a process of negotiation with the central government over the strikers’ demands. It also looks at how the peace process attempted to deal with such demands through the so-​called Programas de Desarrollo con Enfoque Territorial (Development Programmes with Territorial Focus; PDET) initiative, under which local development priorities were supposed to be identified via mechanisms of public participation, and then supported by a range of government agencies. Disenchantment with this programme quickly emerged, despite the efforts of local civil society organizations to support it. Yet this disillusionment with state-​led consultative mechanisms did not lead to an end to participation: instead, participation took on new forms, and indeed bottom-​up processes of DST were created as a result of the disappointment with official channels. Here we examine the Improbable Dialogues project’s engagement with the environmental committee established by the community of La Angalia, reflecting on this DST’s achievements and the role of researchers in supporting it.

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Chapter Four, which focuses on the Pacific port city of Buenaventura, examines a similar narrative arc in which the failure of the state-​led PDET process to properly address community demands led to direct action in the form of a city-​wide civic strike and direct negotiations between the strike leaders and the national government. Most importantly for our purposes, the Buenaventura DST was (and is) host to a wide variety of community-​led participatory experiments for peace, human rights and life with dignity, drawing heavily on Afro-​Colombian and indigenous forms of knowledge. Again, we use our engagement with some of these experiences as a basis for reflecting on the ways in which the tensions between territory and development have been navigated by communities in Buenaventura, and the lessons that can be learned for processes of participatory research and action in relation to peacebuilding more widely. Finally, the Conclusion presents a synthesis of the book’s central empirical, theoretical and methodological insights. It comparatively analyses the two case studies, asking what lessons these experiences of DST might offer for communities elsewhere in Colombia, and indeed beyond. It also distils our key reflections for peace scholars and practitioners, arguing that DST is not only an empirical process to be researched, but that it also offers researchers an entry-​point for supporting communities to overcome the conflict(s) that impact their lives. DST, therefore, becomes not only an analytical category, but also a normative commitment. Finally, we offer a brief reflection on recent events in Colombia, not least the election of Petro in 2022, and what his vision of total peace might mean for the prospects of communities in Catatumbo, Buenaventura, and others nationwide, to play meaningful roles in moving the country towards a less violent future.

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ONE

Peace through Participation: The Colombian Experience

The 2016 Colombian peace ag reement was lauded internationally as innovative, multi-​layered and comprehensive. It went far beyond a simple commitment to lay down arms, incorporating further provisions on how to deal with various thorny legacies of the conflict, and also new challenges that would arise in response to its implementation. These included issues such as reparations for victims and the reintegration of demobilized FARC combatants, including guarantees for their political participation. Most ambitiously, the agreement sought to provide for the future economic growth of the predominantly rural areas that had been most heavily impacted by the conflict, often among the poorest in the country. In doing so, it incorporated much of the learning from previous peace processes (both those perceived as successful and those less so) that took place around the world in the post-​Cold War era, while building upon multiple peacebuilding experiences and traditions developed in Colombia itself over the preceding decades. This unquestionably ambitious project of a participatory peace and geographically targeted development was, nevertheless, criticized widely from within Colombia. In the areas that were ostensibly intended to benefit from it, various social actors pointed to an implementation process that failed to address asymmetric power relations and, above all, the economic injustices that fuelled the armed conflict in the first place.

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The discussion in this chapter situates the emergence of new forms of community-​led participatory peacebuilding in relation to shortcomings in the peace process. Specifically, the chapter’s goal is to contextualize the origins of the diálogos socio-​territoriales (DSTs) discussed in Chapter Two and explored empirically in Chapters Three and Four. Particularly notable in the Colombian peace process was the government’s use of social dialogue as a form of state-​sponsored participatory peacebuilding, which in turn built upon previous civil society-​ led experiments with peace. The ambitious peace programme aspired to produce peaceful and prosperous futures for conflict-​ affected areas while involving the entirety of Colombian society in the process. However, it was also rather top-​down in its initial composition, and various state–​society interactions occurred during both the negotiation and implementation phases, which saw its very constitution and purpose becoming a site of conflict and contestation. Frustration at its changing rationales and disappointment at its outcomes encouraged community participants to broaden their role; from being merely invited to pre-​formatted consultations of uncertain consequence, to actively convening their own spaces for transformative dialogue based on their own lived experiences, needs and aspirations. Thus, those affected by the conflict began reinventing bottom-​ up participatory peacebuilding and highlighting territorial conditions that state-​sponsored consultations had overlooked, or even obscured. The chapter consists of three sections. In the first, we look at the rise of ‘post-​conflict’ peacebuilding as a field of both theory and practice in the post-​Cold War era. We focus in particular on the ‘local turn’ and its attempts to move beyond the previously dominant ‘liberal’ approaches to peacebuilding. Our discussion highlights the role ascribed to ‘participation’ in making peacebuilding processes more inclusive and emancipatory. In the second section, we trace the origins of the Colombian peace process back to the ambitious dual goals of ‘peace and development’ set out by the incoming President

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Santos in 2010. Here, we explore the tensions within the governmental discourse of a ‘territorial’ and ‘differentiated’ peace, which blended innovative international notions of peacebuilding with vernacular traditions of bottom-​u p peace, and which constructed participatory processes around the notion of ‘social dialogues’. In the third section of the chapter, we review the ‘double defeat’ of the peace process: the national electorate’s narrow rejection of the peace accord’s approach to reconciliation, reintegration and socio-​economic development in 2016, and the subsequent failures of localized implementation programmes to bring about territorial transformations, let alone secure an end to armed violence. We conclude by noting that the critical body of research reviewed in this chapter recognizes the new and old challenges that people face in post-​conflict areas, including the intensification of transnationally oriented extractive economies harming local communities and ecosystems. We also highlight ongoing studies of the innovative forms of grassroots peacebuilding emerging from this state–​society turmoil, and point to a lingering gap in ascertaining how peace research can actively engage with these territorial struggles, beyond simply documenting them. Peace and participation To examine the evolution of post-​conflict peacebuilding, we discuss here four issues: the ways in which top-​down processes of liberal peacebuilding have been scrutinized and found wanting; the emergence of the so-​called ‘local turn’; the problems with a ‘local’ that is sometimes excessively romanticized; and, finally, the ways in which participation has been conceived more recently in particularly delicate post-​ conflict settings. For much of the 20th century, the main focus of conflict resolution research was on elite-​level dialogues in the context of peace negotiations between warring states. In the 1990s,

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as attention shifted to the problem of intra-​state conflict, a number of new elements became prominent, picking up on research agendas that had long existed in Peace Studies (for example, in the work of Johan Galtung), but that had achieved a far lower profile in the international policy discourse. These included an emphasis on the role of international mediators in supporting domestic peace negotiations, and a longer-​term vision that extended beyond the thrashing out of a settlement to the considerably more ambitious task of creating environments conducive to sustaining ‘positive peace’ (rather than merely the absence of armed violence); or what Galtung (1975) had called ‘peacebuilding’. Implicit in this, of course, is the idea that generating peace is a long-​term, ongoing process, not an isolated episode settled by an often uneasy, generally exclusionary, and therefore usually contested, agreement between elite factions. In 1992, the concept of ‘peacebuilding’ officially entered UN discourse in Secretary-​General Boutros Boutros-​Ghali’s influential Agenda for Peace (Boutros-​Ghali, 1992). Often described as the ‘liberal peacebuilding’ approach (Paris, 2004; Donais, 2012: 4–​5), this emphasized the promotion of international norms of ‘good governance’ (including democratic elections, human rights protection, the rule of law and free markets) that were thought to be central to sustainable and lasting peace. Important roles were ascribed to the international community (not least the UN itself) in both the mediation of peace agreements (‘peacemaking’ in the language of Agenda for Peace) and the longer-​term process of (re)constructing stable post-​conflict societies (peacebuilding). This mirrored wider attempts at generating and understanding ‘third wave’ transitions from authoritarian rule in the 1990s –​especially in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe –​which tended to focus on elite pacts and transitions that implemented the familiar procedural elements of liberal democracy, market economies and institutions of good governance, albeit not always achieving deep substantive democratization in practice

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Peace Through Participation

(O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986; Levitsky and Way, 2010; Grugel and Bishop, 2013). The liberal approach to peacebuilding quickly came to be widely criticized. In part, this was due to a decidedly mixed record in practice. It was also criticized in principle, as a continuation of liberal models of Western intervention by other means (e.g. Chandler, 2006). The major alternative was what Donais (2012: 5) called the ‘communitarian perspective’, which emphasized ‘peacebuilding from below’ and was closely associated with the work of conflict resolution scholars and practitioners such as Galtung and John Paul Lederach (Leonardsson and Rudd, 2015). Rather than seeking to transplant (Western) liberal ideas of democratic governance and free markets, this approach brought a much greater emphasis on ‘the local’ –​both in terms of the cultures, traditions and contexts that made each conflict unique, and also the ways in which local actors could be important agents in building peace. Individuals and communities, in this perspective, had roles to play not just in participating in elections and capitalist markets as per the liberal approach, but through taking community-​ level action to resolve conflict and promote peace. The resultant ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding had its roots in the mid-​1990s, and was aligned with a wider poststructural project –​ in both development studies and also democratization –​that consciously challenged, and even rejected, the intellectual foundations of liberal modernity by privileging indigenous knowledge systems. So-​called ‘post-​development’ theory emerged in Latin America and was primarily associated with Colombian intellectual Arturo Escobar. In his groundbreaking work, Encountering Development (Escobar, 1995), he critiqued Western notions of development as a neocolonial imposition that obscured ongoing cultural imperialism, undermined local development processes, and constructed places like Colombia as both exoticized sites of excess and as dangerously lacking civilization. This in turn legitimized external involvement as countries discursively constructed as ‘underdeveloped’ (or,

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by implication, dangerous) ‘embarked upon the task of “un-​ underdeveloping” themselves by subjecting their societies to increasingly systematic, detailed, and comprehensive interventions’ (Escobar, 1995: 6). In peacebuilding specifically, the work of Lederach (1995, 1997, 2003) is critical. Drawing on Adam Curle’s Making Peace (1971), Galtung’s (1969) theory of structural violence, and, later, Kelman and Fisher’s (2003) work on conflict resolution, Lederach built the ‘conflict transformation school’. The crux of his approach is local capacity building, which aims to give ‘local people agency and power over their peace processes’ (Paffenholz, 2015: 860) and enables them to engage in ‘citizen-​based peacemaking’ (Lederach, 1997). Lederach’s audience was not only academics, but also practitioners at both the national and international levels, as well as local leaders, community actors and grassroots civil society organizations. The influence of Lederach’s work on practitioners was boosted by his own activism and extensive collaboration with grassroots communities who were developing peacebuilding initiatives, as well as his participation in ‘politically charged, high-​level peace negotiations to end an armed conflict’ (Lederach, 2012: 9). Given increasing evidence of the failure of elite-​level peace agreements (‘peace from above’), Lederach’s ideas and those of others regarding the possibilities of promoting ‘peace from below’ began to be heard and taken on board, including by liberal peacebuilding theorists and practitioners themselves (Hughes et al, 2015: 819). In the early 2000s, under Kofi Annan, the UN began to modify its approach, recognizing more fully the importance of local peacebuilding capacities (Leonardsson and Rudd, 2015: 827–​31). Yet the central tenets of liberal peacebuilding remained largely intact and continued to inform most programming. Consequently, while still inviting critique from proponents of the ‘local turn’, international actors generally approached new community-​based efforts as part of the process of realizing externally defined goals, rather than

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a more emancipatory model that would involve handing real agency to individuals and communities. Critical of this cooption of ‘the local’, the architects of the ‘second local turn’ (Paffenholz, 2015), Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver Richmond, sought to promote a mode of local peacebuilding that is genuinely emancipatory and focused on resisting interventionist peacebuilding projects; even those that come dressed in a cloak of participation. Engaging with the post-​colonial works of Bhabha (1994), Chabal et al (1999) and Scott (1990; see also Scott and American Council of Learned Societies 1985) provided a new way to foreground resistance at the local level. The focus on emancipation and resistance in an effort to avoid local communities being subject to interventionist and liberal logics (Paffenholz, 2015: 860) is not the only marked difference between the ‘first local turn’ work of Lederach and the later work of Mac Ginty and Richmond (2013), and others (e.g. de Coning 2013, 2018; Millar, 2017). The ‘second local turn’ also brought in the key concepts of ‘hybridity’ and ‘everyday peace’. The first of these concepts is used by Mac Ginty and Richmond (2013) to highlight the overlapping, messy and mixed conditions in post-​conflict spaces where international, national and local agendas, ideas, institutions and authority structures co-​exist with one another and result in a ‘hybridized political order’ (Hameiri and Jones, 2017: 55). This hybrid space becomes the context in which local actors attempt ‘to respond to, resist, and ultimately reshape peace initiatives through interactions with international actors and institutions’ (Richmond and Mitchell, 2012: 33). Hybridity is therefore imbued with normative potential due to the possibilities for it to generate emancipatory outcomes as a result of local agency. ‘Everyday peace’, meanwhile, is an analytical category used to examine local practices for post-​liberal peacebuilding. According to Elisa Randazzo (2016: 1354), the concept of ‘the everyday’ represents ‘both a practical alternative to the liberal peace and an acknowledgement of the already existing complex

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and hybrid ontological nature of post-​conflict societies’. For Mac Ginty (2021), the values of sociality, reciprocity and solidarity rooted in low-​level everyday social interactions, or ‘micro-​acts’, are key to building peace. Each component of these local turns –​‘the local’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘the everyday’ –​has been critiqued on various grounds. The idea of ‘the local’, for example, has been criticized for its vagueness (Hirblinger and Simons, 2015; Ljungkvist and Jarstad, 2021); its tendency to romanticize and homogenize (Paffenholz, 2014: 25; Barrera et al, 2022); its examination of local initiatives in isolation from other peacebuilding processes occurring at the national or international levels (Piccolino, 2019: 355); and for being based on an inherent Western-​ centricity (Sabaratnam, 2013). Criticisms of the concept of ‘hybridity’ have problematized its tendency to dichotomize the international and the local (Brigg and George, 2020: 411–​ 12), resulting in a ‘bifurcation between ideal-​types of the local-​indigenous and international-​liberal’ (Heathershaw, 2013: 277), which for some leads to the subordination (even if unintended) of the local (Lundqvist and Öjendal, 2018: 18). Hybrid peace has also been critiqued on the grounds that it can reproduce structural and cultural violence, re-​entrenching inequity and discrimination (Mouly, 2022: 189). The idea of ‘everyday peace’, meanwhile, has been criticized by feminists such as Tarja Väyrynen (2019: 150), who have argued that it has failed to pay enough attention to mundane practices, the consequence of which has been a projection of the local sphere and the everyday as something that is radically different and therefore further ‘othered’, valued only for its emancipatory qualities: ‘a reminder of the colonial condition, in which white men seek to save “brown women from brown men” ’. Others have argued that, by ignoring the mundane, the realm of care, which is crucial in creating trust, is also excluded from work on everyday peacebuilding (Vaittinen et al, 2019: 196). A further critique of the local turn literature focuses on the extent to which local knowledge and local experiences are truly

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Peace Through Participation

included and listened to, and how potential conflicts among those claiming to represent local communities may be resolved (Barrera et al, 2022). Many scholars, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international organizations and peace negotiators (including those in Colombia) have begun to recognize the importance of ‘the local’, resulting in a move beyond the previous focus on state actors and national elites. However, as Julian et al (2019) note, recognition is very different from inclusion. Recent studies (Telleria, 2021; Krystalli and Schulz, 2022) have pointed to the continued exclusion of experiential knowledge. Epistemic hierarchies remain, and what counts as ‘reliable knowledge’ tends to ensure that local, indigenous and practical knowledge is disregarded. In her work with healthcare practitioners in Peru, for example, Katy Jenkins (2009) showed how local grassroots experiential knowledge is delegitimized and prevented from reaching different audiences due to the workings of race, class and gender. This may help explain a tendency to focus on ‘local elites’ as a proxy for ‘the local’. Rather than including ‘ordinary people’ and their varying experiences and encounters with peace and conflict, many researchers and practitioners have instead worked with community leaders, civil society actors and local experts (Millar, 2017). Indeed, Lederach’s peacebuilding pyramid (Lederach, 1997: 39) and his reflections on strategic networks (2005) suggest that human webs and middle-​range leadership (by which he means community leaders of various kinds: religious, humanitarian, academic, etc.) may have some of the strongest potential to build peace, given their ability to be understood by and claim to represent ‘the local level’, but also to leverage their status to allow them to engage with higher-​ level leaders. For some, this may seem logical. But Julian et al (2019: 223) warn that by ‘privileging their representations at the potential cost of the experiences and aspirations of those whose voices are silenced by the violence’, we are prevented from truly understanding the everyday realities of life in ‘post-​ conflict’ spaces and the means by which peace is negotiated

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and embodied. If we want to really grasp how peace is made through everyday practices of conflict resolution that are rooted in local culture (Leonardsson and Rudd, 2015), then experiential knowledge must be included, the potential problems with that knowledge being mediated by elites must be recognized, and ideas of what constitutes valid ways of knowing must be challenged. In the Colombian context, armed conflict had disrupted ‘the local’ as much as it created, shaped and reconfigured it (González, 2014). As a political-​military organization, the FARC had long recognized the strategic value of insertion into community governance, having not only rebelled against and challenged the state, but effectively taken on its core functions at the local level in many rural areas (Arjona, 2016). In this context, it was even more important that the wide variety of local experiences of conflict were recognized and taken into account in the peace process. As we will discuss, this became a key challenge and priority at both the negotiation and implementation stages. The common critiques of the local turn are not, for the most part, objections to foregrounding ‘the local’ in thinking about building peace. Quite the reverse: they often revolve around the core critique that this strand of work is not sufficiently localized, grassroots-​oriented, or emancipatory. As a result, despite the ongoing debates, a near consensus has emerged on the importance of broad-​based participation in peace processes. The effectiveness of such participation has been observed across different stages of conflict, from preventive efforts before a turn to violence in societies experiencing conflict (Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011; Paffenholz et al, 2016), to everyday activities that promote peace in the midst of armed violence (Autesserre, 2021; Mac Ginty, 2021), and the engagement of various sections of society, particularly women (O’Reilly et al, 2015; Berry, 2018; Krause et al, 2018) in peace negotiations and the implementation of peace agreements (Nilsson, 2012; Hunter-​Bowman, 2019). These findings have been reflected

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Peace Through Participation

in the recent calls for participatory and inclusive peace which have come from academics as well as practitioners and policy​ makers, including international organizations at the forefront of peacebuilding interventions (United Nations and World Bank, 2018). The notion of participation in peace processes is again, however, contested as it can overlap with, build upon, or overlook pre-​existing bottom-​up efforts at peace. Participation encompasses a variety of activities and associated state–​society interactions, from protest on the streets, through formal and informal consultative forums, to representation and observation at the negotiation table and in post-​agreement commissions and hearings. It also involves a variety of actors, including social movements, civil society organizations, religious organizations and individual advocates (Paffenholz, 2014: 76–​7). In this book, we are particularly interested in public participation in building peace, and we adopt a consciously broad understanding of the term. For us, participation includes the engagement of the full range of social actors in a wide range of activities, from direct engagement in peace processes at the local level to participation and representation at the national and international levels (Conciliation Resources, 2009). At the heart of participation lie multiple actors including community-​based organizations, social movements, local leaders, survivors of atrocities, conflict-​affected collectives and even ex-​combatants reintegrating into society. Participation comprises myriad activities beyond demonstrations, strikes and appeals to government officials, such as everyday cooperative behaviours, behind-​the-​scenes mediation efforts and dialogue. It also involves recognizing the multi-​faceted role played by grassroots organizations as facilitators of dialogue between their communities and external actors, and the everyday roles they play as mediators in local disputes, educators, generators of networks and, in many cases, front-​line providers of support in response to humanitarian crises. Hence, dialogue, to which we

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turn towards the end of this chapter, is one among many forms, or repertoires (McAdam et al, 2001), of participating in peace. Some of these different forms of participation promote peace, whereas others do not, regardless of the intention. There are a range of other possibilities too, not least involuntary non-​participation as a result of barriers (for example, adverse security conditions), and voluntary non-​participation as a form of agency (Mac Ginty, 2012). One problem is that, in the complexity of ‘hybrid’ peacebuilding, any given action can have different consequences as it exists among parallel activities of local and supralocal actors who are operating simultaneously with distinct agendas. Another is that the activities these complex contexts encourage provide limited opportunities for meaningful participation given the state-​ centric, linear modalities of the still prevalent liberal approach to peacebuilding (Paffenholz, 2021). Finally, participation in these contexts includes not only peace-​promoting activities, but also those that coopt and potentially inhibit peacebuilding (Franks and Richmond, 2008). Efforts to resist inclusion in peace processes are one example of such activities (Çuhadar, 2020). Protests or other activities opposing peacebuilding efforts, especially the signing of peace agreements, as in the case of the 2016 referendum in Colombia which rejected the first agreement reached between the Santos government and the FARC, are another example. Taken together, these conclusions suggest the need to nuance the undifferentiated embrace of ‘participation’ in present-​day discourse on peacebuilding. The Colombian peace process In this section, we draw on the preceding discussions to highlight two key elements of the Colombian peace agreement, which we explore through both the negotiations during which it was formulated, and the content of the accord itself. First, the notion of participation is central, through the creation of state-​sponsored processes of social dialogue. Second, local

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turn ideas and insights are incorporated into the agreement via the specifically Colombian notion of ‘territorial peace’. While it might be tempting to see this as the imposition of ‘external’ ideas, in fact the Santos government strategically leveraged these fashionable international concepts, reflecting them back to the international community in order to bolster external support for the country’s emergence from conflict. However, although this was initially conceived by elites as a relatively top-​down and circumscribed process in the sense of the ‘first local turn’, it had the effect of opening up a space for bottom-​up contestation and dialogue; something more genuinely emancipatory in the sense of the ‘second local turn’. It is commonplace for Colombians and media pundits to refer to the peace process as ‘Santos’s peace’. Indeed, President Juan Manuel Santos (2010–​18) figured prominently in its design and early implementation, earning him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016. While turning away from a previous hard line of direct armed confrontation –​Santos, in his previous role as head of the Ministry of Defence, had pursued an unrelentingly aggressive militarized approach to the FARC –​to a negotiated ceasefire to be informed by a process of broad social consultation, the administration was pursuing a model of what we may call ‘peace for extractivism’. In fact, the Colombian case may count as a complex variation on the extractivist model of economic growth, which is based on the expansion of export-​oriented extractive industries, including agri-​business, mining and oil extraction, and which has been pursued throughout Latin America in the 21st century (Svampa, 2021; Kanai and Schindler, 2022). Nevertheless, this political economy critique is not the only possible reading, and the value of pursuing peace per se must also be considered given the country’s long-​standing history of deadly armed conflict, and public exhaustion with it. Moreover, the Santos administration couched its various peace and development initiatives in an all-​encompassing discourse claiming to leverage the institutional, political and investment capacities of the state towards shared peace and

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prosperity. Some of these policies had already appeared in the National Development Plan of 2010, prefiguring those included in the Peace Accord of 2016; specifically its provisions for ‘comprehensive rural reform’. For the political elites around Santos, ‘progress’ was expected to reach deep into forgotten places. In the president’s early speeches, he used the rhetorical idea of ‘locomotive’ sectors, which tellingly points to a system of infrastructure-​enabled geographical expansion of the Colombian economy predicated on strategic activities linked to transnational value chains (Díaz et al, 2021). However, the administration laid down clear red lines regarding the FARC’s demands for more radical reforms to the economic system, refusing to enter into meaningful discussion of the historically skewed relations of land ownership and access to natural resources. Part of the issue here was that the Santos administration was heavily implicated in wider processes of neoliberalization: its close relationship with Washington, for example, saw American military aid tied to extending transnational corporate power in both the extractive and privatized security sectors (Hobson, 2014; Tate, 2015; Grajales, 2017). This reflected a broader process that one author calls ‘transnationalizing illiberal governance’ (Corva, 2008). It also intensified ongoing processes of enclosure in which private interests –​both domestic and international –​had continually encroached on, and commodified, public lands, in turn pushing rural communities into ever-​more marginal spaces and exposing them to the effects of commodity price shocks, which in turn further exacerbated conflict (Guardado, 2018; Albertus, 2019). Occasionally, social unrest and concerted efforts at grassroots organizing in peripheral regions –​often against the incursion of mining interests or the imposition of external coercive militarization –​forced the national government to engage in direct negotiations with local actors and make place-​specific promises in parallel to the national programme. This was the case in the Pacific and Catatumbo regions, which we present in depth in Chapters Three and Four.

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Sergio Jaramillo, the High Commissioner for Peace (2012–​16), perhaps most clearly articulated the governmental discourse on the relationship between peace and development, which he consistently framed as a programme of ‘territorial peace’. It is noteworthy that, on the one hand, this promised to take into account the granular specificities and historically unmet needs of conflict-​affected areas, while, on the other, it presented an image of Colombia as a unified country under the rule of law. The long-​negotiated Colombia–​United States free trade agreement of 2012 demonstrated the economic premium to be obtained from legal security, institutional robustness and basic respect for human rights. Jaramillo travelled widely to present the territorial peace programme at high-​profile universities in North America and Europe, while also gathering support from multilateral institutions and international donors. Referencing the international state-​of-​ the-​art on peacebuilding served the objective of reaching these audiences effectively, and the Colombian government also hired a cadre of prominent international advisors with expertise in facilitating social dialogues for peace and experience in previous transitions out of armed conflict. These measures accompanied the mobilization of vernacular sources and locally commissioned facilitators, drawing on Colombia’s rich history of peacemaking from the ground up. Prominent examples of this included the ‘Peace Laboratories’ initiative in the Magdalena Medio region in the 1990s (Barreto Henriques, 2009) which sought to co-​design a region-​based approach to peace and development, and the community-​led peace zone in San José de Apartadó, emblematic for the community’s struggle to free its territory from the influence of legal and illegal armed actors (Uribe-​López and Correa-​Barrera, 2019). Finally, the essential ambiguity of territorial peace as a concept allowed negotiators for the Colombian government to establish a point of discussion compatible with the FARC’s emphasis on the ‘land question’ without acceding to their specific demands (Cairo et al, 2018; Díaz et al, 2021).

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While holding closed-​door negotiations in Havana, the Colombian government and the FARC co-​sponsored a series of high-​profile and public consultative events between 2012 and 2014, which attracted broad and diverse participation. The first of these was the Agrarian Development Forum (ADF) held in Bogotá in December 2012. For 2 days, 1,314 representatives from 522 organizations from across Colombia gathered in the capital, along with national and international observers, cooperation agencies and the media (UN and UNC, 2012: 13). The ADF was intended to be a broad social consultation regarding the model of rural development that should be included in the agreement. Reflecting the national mood at the time, participants expressed optimism about the process and high expectations at the opportunity to engage in serious dialogue about the stark cleavages and differences that existed in the country. For example, representatives from the Asociación Nacional de Zonas de Reserva Campesina (National Association of Campesino Reserve Zones), a highly activist organization, found that the ADF afforded them an unprecedented opportunity to discuss questions of social justice with landowners, businessmen and bankers (UN and UNC, 2012: 86). Moreover, several proposals presented at the forum envisioned ‘an alternative territorial order resisting the state’s intent to subject [communities] to a hegemonic idea of economic development’ (Cairo et al, 2018: 475), including proposals from indigenous peoples, Afro-​Colombians and women’s groups. However, some participants reflected a preference for the status quo: the National Agricultural Association of Colombia supported the government’s refusal to discuss its economic development model, or to question guarantees afforded to private property and the rules of the market economy (UN and UNC, 2012: 45). The ADF as a social dialogue, therefore, constituted only a small step towards broadly consensual reforms. It was far from certain that community demands to improve rural life would be addressed in any future peace agreement, even if FARC representatives

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in Havana embraced several of the innovative ideas presented and added them to their own agrarian agenda. Subsequent thematic fora continued to reveal deep rivalries and antagonisms. Yet, the forum on political participation created a space to discuss mechanisms for the reincorporation of FARC combatants after half a century of armed conflict, and opportunities to consolidate the presence of the state in remote regions. The forum on victims paved the way for delegations of victims of the conflict to address the negotiating parties in Havana, which ultimately influenced the establishment of the Truth Commission. As a result, beyond the acrimony manifested in the fora, a key message to emerge was that public participation through social dialogue was essential to overcoming the legacies of long-​term violence. Tentatively and falteringly, but nonetheless surely, mechanisms and processes for developing such dialogue continued to evolve. Father Francisco de Roux, President of the Truth Commission, encapsulated this sentiment well, noting that, to deal with their differences, ‘Colombians … do not need to kill each other’ (UN and UNC, 2012: 111). Not all sectors were willing to engage in social dialogue. Most notably, the influential Federación Nacional de Ganaderos (National Federation of Cattle Farmers, FEDEGAN), representing wealthy cattle farmers with combined ownership of over one third of the country’s land, refused to participate in any fora involving the FARC, their historical enemy. At the same time, wholesale opposition to the peace process was building along party-​political lines. With the territorial peace approach ultimately unable to decisively resolve the deep-​seated conflicts presented in this section, the peace process ended with paradoxical outcomes at different scales. Internationally, the final agreement received acclaim as ‘the most inclusive in the world’ (Koopman, 2020) and rendered Colombia the leading global example of comprehensive peacebuilding (Perez et al, 2019). Yet inclusion had not necessarily been the case from the outset: during initial

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negotiations there were no women on either side of the negotiating table (Winstanley et al, 2017). In April 2013, the FARC appointed Judith Simanca-​Herrera, alias Victoria Sandino, to their team. In October 2013, with the motto ‘las mujeres no queremos ser pactadas, sino ser pactantes’ (‘we women don’t want to be the object of agreements, we want to make the agreements ourselves’), 450 representatives of women’s organizations came together at the National Summit of Women and Peace to demand greater participation in the peace talks (UN Women, 2015). In November, Nigeria Rentería, the Government’s Senior Advisor for Women, and María-​Paulina Riveros, Human Rights Director, were appointed. The government appointments were the result of extensive pressure from women’s civil society organizations (Koopman, 2020: 3). The following year, delegations of victims of the conflict, 60 per cent of whom were women, addressed the negotiating parties. At times, one-​third of delegates in Havana were women, ‘still far from parity but above global averages’ (UN Women, 2015). Then, in September 2014, the Gender Sub-​Commission was established. Described as a ‘unique mechanism in the history of conflict resolution’ (UN Women, 2016), the Sub-​Commission focused not only on women’s rights, but also provided a platform for articulating the particular impact of the conflict on women, LGBTQ+​people and indigenous and Afro-​Colombian communities (Bouvier, 2016). As a consequence, members of these groups advanced a number of protective measures that directly informed the final accord, an achievement since described as ‘truly remarkable’ (Perez et al, 2019: 2). Dialogue was seen by the negotiators as central to the future implementation of the agreement, and to wider progress on territorial peace, development and democracy. This is evident throughout the text of the peace agreement. The Introduction states that ‘dialogue between the various sectors of society will contribute to building a climate of trust and promoting a culture of tolerance, respect and peaceful coexistence in

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general, which is an objective of all the accords’. It further promises the creation of new mechanisms for social dialogue between national, regional and local government and different sections of society (e.g. Section 1.1.8), and new citizen participation forums and methodologies (in Section 2.2.1). What is common to these new spaces and processes within the accord, however, is that they are firmly government-​ led. Although they may offer new opportunities for public participation and engagement in dialogue, they do not deliver fully on the authentically bottom-​up or emancipatory aims of the more critical local turn literature discussed previously, nor on the initial promise of territorial peace. Nonetheless, internationally, the accord projected an image of 1) a modern, advanced peace agreement that incorporated the insights of the ‘local turn’; 2) a government committed to locally differentiated economic development (which brought with it opportunities for inward investment) and 3) a country emerging from armed conflict in which both international and domestic audiences could have confidence in security and the rule of law nationwide. Yet, as already discussed, it left the concept of ‘territorial peace’ intentionally and strategically ‘fuzzy’ (Cairo et al, 2018). As a result, it provided sufficient appeal to the FARC and civil society participants, but limited the possibilities of and scope for structural reform (in effect, protecting the government’s pre-​e stablished economic ambitions). Although its signing was presented as a moment of national unity, the peace agreement ultimately proved divisive (Barrera et al, 2022). For Koopman (in Cairo et al, 2018: 473), it demonstrated the lamentable gap between the ‘two Colombias’: the rural, conflict-​affected communities who saw peace as the necessary path forward; and the urban, metropolitan electorate who had been insulated from the most destructive effects of armed conflict. In reality, of course, the lines of fracture were multiple and considerably more complex than this might suggest. We discuss this further in the next

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section in which we explain the ‘Santos peace’ programme’s ‘double defeat’: first through the rejection of the agreement by the Colombian public; and second through the non-​ implementation of key parts of the agreement in the years that followed. In spite of this, pathways remain for identifying common interests and forging relations of solidarity, as the unwavering efforts at genuinely community-​led peacebuilding which we explore in later chapters unambiguously demonstrate. The double defeat What chance does grassroots peacebuilding have when the peace process itself falters? How do social actors reposition themselves in the wake of radical policy turns and a more punitive state? What will those who have engaged in dialogue attempt when they realize that they are not being heard or are no longer invited to sit around the table? This section begins to answer these questions by looking at the trajectory that peace has taken in Colombia since the agreement reached between the government and the FARC was narrowly defeated in a countrywide referendum on 2 October, 2016. Although the Colombian Congress ratified a slightly modified document by the year’s end, peace was, to some degree, delegitimized. Implementation was further compromised with the 2018 election of Iván Duque, the Conservative presidential candidate who had openly opposed the Santos administration’s approach to ending the armed conflict. Half a decade on, international monitors expressed concerns at the large proportion of implementation actions that had not been completed or even initiated, including in the critical area of comprehensive rural reform (Echavarría Álvarez et al, 2022). Thus, while territorial peace had succeeded in making a mark internationally, it could be seen as doubly defeated domestically –​stripped of widespread national support and failing to implement the processes that were intended to create the promised local transformations. Nevertheless, in the face of Duque’s return

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to militaristic repression, the rejection of peace by dissident FARC members and massive social protests taking once again to city streets and country roads, communities committed to (defending) peace continued to pursue dialogue, and even began inventing new formats in which they would occupy convening roles. The peace referendum exposed the many rifts and divisions that prevent a reading of the peace process as a project garnering broad countrywide support. Even before the YES and NO ballots were tallied, the referendum indicated the limits of state commitment. Regardless of reaching an agreement with the FARC, the Santos administration did not acquiesce to their demand of holding a constitutional assembly in place of a referendum. The referendum was a compromise solution, and even then, critics pointed to lack of governmental campaigning and, worse still, insufficient polling stations in remote conflict-​affected areas, with the result that many of the people most likely to benefit found themselves effectively disenfranchized. Meanwhile, the NO coalition mounted a vigorous campaign led by former president Álvaro Uribe, who maintained his charismatic appeal especially across conservative bastions. Attacks on the agreement ranged from those deeming its ‘leniency’ to the FARC unacceptable, to broader arguments admonishing the ‘differentiated’ approach, which included attending to the specific needs and demands of women victims and the conflict’s impact on LGBTQ+​communities. A disinformation campaign warned of the threat to traditional Colombian institutions, including the family and the Catholic church, if the referendum were to pass. For their part, voters did not turn out in great numbers, and many of those that did vote rejected the peace agreement, particularly in large-​and mid-​ sized cities outside the capital. In an already-​stretched context, many feared a further retrenchment of public finances if large, regionally focused peace investments were going to be made. Even in conflict-​affected regions, where the overall vote

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was in clear favour of adopting the agreement regardless of local activists’ lingering concerns, fine-​g rained differences in the vote appeared as jurisdictions with historical allegiance to the Conservative party leaned towards the NO vote. Communities most affected by the violence also differed in their votes (Kreiman and Masullo, 2020). Political polarization again marked the presidential election of 2018, with voters divided between Duque and the left-​ leaning candidate, Gustavo Petro, who committed to take the transformations promised by the ‘Santos peace’ further than even Santos himself would have done. However, with the former’s second-​round victory, the meaning of peace was reframed through a paradigm of ‘legality’, and the Colombian government once again adopted armed repression as a favoured policy approach. During Duque’s tumultuous presidency, the agreement’s implementation schemes faltered, illicit crop cultivation continued and in some places intensified, and violence resurfaced. There was a noticeable rise of bandas criminales (criminal gangs) associated with previous right-​wing paramilitary groups, and those dissident FARC groups who had not abandoned the peace process during the negotiations rearmed (see Maher and Thomson, 2018). There were targeted assassinations of civil and environmental leaders and FARC ex-​combatants, alongside new displacements of rural populations. By November 2019, social discontent mounted, and what was planned as a 1-​day strike against proposed labour reforms turned into weeks of unrest, which were called the paro nacional (national strike). In their analysis of the paro, Díaz et al (2021) point out that the participation of a wide range of social actors (including students, indigenous groups, labour organizations and political collectives) reflected the support of an overwhelming majority of the population, according to public opinion polls. It could thus be read as a new civil ‘referendum’ (this time a referendum on the Duque administration) and a more unified national call for peace than the 2016 vote on the agreement had been.

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In parallel with this unrest, however, at least some of the public participation processes created by the peace agreement continued. Numerous initiatives addressed victims, ex-​ combatants and smallholders who were incentivized to find substitutes to the cultivation of illicit crops. Among these, the PDETs stand out for their transformative ambition for public investment and commitment to the participatory identification of needs and priorities. Implemented in 16 conflict-​affected sub-​regions (purposely designated clusters of municipalities), which amount to just over a third of the country’s territory, the PDETs were intended to provide the required infrastructure and amenities to support local development and revitalize regional economies. The PDET process would allow communities from the smallest units (veredas) upwards to participate in a diagnostic phase centring on eight thematic pillars, including public investment, agricultural production, financial and social service needs. This diagnostic phase would then inform 10-​ year Action Plans for Regional Transformation, which would be synchronized with existing municipal planning frameworks and ultimately guided by the National Development Plan. Communities engaged enthusiastically with the programme: a total of 200,000 participants attended 1,660 meetings held between 2017 and 2019. By 2022, a total of 2,357 projects were reported to have been completed (Zambrano and Otero, 2022: 18, 57–​8). Yet for all their discursive ambition, budgetary commitment from the national government and initial local support, the PDETs have proven less than transformative. The many reasons for the disappointing outcomes include 1) the bureaucratic hurdles created by the national, departmental and municipal-​ level units that hampered participation and implementation; 2) the effective withdrawal of presidential support after Duque’s election; 3) the increasing militarization of place-​based policy and 4) the inherent limitations of the one-​way, consultative approach to the programme’s participatory component. The latter, echoing the limits of the participatory peace process as

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well as international development debates on participation, points to a lack of substantive dialogue between government officials and local communities who have their own knowledge systems. Government officials in charge of the various schemes only provided a finite set of pre-​formatted options for communities to select from, rather than facilitating the co-​ production of transformative schemes based on the exchange of knowledge (or, rather, knowledges). These limitations are further explored in the chapters that follow. Conclusion The double defeat of the ‘Santos peace’ should not be interpreted as a failure of the idea of participation in peacebuilding itself. In fact, participation continued and gained more prominence as the fragile nature of peace became evident. At this stage, it is necessary to differentiate between these state-​sponsored ‘invited’ spaces of participation that were created under the peace agreement, and those that are popular, community-​driven or ‘invented’ (Miraftab, 2004). In the latter, social actors are not limited to participating in a consultative role, but also act as conveners, moderators and sponsors of social dialogues. These ‘dialogues from below’ are more attuned to local conditions as experienced by communities in their everyday lives, and frame claims of territorial futures around their own understandings and aspirations. These experiences are also, inevitably, charged with power relations that may centre certain visions and silence the voices of others. Nor can they escape the trappings of state authority and political cooptation, sometimes leading to ‘banal, boring and not particularly effective’ forms of citizen participation that reproduce the objectives of state actors while legitimizing the withdrawal of resources and social infrastructure (Hunt, 2012: 1305). Nevertheless, community-​driven dialogues have proven resilient to changing governmental agendas and have opened up opportunities to highlight areas of concern beyond

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official peace discourses. These include, for example, questions of racialization, the environmental implications of peace, conflict and development, and the persistence of multiple forms of violence after the signing of the peace agreement. There is, however, much to still be discussed about how researchers can engage with these bottom-​up forms of participation and dialogue in ways that are not extractive, but instead co-​produce peace and research together with communities. In the next chapter, we extend our focus on participation to consider the potentials, and challenges, for PAR to make a contribution to peacebuilding.

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TWO

Participation through Dialogue: Co-​Producing Peace and Research

Dialogue cannot be a panacea for all conflict challenges, nor did the social leaders and community members engaging with our project expect it to be. Their main priority was to find pragmatic ways of addressing ongoing problems and bringing improvements to their territories, often through de-​ escalating ongoing violent conflicts and finding strategies to avoid overt confrontation. Many participants shared concerns that latent tensions were being intensified by the failure to implement key parts of the peace agreement. Yet, we found that a broad range of social actors saw value in community-​ driven peacebuilding through dialogue. The main aim of this chapter is to introduce how methodological approaches and ethical sensibilities from Participatory Action Research (PAR) can open up opportunities for researchers to work alongside social actors in the co-​production of such dialogues, instead of merely documenting them. We focus in particular on the format of diálogos socio-territoriales (DSTs), which the chapter also defines in more depth. We must begin by recognizing that territorially rooted, dialogue-​based modes of participation were not, for the most part, created de novo after 2016. Such efforts have been part of communities’ repertoires of ‘peacebuilding from below’ for decades (Jaramillo Marín et al, 2018). Community-​based organizations have frequently created and convened participatory spaces when state actors have proved unresponsive or unable

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to interpret their claims (Archila, 2019). Yet, these dialogues have not been adequately recognized either by the literature on peacebuilding, or by the national peace agreement’s promises of citizen involvement in the construction of ‘territorial peace’. In many cases, the invented spaces of dialogue that communities have sustained in the ‘post-​conflict’ period have been a continuation of, or have built upon the foundations of, those previous efforts. They have also continued to adapt to changing (post-​)conflict circumstances, in doing so producing innovations that have opened up further avenues for participation, the construction of peace and pursuit of life with dignity. This chapter consists of four sections. The first outlines the Improbable Dialogues project from which this book emerges, situating it in the context of receding violence and increasing political optimism that at first followed the signing of the peace agreement. The second section briefly outlines the project’s roots in the Latin American tradition of PAR as developed in the pioneering work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, and explains how we applied these principles critically in our approach to community engagement. We then go on to build on the work of Jaramillo Marín et al (2022) to outline our understanding of DSTs –​a key analytical concept for our empirical discussions in Chapters Three and Four. We emphasize that, while DSTs are deeply rooted in local histories of peacebuilding, they also adapt to shifting internal and external circumstances and a broad range of economic, political, inter-​group and environmental challenges. Over time, this enables DST processes to open up further avenues for participation and transformative social practice. The chapter’s fourth section introduces the two processes of DST with which we have collaborated most extensively, in the Catatumbo and Buenaventura/​Mid-​Pacific regions. We explain the theoretical and practical reasons behind the book’s focus on these particular experiences of co-​producing peace and research in parts of the country that have been deeply affected by armed conflict, and which continue to be beset by high levels of violence

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and exclusion that individuals and communities resist through multiple means. Improbable Dialogues:​the research project The project ‘Improbable Dialogues: Participatory Research as a Strategy for Reconciliation’ was a bilaterally funded British-​Colombian collaboration between academic and civil society institutions across both countries, with the purpose of informing sustainable peacebuilding in Colombia. The original funding call, launched in 2017, was tightly aligned with the peace agreement, which had been ratified by the Colombian parliament towards the end of the previous year. Most importantly, following the agreement’s principle of subnational differentiation, the call’s guidelines required a focus on one or more of the 51 municipalities included in the PDET programme (RCUK-​Colciencias, 2017: 1–​2). The call replicated the agreement’s preference for creating opportunities and solving problems at the local level by focusing on questions of inclusion and participation, education for peacebuilding and working towards reconciliation (RCUK-​Colciencias, 2017: 4–​5). Furthermore, proposals were asked to address the question of how national, regional and local governments could collaborate with various civil society actors and communities to achieve such democratic goals in a post-​context conflict (RCUK-​Colciencias, 2017: 4). The requirement to include British institutions in the research teams, which were to be funded by the UK government through a national research council and an overseas development assistance programme, was consistent with the Santos administration’s goal of bringing international visibility to the peace process (Díaz et al, 2021). In addition, from the UK side, there were clear economic interests in increasing investment in Colombia, not least emerging partnerships in the oil and gas sectors, as well as the political benefit of illustrating the new orientation of a post-​Brexit ‘Global Britain’. During

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President Santos’s unprecedented state visit to the UK, the first by a Latin American president, then-​Prime Minister Theresa May stated her determination ‘that Britain should become the global champion of free trade, and that means boosting trade with fast-​growing economies like Colombia’, which in practical terms meant cooperation on multiple fronts, including academic research (Reuters, 2016). The Improbable Dialogues project’s research design had to respond to these various imperatives: the interests of the two governments, the prioritization of sub-​national differentiation and especially those regions that had been most affected by conflict (specifically, PDET regions), the desire for the participation of communities and the need to bring together academic, civil society and government actors. Initially influenced by the optimism of the early post-​accord period, the Improbable Dialogues project –​ named after the concept introduced by Lederach (quoted in MacBride, 2019 and in Arias, 2021) –​aimed to contribute to cementing peace in conflict-​affected communities by focusing on remaining tensions and unresolved issues, for which we used the Spanish term conflictividades. The idea was to bring together community members and groups who might not normally talk to one another to address common issues, even where they appeared to have opposing interests (Jaramillo Marín et al, 2022). But within this broad framework, the project also incorporated PAR’s normative commitment to community-​led research. This allowed us to adapt our aims and activities according to community priorities –​and in the face of radical changes in how the peace process was being understood and implemented by the national government. Thus, over time the project shifted from focusing on residual conflictividades after the official ceasefire to working with local researchers, community leaders and grassroots participants in addressing their concerns and priorities in a context of resurfacing armed violence and new and old threats to their lives and livelihoods.

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As we discussed in Chapter One, much changed between the funders’ initial call in 2017 and the project’s end in early 2022. These changes related not only to the peace process itself, around which the mood grew less optimistic as time went on –​especially after the election of the conservative Duque government in 2018 –​but also delays and adaptations caused by the COVID-​19 pandemic. Yet, these shifting circumstances also allowed us to carry out the project in ways that engaged with international thinking on ‘local turn’ peacebuilding, while at the same time prioritizing the co-​production of knowledge with partner communities, employing vernacular conceptual frameworks, theories and methods. Specifically, the project’s understanding of intercambio de saberes (exchange of knowledges), participation and dialogue derives from the Latin American PAR tradition, which may have received its fair share of international exposure and scrutiny but has only recently started to be considered as a conflict-​sensitive method for participatory peacebuilding (UN Sustainable Development Group, 2022). Participatory Action Research At the core of PAR, and at the heart of the Improbable Dialogues project, is the concept of participation, foregrounded as part of ‘a desire for more equitable research relationships’ (Shaw, 2016: 419). As mentioned in the Introduction, the PAR tradition was developed through the pioneering work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda. The epistemological principles of Fals Borda’s PAR developed out of processes of self-​criticism and systematization of his early work as an activist-​researcher committed to supporting the peasants’ struggle for land in the Colombian Caribbean Coast in the early 1970s. While his early activism-​research was stimulated by Paulo Freire’s call to support the oppressed in investigating their reality, the implementation of techniques of militant research such as analysis of class struggle and ideological

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formation of revolutionary cadres ended up reproducing the subject–​object asymmetry that they were trying to depart from (Fals Borda, 1979: 48–​50; Rivera Cusicanqui, 1987: 51). Fals Borda’s systematization of his own experience was complemented by a period of cross-​fertilization between Anisur Rahman (1983), Budd Hall (1992) and other members of the International Network of Participatory Research, after which PAR –​as Fals Borda named it –​emerged as ‘action research that is participatory, and participatory research that unites with action’ (Rahman, 1983: 18). This approach was guided by a series of epistemological principles rather than a prescriptive set of techniques and strategies (McTagart, 1997). Of particular importance among these principles is the understanding of PAR as an approach that: 1) contests the positivist idea of neutral or objective social science; 2) facilitates horizontal relations, as opposed to the traditional divide between researcher and researched; 3) values ‘people knowledge’ and indigenous epistemologies; 4) seeks to contribute to empowering marginalized groups; and 5) recognizes participants as thinking, feeling people (sentipensantes) (Fals Borda, 1988). In methodological terms, ‘there is no rule book for PAR’ (Rappaport, 2020: xviii). However, some of Fals Boarda’s techniques and strategies remain relevant and fruitful, as the cases studies analysed in this book show, including: i) collective and dialogical research through traditional ethnographic techniques, but also visual and art-​based approaches such as participatory video, street theatre, cultural gatherings, etc.; ii) critical recovery of history through exercises of collective memory, analysis of archivos de baúl (kitchen archives) and creation of graphic stories; iii) valuing and fostering local culture to promote action and participation; iv) co-​production and multi-​level dissemination of knowledge that is accessible to local communities, organizations and professional researchers as a means to challenge the monopoly of the written word in research and v) devolución sistematica (systematic feedback), which should not be interpreted as the ‘returning’ of finished

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outputs to a passive audience, but rather as ‘the creation of educational vehicles geared to their audiences’ capabilities and needs’ (Rappaport, 2020: 133). In the context of the Improbable Dialogues project, as will be discussed later on, processes of systematic feedback became integral to its methodological core. The process of co-​designing strategies and techniques to facilitate social dialogues became in itself a methodological question, which positively impacted the dynamics of participation between researchers and local actors. Central to the Improbable Dialogues project, then, was an approach based on working alongside community members and community-​based organizations, rather than viewing them as objects of the research. The project moved from seeking to understand the context of the territories in which it was working in an initial ‘participatory scoping phase’, to then identifying processes and organizations with which it could work to support dialogues. Often those processes of dialogue were already in existence. The types of support the project provided varied according to local needs and demands, but included training and capacity building, practical support in facilitating events and the input of particular forms of expertise where requested. In Chapters Three and Four we discuss in more detail the dialogue processes with which we engaged in Catatumbo and Buenaventura: the nature of those processes, and the roles played by members of the project team, were very different in each case, but united by the PAR-​based approach. PAR and similar collaborative and participatory research approaches are certainly not free from ethical challenges and considerations –​especially in conflict-​affected locations. While we sought to investigate the potential of such a method to make a contribution to local-​level dialogues for peace, we were not naive as to its challenges. Yet, PAR provided a set of ethical and practical principles to enable research based on genuine collaboration, led by participants and researchers working together in a way that allows for capacity building and social change. When consistent with these principles, we found that

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research could have positive impacts for communities and could constitute a meaningful interaction for the promotion of social change. One common critique of PAR (and, indeed, other forms of participatory research) is that the concept of participation is prone to romanticization (Shortall, 2003) and to cooption by actors who use local elites as proxies for actual participation and engagement with ‘the local’ (Rappaport, 2016: 10). This has also been argued in relation to peacebuilding research and practice (Alejandro Leal, 2007: 539), where participation is often associated with inherently ‘good’ properties (Hirblinger and Simons, 2015). Notwithstanding this critique, there has been a huge growth in enthusiasm for participatory approaches from funders, universities, aid organizations and even international banks in recent years, leading some to argue that participatory research has become a ‘new tyranny’ (Cooke and Kothari, 2001), and that long-​standing critiques of its antecedents (not least of participatory rural development practices of the 1970s, which were criticized, among other things, for privileging engagement with local elites, for remaining donor-​driven and for having limited impact) have been forgotten in the process (Hall, 1975; Fals Borda, 1987; Cornwall, 2008; Oslender and Fals Borda, 2014; Swantz, 2016; Díaz-​Arévalo, 2022). At the same time, despite increasing awareness of the importance of centring local voices and needs, extractive research practices unfortunately persist –​sometimes even in work that claims to be participatory. ‘Extractive’ research practices dressed up as participatory research have rightly been critiqued (Swantz, 2016; Rappaport, 2020; Díaz-​Arévalo, 2022). Short-term research visits that include elements of ‘participation’ in their methods and approaches, and on that basis claim to be practicing PAR, are common. Similarly, it is not unusual to find supposedly participatory research projects in which local researchers are used merely as data collectors, assuming the risks of fieldwork in ‘dangerous’ or

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inaccessible places while the processes of research design and data analysis are driven by international researchers who reap the practical and reputational rewards (Bouka, 2019; Faciolince, 2019). Neither of these would meet the principles of PAR, which centre on genuine and ongoing partnership between researchers and participants to deliver change, based on their respective skills, knowledge and experience. Being fully cognisant of the validity of these critiques, the Improbable Dialogues project’s normative commitment was to reduce the distance between ‘researchers’ and ‘participants’. Our success in doing so was, perhaps inevitably, imperfect. With our university-​based teams located overseas and in Bogotá, both far from the communities with which we were working, we were aware from the start that the project could easily come to be seen by those in the territories as yet another externally driven, extractive project. It was clear that short research ‘fieldwork’ visits would not be enough, nor did we want the team members based in the territories to be mere data collectors. Even with good intentions, avoiding these pitfalls required an ongoing critical reflection on the nature of our local collaborations, ensuring that local researchers felt appropriately trained and supported and understanding and responding to participants’ views of the project. As one example of this, we even changed the project’s Spanish-​language name after participant feedback that the term ‘improbable’ was not part of their everyday vocabularies and, more importantly, failed to enthuse them to participate. Following this, the project became known simply as Diálogos. We were not, of course, under any illusion that these efforts would mean the project avoided being shaped by power dynamics and inequalities of various forms (Nygreen, 2009). The activities, and the processes of dialogue, were frequently affected by tensions between participants, and inevitably reflected various hierarchies, including those produced by gender, race, age and class differences (Caretta and Riaño, 2016: 263). As Cornwall (2008: 276) argues, participation as

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praxis is ‘a terrain of contestation, in which relations of power between different actors, each with their own “projects”, shape and reshape the boundaries of action’. Aware that ‘group dynamics also limit open expression in several ways’ (Shaw, 2016: 425), the research team often discussed whether some participants might be assuming more dominant roles, whereas others, for example women, might feel less confident or even uncomfortable to speak, and if they did speak, might not be listened to. As Collier et al (2016: 401) note, while women are reified as peaceful and peacemakers in the home, their voices are largely absent from peace processes, including local-​level discussions, due to the workings of patriarchy (see also Berman-​ Arévalo and Ojeda, 2020). Another concern was ‘participation fatigue’ (Vélez-​Torres et al, 2021), which was expressed by some local participants on occasion. Sustaining participation in a project such as Diálogos depends on a meaningful connection between the personal aims of participants and those of the project. As Mistry et al (2016: 413) note, ‘different motivations not only lead to decisions on whether to participate or not in a process, but also determine how people participate’ –​and whether they remain motivated and committed to the process. It was here that the idea of working with rather than on existing community-​based processes of dialogue became of fundamental importance. And it was here that we were required to collaborate with local actors to consider how, when and in what ways PAR-​ based approaches could productively contribute to supporting existing or planned DSTs. The next section defines this term and explains how we approached the co-​production of peace and research in two territories. Introducing diálogos socio-territoriales In this section, we draw on the work of Jaramillo Marín et al (2022) to define DSTs as a preeminent form of participatory peacebuilding in the communities in which we were working,

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and explain how we mobilized PAR principles and methods in our collaboration with DST participants. The section first embeds the concept of DSTs in the ‘territorial turn’ that social movements have taken in Latin America, which implies a more explicit recognition of feminist, decolonial and ecological struggles in what are now widely known as movimientos en defensa de la vida (movements to defend life) (García López et al, 2019; Luna Nemecio, 2021). We explain that, whereas such movements are positioned in the Latin American region’s 21st-​century transition from neoliberal reforms to more pervasive neo-​extractivist forms of development, communities in Colombia have had to address these while at the same time engaging in complex struggles over the meanings attached to historical armed conflict and the desire to move towards a sustainable and inclusive peace (Díaz et al, 2021). At the end of this section, we introduce the practices of education and devolución sistematica (systematic feedback) we used to enable co-​production between our researchers and the diverse range of participants involved in the local DSTs. DST constitutes an emergent category that allows us to engage with a broad range of peacebuilding practices from below and which provides a focal point to explore the application of PAR’s principles and methods. Jaramillo Marín et al (2022) situate the emergence of DSTs in the context of flawed and disappointing ‘social dialogues’ promoted by the Colombian government (the ‘invited spaces’, for example those that were part of the PDET process that we discussed in Chapter One). Even though state-​sponsored dialogues were often narrowly focused around the dominant developmentalist discourse –​ and often not followed up with real policy commitments –​these experiences were nevertheless useful for historically marginalized communities, including Afro-​ descendents, indigenous peoples, traditional communities and women’s and LGBTQ+​collectives. By participating in state-​ sponsored dialogue fora, social actors could claim their right to participate in the design of the peace agreement; reiterate

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the need for a societal discussion on the consequences of neoliberal reforms; highlight the need for a democratization of ordenamiento territorial (land use planning); and remind state actors of the need to incorporate local ideas and visions to secure a sustainable peace (  Jaramillo Marín et al, 2022: 66). In Chapters Three and Four we show how DSTs in Catatumbo and Buenaventura emerged, or were reinvigorated, in the context of disillusionment with the limited outcomes of these state-​sponsored dialogues. Following Jaramillo Marín et al (2022), we see DSTs as having four essential characteristics. First, they are ‘territorial’ in the Latin American sense explained earlier. By that we mean that they take place in a particular place (usually a relatively defined geographical region), but more than that: they are rooted in local identities, histories, power relations and knowledge. Following Escobar (2008, 2020), DSTs can in this way be understood as ‘pluriversal’, for they aim to protect ‘territories of difference’ or a world where multiple worlds can coexist –​the notion is of particular relevance for when mobilized actors resist the imposition of ‘uni-​versal’ capitalist regimes of private property and market relations over fragile ecosystems that have been managed sustainably for generations through community-​based arrangements (for an approach to pluriversal co-​existence more explicitly based on cultural differences in contexts of highly asymmetric power relations, see also Hutchings, 2019). Second, while DSTs are created, convened, managed and curated (i.e. ‘invented’) by local social actors, they are also able to maintain communication channels with the state and other external actors –​ including corporations and international bodies. This is essential given that these processes have acquired urgency as a result of the intensified onslaught of capitalist forces over culturally and ecologically diverse territories. Schindler and Kanai (2021), for example, point out that the transition from the neoliberal focus on free markets and open borders to territories that are functionally integrated into global value chains has hinged on a form

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of ‘infrastructure-​led development’ in which the state is mobilized for the geographical expansion of infrastructure connectivity, often with negative social and environmental implications for the territories being connected. Thus, DSTs exist in Colombia in the context of national goals, not least state-​sponsored extractivism claiming to bring prosperity to conflict-​affected peripheral regions (Ulloa and Coronado, 2016), and the problems they seek to address cannot be ‘solved’ locally, but only through engagement and negotiation with more powerful actors external to the territory and exercising their influence through complex institutional arrangements structured across multiple scales (Barrera et al, 2022). Third, the focus of DSTs can vary widely. Some might be seeking to address problems in the short-​term; others might aim to strengthen long-​term collaborative networks and relationships of trust. The direct aims of these processes might not be described explicitly in terms of peace, as with the environmental committee aiming to reduce pollution in the Catatumbo river system that we examine in Chapter Three. Yet, through these dialogue processes, the participants are engaging in peacebuilding, bringing together different groups to resolve areas of conflict. DSTs conceived of in this way constitute a ‘post-​conflict’ subset of what Escobar (2019) calls ‘ontological struggles’ in a context of pluriversal co-​existence (see also Escobar, 2018) as mobilized actors do not only demand their right to remain in their territories but also for their ecologies and cultures to not be fundamentally altered through extractivist economic activities. Communities engaged in such struggles oppose the ‘development’ of their territories in ways that are promised to create growth, but are also known to bring about ecological and social disruption. In this sense, DSTs are part of the movements to defend life that have emerged throughout Latin America, which have been conceptualized as socio-​territorial (Halvorsen et al, 2019) or eco-​territorial (Svampa, 2021).

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Fourth, DSTs rely for their success on participants with the skills and knowledge to convene and sustain what are often complex dialogue processes. In both of the cases we examine in this book, the existing capacities of local social actors to fulfil those functions were enormous. Yet, it is here that PAR can make a contribution, supporting DSTs with organizational capacity, resources and skills and expertise where needed. While DSTs themselves build capacity through organic processes of ‘learning by doing’, there can also be a contributory role played by outside researchers who are seeking to work with local actors to promote change. Co-​producing peace and research thus entails working with processes of DST on visions that are both anchored in and advance the needs and aspirations of communities. In the Diálogos project, we pursued this through three main avenues: collaboratively planning activities; contributing to the development of territorially embedded research and facilitation capacities; and engaging in a process of devolución sistemática (systematic feedback). Practically, in terms of the planning of local activities, this meant that the research team avoided arriving with an agenda, other than general aims that had been agreed with the local partners (discussed further in Chapters Three and Four) to avoid any potential conflicts and misunderstandings. Then, we would hold a series of preparatory meetings to engage in our own dialogue with social actors. In these, we presented the project while also learning about local organizational priorities, trying to identify overlapping interests and opportunities for collaboration. To build mutual trust and facilitate discussion, it was important to present the project in a language accessible to lay people, spelling out its methodological and ethical underpinnings and stressing our commitment to respect the autonomy of the organizations and their agendas. Our partners had ample opportunity to observe and judge the sincerity of that commitment over an extensive period of collaboration. In terms of capacity building, the project created opportunities for local community members and organizations to take part

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in hands-​on training in research methods, facilitation and communication skills, learning from each other and from members of the project team in order to maximize their chances of being able to sustain successful DST processes. Depending on local circumstances and the expressed needs of participants, this included support to develop reading and writing skills, training in participatory video, radio broadcasting, archival research, facilitation skills and more. The format of these activities varied widely, from short intensive workshops to a 3-​month diploma course, certified by Universidad Javeriana. The continuous sharing of research findings and project outputs and outcomes was key to building ongoing collaborative relationships between researchers, social leaders and communities. We implemented the PAR principle of systematic feedback, outlined by Fals Borda (1987: 344) as ‘an obligation to return [this] knowledge systematically to the communities and workers’ organizations, because they continue to be its owners’. Whereas some researchers, as Rappaport (2020: 225) notes, have interpreted this as the ‘returning’ of finished outputs to a passive audience that has not participated in the process, we followed Fals Borda’s (1987: 133) call for ‘the creation of educational vehicles geared to their audiences’ capabilities and needs’, which may include artistic or performative practices. Adapting to participants’ habits and preferences, we employed participatory video, comic books, digital and physical graphs and community theatre and music to share knowledge with a variety of audiences. This systematic feedback sustained a ‘chain of conversations’ (Rappaport, 2016) that facilitated and supported processes of self-​reflection among marginalized communities, while enabling outside researchers to input wider comparative context and learning. Building peace in Catatumbo and Buenaventura What indications of transformative peacebuilding have DSTs produced to date? What lessons can we draw from effective

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co-​p roduction experiences with such remarkable and innovative processes? What contexts did these DSTs emerge from and how might their achievements inform struggles for a just peace elsewhere? We address these questions in the chapters that follow, which focus on two cases in which our project was involved in supporting peace initiatives from below. These DSTs are respectively located in the Catatumbo and Buenaventura/​Mid-​Pacific regions, two conflict-​affected areas that continue to face multiple challenges in the post-​agreement period. This section details the regions’ intrinsic interest for research on peace and conflict, but also explains the practical reasons that led us to include them in our project from a PAR perspective, in which trust-​based co-​production between researchers and participants was essential. We mention our pre-​ existing contacts with intermediary organizations with a visible presence in the territories, and explain how we eventually came to focus our co-​production efforts, and the core of this book’s analysis, on two specific DSTs that respectively resulted in an environmental committee for Catatumbo and a peace strategy for Buenaventura. As already explained, the funders’ call indicated a preferential focus for research in locations participating in the national PDET programme. Of 16 officially designated sub-​regions, our research design limited field activities to three areas, decided upon according to available resources and access secured by existing collaborations. In assessing the potential contribution of PAR to peace and research amidst ‘post-​conflict’ challenges, this book centres on two specific experiences (see Map 2.1). However, this does not imply that meaningful collaborations failed to materialize in the third area (the Meta municipality of the Macarena-​Guaviare sub-​region), nor that DSTs in the Catatumbo and Buenaventura/​Mid-​Pacific regions were limited to the co-​production of the processes described in Chapters Three and Four. Located in North-​Eastern Colombia on the border with Venezuela, Catatumbo is one of the most conflict-​affected

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Map 2.1:  Political map of Colombia with PDET sub-​regions

Source: Agustín Codazzi Geographic Institute, Government of Colombia. Map author: Santiago Manuel Rodriguez Alonso.

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areas of the country. A fertile land structured around the Catatumbo River Basin, recent rapid economic growth and infrastructural development has seen the region’s historically campesino and indigenous populations become increasingly diversified, with an expanding number of urban centres. But this growth has not solved an array of historical problems, including poverty, labour precarity, unequal land access and widespread illicit activities such as illegal mining and coca cultivation. Residents have endured violence, instability and stigmatization for decades, with daily life characterized by pragmatic and uneasy alliances with armed actors amidst new environmental challenges, particularly water contamination and deforestation. The Pacific Region, meanwhile, is one of Colombia’s six ‘natural regions’ and extends across Chocó, Antioquia, Nariño, Cauca and Valle del Cauca. In the latter of these sits the municipality of Buenaventura, which incorporates both urban and rural zones including 25 indigenous settlements and 44 Afro-​Colombian consejos comunitarios (community councils). The city of Buenaventura itself lies directly on the Pacific ocean and has become one of Latin America’s major ports, providing a crucial link between inland industry and the global export market. But the wealth generated is unevenly distributed, with poverty rife across the city’s comunas (communes) and particularly acute among the urban Afro-​Colombian population. Meanwhile, Buenaventura’s geographic position has made it a focal point for narcotrafficking and other illicit economic activities, resulting in violent territorial contestation among multiple armed actors. Our research engagement across Catatumbo and Buenaventura/​M id-​Pacific revealed commonalities and differences in terms of aspirations, grievances and collective actions within and beyond the bounds of the formal peace process. Both spaces were afforded priority within the agreement itself, with Catatumbo incorporated into a unified PDET sub-​region and Buenaventura amalgamated

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into the Pacífico Medio PDET along with three Cauca municipalities. Each place also witnessed massive if distinct waves of social mobilization either during or after the agreement’s ratification, building on a long history of contentious interaction with the state. But the nature of the ongoing conflicts differed significantly, as did local cultures and traditions of collective social action and mobilization, perhaps most notably between the largely Afro-​Colombian population of Buenaventura, and the mixed campesino/​ indigenous populations of Catatumbo. By exploring the gains and tensions endemic in these social struggles, how they built on –​and gave way to –​territorially specific dialogue processes, we highlight the potential for DST to produce concrete outputs and achievements in other regions of Colombia and beyond. We were fortunate to benefit from the existing relationships of the project’s Colombian partners with leading organizations in both of these territories, providing an entry-​point for the participatory scoping phase, during which the project team expanded those networks to include, and work alongside, a far wider range of community-​based organizations. In the case of Catatumbo, we were able to utilize the longstanding relationship between CINEP and Pastoral Social Diócesis de Tibú which, as described in Chapter Three, had an enduring engagement with communities throughout the region through its work on the peace process directly (for example, supporting the PDET process in the region), and through wider community support activities. In Buenaventura, meanwhile, we drew on the existing links between Universidad Javeriana and CORMEPAZ, a local civil society organization with a long history in campaigning against violence in the city, preserving the memory of victims of the conflict and providing training opportunities for community members. It is notable (and not unusual in Colombia) that both of these local organizations were, either directly or indirectly, related to the Catholic church (as indeed are

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both Universidad Javeriana and CINEP): Pastoral Social is an agency of the diocese, overseen directly by the Bishop; CORMEPAZ’s relationship with the church is somewhat less direct, although it originally grew out of the church and occupies premises (La Casa Social Cultural y Memoria) directly abutting the church. Conclusion While the ethical and practical principles and methods derived from the Latin American PAR tradition guided co-​production between researchers and participants in the Diálogos project from its outset, we adapted to shifting circumstances to tap into existing modes of participation in the communities with which we worked. As a result, we did not create anew but rather built upon existing repertoires of ‘peacebuilding from below’, working together with community members and community-​based organizations. This approach unveiled the long histories of mobilization in these communities, including efforts to ‘invent’ participatory spaces beyond ‘invited’ state-​ sponsored initiatives such as PDET consultations, which failed to bring about meaningful change due in part to their developmentalist underpinnings. Community-​based DSTs in Catatumbo and Buenaventura, the cases on which this book focuses, emerged in different, territorially specific ways, but were connected to communication channels with the state, brought together parties to resolve conflicts and drew on the skills and knowledge of local social actors who organized these processes, reflecting the core characteristics of DSTs. Working with rather than on these initiatives, the Diálogos project contributed to efforts to promote social change through collaborative planning of activities, development of research capacities and systematic feedback to partner communities based on their visions and needs in the process. Our PAR-​ based approach to supporting existing DSTs, while cognisant of the need to reduce the distance between ‘researchers’ and

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‘participants’ and continually reflect on power dynamics and inequalities in the activities of dialogue, thus enabled trust-​ based co-​production with a diverse range of local actors. The following chapters turn to the dialogue processes in Catatumbo and Buenaventura that we engaged in.

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THREE

Protecting Catatumbo: Dialogue as Conflict-​Sensitive Environmentalism

On the morning of 10 June 2013, a group of around 300 campesinos blocked the road connecting Tibú, the largest town in Catatumbo, to Cúcuta, the departmental capital of Norte de Santander. Central to the protestors’ concerns was the excessive use of force in the government’s illicit crop eradication programme, along with unequal access to land and a lack of support for transitioning to alternative livelihoods. The blockade sparked what would become the Catatumbo agrarian strike, lasting 53 days and including around 10,000 people in an unprecedented region-​wide mobilization (  Jiménez Martín et al, 2019). During the Improbable Dialogues project’s participatory scoping phase, the strike was repeatedly cited as a watershed moment for envisioning and realizing a community-​led peace. The transport blockages had soon affected palm oil production, access to the Colombian Oil Company (Ecopetrol) and other commercial sectors in the region. The results included food shortages and clashes between campesinos and security forces. Although the protesters eventually obtained a response from the Colombian government, issues emerged over the extent to which the protestors were representative of the region’s diverse groups, including the Motilón-​Barí indigenous people. Few of the promised state concessions came to fruition and, even though the PDET programme which stemmed from

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the 2016 peace agreement prioritized the development of the region, it did little to change the situation on the ground. It is no overstatement to suggest that communities like those in Catatumbo have been some of the biggest losers of the conflict: as Ballvé (2013b: 238) suggests, for four decades ‘the conflation of political violence and the cocaine boom have devastated rural Colombia, fueling the displacement of some 4 million campesinos – ​mainly by paramilitary groups’. Yet, even after the agreement with the FARC had been reached, the people of Catatumbo continued to be plagued by a combination of illegal economies, armed violence from guerrilla and paramilitary groups, state repression and unequal access to land and natural resources. While the contentious politics that animated the agrarian strike continue to this day, and residents acknowledge the challenges and slow pace of change stemming from the peace agreement, innovative and community-​based efforts to create and sustain peace are gaining visibility and traction. Our local partners, especially the faith-​based organization Pastoral Social who have long been active in the territory, introduced us to multiple initiatives, including in remote, poorly-​connected parts of the region. Our role in observing and supporting the emergence of a conflict-​sensitive environmental platform, and in working with local actors to co-​produce tools for effective intra-​and inter-​organizational communication for community-​based environmental management and resource conservation, afforded us direct experience of the potential of DST to improve living conditions and mitigate environmental harms such as water pollution, even amidst ongoing criminality and armed violence. This chapter comprises four sections. The first introduces the combination of factors that have fuelled conflict in Catatumbo. We show that this unevenly developed region –​frequently stigmatized as a lawless borderland –​ has been subject to multiple forms of state and para-​state domination and violence, yet has also produced vibrant forms of collective action and

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resistance. The second section charts a specific series of actions which preceded the signing of the 2016 peace agreement, culminating in the agrarian strike which sought to insert local concerns around land access, autonomy and alternative livelihood opportunities into the official peace agenda. We then present the state response to demands from the region, specifically through the PDET process. Here we explore the role of Pastoral Social in identifying the limitations of PDET implementation, and the range of social responses to the perceived failure of the process (including contentious actions and dialogue-​oriented peacebuilding), as well as emergent challenges around communication and representation. In the final section, we examine the environmental concerns centring on the riverside community of La Angalia, and the Improbable Dialogues project’s engagement in using PRA to support the development of an effective environmental strategy and oversight committee. Conflict in a ‘lawless borderland’ The region of Catatumbo (see Map 3.1) derives its name from a 340 kilometre-​long river: the Río Catatumbo, or ‘House of Thunder’ in the Motilón-​Barí language. In fact, many rivers and tributaries flow through this diverse territory, originating from the highlands to the West and flowing northeastward to Venezuela through the lowlands. Rivers connect the region’s major settlements, including Tibú, its rapidly expanding main town. However, despite the natural beauty of this vast and remote space, with expansive national parks and protected indigenous territories, Catatumbo has come to be seen as a conflict-​prone and lawless borderland. Our participatory scoping identified the confluence of three factors that lay behind this stigma, the physical violence affecting the region’s inhabitants and the difficulties in building a sustainable regional agenda for peace. First, geographically uneven development has been exacerbated by various forms of resource extraction

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including monocrop agriculture, oil extraction and mining, all of which have generated new social inequalities and environmental harm. Second, violent state and para-​state domination has forced residents to navigate living in the crossfire between armed actors, with many relying on illicit coca cultivation as their only livelihood option. Third, fractured relationships among various civil society groups (including campesino–​campesino and campesino–​indigenous frictions) who have been competing to secure public investment and land security has undermined the possibilities of cooperation between them. Catatumbo is simultaneously far removed from the centres of state power and profoundly affected by political decisions on territorial development and armed conflict management that are usually taken in Bogotá. Still considered peripheral and problematic, the region is a quintessential example of how geographically uneven development stems from –​and intersects with –​the centralist tendencies of the Colombian state (González, 2014). Located approximately 16 hours from Bogotá by road, Catatumbo is even far from Cucutá, the capital of Norte de Santander, the department to which the region’s municipalities belong. However, while the lack of well-​maintained roads impedes travel to, from, and within Catatumbo, multiple and diverse flows dissect the region with different levels of infrastructure support and state sanction. These include the oil extraction industry, in operation since the 1970s,1 growing agri-​business enterprises, unregulated migration from bordering Venezuela and illicit cross-​border trade –​including narcotrafficking. Due to low levels of investment in social and economic development, agriculture continues to provide the main source of employment. Even those living in rapidly-​expanding

1

The Caño Limón-​Coveñas, Colombia’s second largest oil pipeline, passes directly below Tibú.

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Protecting Catatumbo

Map 3.1:  Political map of Norte de Santander with the Catatumbo PDET sub-​region

Source: Agustín Codazzi Geographic Institute, Government of Colombia. Map author: Santiago Manuel Rodriguez Alonso.

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urban areas often need to search for work in the countryside given the limited opportunities in the public, commercial and service sectors. Agriculture as a sector is economically beneficial for the region, but it generally offers low-​paid and insecure work, resulting in high levels of unemployment and poverty (Vargas Prieto and Figueroa Córdoba, 2020). Furthermore, the expansion of primary commodity production such as palm oil has exacerbated pressure on natural resources and competition for both land and water (Potter, 2020). Combined with population growth and urbanization, this has led to environmental degradation, especially of watercourses. Meanwhile, the expansion of agribusiness has attracted massive inflows of poor workers from neighbouring Venezuela, who provide cheap labour for cultivation on large-​scale plantations, pushing down wages still further (Potter, 2020). Resolving the problems of land distribution and access has long featured among the demands of the region’s inhabitants, particularly the campesino population. Strategies to overcome adverse conditions have varied, from forming associations to defend group interests, joining cooperatives and even cultivating illicit crops such as coca plants –​either as a primary source of livelihood or to supplement otherwise meagre family incomes (Potter, 2020). Although there has been a history of state-​led peace efforts in the region, hard-​line militaristic approaches have been more common. Catatumbo’s communities have lived for decades under violent and volatile ‘social orders’ imposed by multiple insurgent and paramilitary groups competing to control coca supply networks and other illicit activities such as illegal mining and smuggling (Idler, 2019). This has resulted in recurrent attacks on infrastructure, including oil pipelines which have been illegally tapped by drug traffickers. Some of the worst human rights abuses in the region occurred during the early 2000s at the height of paramilitary control, which saw indiscriminate killings of rural workers, massacres in towns and villages, high levels of gender-​based and sexual violence and the

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forced displacement of entire communities (Camacho, 2013). A particularly pertinent example occurred in 2001, when the rural community of La Angalia, who we came to work with, suffered a terrible massacre at the hands of paramilitary forces who also looted and burnt their homes. After fleeing in desperation, the surviving residents were only able to return in 2005 following the paramilitary group’s demobilization. Catatumbo’s position as a borderland has further compounded the effects of armed conflict there. Its dynamics align with Ballvé’s (2019: 211) notion of a ‘narco-​frontier’, whereby conflict-​affected spaces with a high presence of illicit crop activity are deemed ‘ungovernable’, ‘stateless’ and ‘wracked by extra-​legal regimes of rule in which the state is simply one actor among others’, with this in turn justifying harsh, often-​militarized state interventions. The growth of regional coca production since the year 2000 has become a national concern, undermining apparently more successful efforts elsewhere in Colombia to reduce the size and influence of the drug economy, thereby further feeding into the image of Catatumbo as a lawless borderland. Yet border zones have their own complex conflict dynamics, patterns of social organization and flows of illicit commodities, which belie either simple depictions or easy solutions (Idler, 2020). Nonetheless, state efforts to eradicate the crop from Catatumbo continue. In general, these are widely seen by political elites as a prerequisite to resolving armed conflict, whereas dissenting critics see such aggressive anti-​drug activity as inherently counterproductive and responsible for perpetuating violence in the first place (see Felbab-​Brown, 2014). At best, seemingly effective eradication frequently displaces cultivation –​ via the ‘balloon effect’ (Dion and Russler, 2008) –​to neighbouring places, thereby further intensifying conflict. At worst, it actively undermines rural development and its ecological foundations (see Schleifer et al, 2015). According to recent estimates, Catatumbo has the world’s largest concentration of coca crops, with over 40,000 hectares

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under cultivation in 2020 (France 24, 2022). Furthermore, as neighbouring Venezuela has suffered its own development crisis over the past decade, regional conflict has intensified with a mounting refugee emergency and increased cross-​border trade in weapons and other contraband in return for basic foodstuffs. As a consequence, state authority has been exercised sporadically and often intended as a mere demonstration of military strength (Georgi, 2022). In addition to the significant number of casualties this produces, there are ruinous economic outcomes for smallholders whose entire yearly income may evaporate during a state-​led fumigation or burn of coca fields. Thus, while national administrations have alternated between the use of force and dialogue, there exists in the region a generalized distrust in the state and particular enmity with the military. Neither are local or regional civilian authorities particularly well-​regarded. Even at the sub-​national level, Catatumbo’s formal institutions of public administration are labyrinthine in their complexity, and the region lacks cohesive representation of its interests in departmental politics. There are 40 municipalities in Norte de Santander which, since 1991, have been divided into six administrative geographical regions. The sub-​region of Catatumbo –​a cluster of 11 municipalities with overlapping socio-​cultural, historical and environmental characteristics –​ cuts across the Northern and Western regions.2 Throughout them, a chronic lack of infrastructure and repeated failures to deliver on public investment promises have resulted in widespread scepticism and distrust of official development plans (García Pinzón and Mantilla, 2020). Furthermore, the historical overlap of territorial jurisdictions between local governments, 2

This complexity is further evinced by the fact that not all of those 11 municipalities are part of the PDET. Eight are included –​Tibú, Sardinata, Teorama, Convención, El Carmen, Hacarí, San Calixto and El Tarra –​but the remaining three, Ábrego, La Playa and Ocaña in the more developed and better connected western portion, are not.

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nationally protected natural areas and indigenous territories, hugely complicates the formal planning of basic infrastructure and zoning, resulting in disorderly growth, low expectations of state provision and inter-​g roup friction for control of land and resources (Carvajal Oquendo, 2016). Particularly in rural communities, social trust has been limited to Community Action Boards (Juntas de Acción Comunal), made up of local residents, which can occasionally resolve small-​scale conflicts or instigate minor socio-​economic projects, yet lack the resources required for meaningful change (CNMH, 2020). Amidst this complex scenario, local actors have employed defiant forms of collective action in their attempts to get governmental support for rural and social development. As was stated during an interview we carried out in January 2019, “The little that there is in Catatumbo –​health centres, schools, electrification, roads, bridges –​has depended on Community Action Boards, protests and other collective processes. Not because the state wanted dialogue, but because it’s been obliged to dialogue.” Yet, fractiousness affects communities in their everyday lives, restricting people’s movement and opportunities for socialization, diminishing the potential of organized collective action across geographical, social and cultural divides (Aponte, 2012). This includes a cleavage between the campesino population whose demands often misalign with those of other agrarian and campesino organizations, from established producers to national organizations advocating for coca growers. There is also ongoing tension between campesino organizations and the Motilón-​Barí indigenous group from the region’s northern fringes, who have long-​ standing demands that their resguardos (land reserves) be enforced and restored. Meanwhile, the strengthening of state control and militarism has continued to prevail over social development, with military operations such as Holocausto and Fortaleza serving as the precursors to further efforts to wipe out the guerrilla’s leadership and their narcotrafficking networks (Alba Maldonado, 2018). Once again, communities have found

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themselves in the crossfire, suspected and abused by both sides of the conflict. Regional demands and the national peace process Whatever happens in the next few days … the campesinos have achieved a victory: they have once again drawn national attention to their needs. A reality that neither the state nor the country can continue to turn its back on. (Semana, 2013a) For the communities participating in our project’s participatory scoping phase, the roll-​out of Santos’s peace and development agenda (see Chapter 1) signified a new opportunity for the cessation of violence, alongside the threat of further intrusion into the territory through the intensification of export-​ oriented crop cultivation, mining and oil extraction. Social leaders reported high levels of resistance to the overall model of development which the government negotiators were advancing. Complex ‘scale’ interactions occurred between, on the one hand, internationally sponsored peace talks and, on the other hand, the situated negotiations taking place in conflict-​affected regions like Catatumbo, with their highly specific territorial conditions and trajectories of violence (Barrera et al, 2022). In this section, we discuss how these tensions played out during the period of the peace negotiations. Specifically, we show how the radicalization of protest –​leading to the landmark 2013 agrarian strike discussed in the chapter’s opening –​occurred in a context of frustration with unmet government commitments, and the possibility that even these could be withdrawn amidst the nationwide changes resulting from the peace process. We also show how this persistent and strategic collective action allowed campesino organizations to gain national attention, garner external support and ultimately insert their demands into the agenda of the closed-​door negotiations taking place in Havana.

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Our participatory scoping phase revealed, prior to the agrarian strike, various instances of dialogue between Catatumbo communities and state, as well as with economic and armed actors. In 2005, leaders from remote municipalities in upper-​ and mid-​Catatumbo established the Asociación Campesina del Catatumbo (Association of Campesinos of Catatumbo; ASCAMCAT). This organization came to constitute the main driver for advancing campesino demands around secure land tenure, regional autonomy and a supported –​rather than coerced –​transition away from illicit crop cultivation. Shortly thereafter, in April 2009, a network of organizations established the Temporary Humanitarian Community Refuge of Catatumbo, a physical shelter located in a rural part of the Teorama municipality, which received families from throughout the region in need of protection and support (León, 2013). The Refuge’s stated aims included the protection of life, and ensuring campesino dignity, land tenure and permanence in the region. Soon thereafter, campesino leaders from the Teorama Refuge created the Mesa de Interlocución y Acuerdo (Bureau for Dialogue and Agreement; MIA) to hold dialogues with local and national state actors, with the specific goal of ending the forced eradication of coca and redressing the dynamics which perpetuated dependency on its cultivation. The concerns expressed during the MIA’s subsequent participatory events eventually translated into a proposal for a Zona de Reserva Campesina (Campesino Reserve Zone; ZRC), an area-​based policy mechanism introduced in 1994 to allocate land and protect small agricultural producers. Very few ZRCs had ever been implemented, with government and military officials always wary that greater campesino autonomy could be leveraged by armed actors to consolidate their narco-​trafficking operations. As such, this central demand was never realized. After the arrival of Santos to the Presidency in 2010, communication between the campesino leadership and the national government continued across multiple fronts. But,

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as discussed in Chapter One, while the new administration brought a shift from militarism to dialogue from the outset, it also furthered the pre-​existing model of export-​oriented agribusiness, mining and oil exploration. Given growing concerns, ASCAMCAT united with similar campesino and social organizations across the country in the formation of the Marcha Patriótica (Patriotic March) social movement. On the 200th anniversary of Colombian independence in 2010, this movement staged massive protests in Bogotá and occupied the National University’s campus. Two years later, it was formalized into a progressive electoral platform that questioned Santos’s commitment to a politics of peace, also pointing to the harmful impact of neoliberal policies on agricultural and popular sectors.3 According to CINEP’s database of social struggles (one of the most complete in the country), the next year, 2013, saw the highest number of protests nationwide in almost four decades (Jaime-​Salas et al, 2020). Meanwhile, other grassroots participatory platforms in the region continued to gain traction. In 2013, the Tibú branch of Pastoral Social –​our key local partner –​began to engage with a range of social, cultural and economic organizations operating across ten rural communities in the municipalities of Tibú, El Tarra, Bucarasica and Sardinata. Their efforts initially focused on the elaboration of Community Life Plans, which set out local visions for community-​based development. This initial dialogue gave rise to The Corridor of the Grand Alliance initiative, a region-​wide development scheme through which communities would collaborate on material and social improvements such as road and internet connectivity, replacing illicit crops with other agricultural opportunities and enhancing environmental protection. As we show later

3

A less diverse primary sector and higher food prices, they argued, would have catastrophic effects on poor people in general, and campesinos in particular.

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in the chapter, these early efforts proved essential to inserting community needs into the formal peace process, and to our own opportunities for co-​production with communities in the post-​agreement period. With national peace negotiations now underway, thousands of campesinos –​led by ASCAMCAT representatives –​blocked strategic roads across Catatumbo for a period of 53 days over the months of June, July and August 2013.4 After multiple violent incidents and state repression,5 demands for rural reform and the creation of ZRCs6 were met with reluctance from the government to negotiate protestors’ concerns beyond the bounds of the formal peace agenda.7 This exposed the limits of the participatory approach promised by the Santos administration, creating tensions with the United Nations Office for Human Rights8 and even threatening to delegitimize the entire peace process. Meanwhile, mounting pressure to allow commercial transport to circulate further highlighted Catatumbo’s strategic value for agribusiness and extractive industries. Yet, it was unclear how a peace programme could bring about an alternative to this model of development that

4

5

6

7

8

The strongest blockades were at the villages of Campo Dos and La Cuatro, where 2,000 campesinos were concentrated, with others on the Ocaña-​ Aguachica and Ocaña-​Convención roadways (Prensa Rural, 2013b). On 25 June, two campesinos were killed and three wounded (Prensa Rural, 2013c). On 12 July, clashes broke out again in Tibú, leaving ten protesters and two police officers injured (Prensa Rural, 2013d). In their first public communique, ASCAMCAT representatives denounced a 70-​year history of plundering, looting and massacres (Prensa Rural, 2013a). Officials –​including Santos, the commander of the armed forces and the interior minister –​claimed that the protest was manipulated by the FARC to force recognition of the ZRC (El Tiempo, 2013a). The UN Office for Human Rights publicly denounced the use of force and called for a formal investigation into the death of four campesinos and use of lethal weapons and tear-​gas. This was the biggest ever disagreement between the Santos government and the UN (Semana, 2013b).

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would be acceptable to impoverished campesinos –​both in Catatumbo and beyond –​while also eradicating illicit crops and associated violence (see, for example, Acero and Machuca, 2021; Gutiérrez-​Danton, 2021; Sankey, 2023). Communication between campesinos and the government was intermittent and tense. Strike leaders established a Permanent Assembly of Campesinos spearheaded by six spokespeople and a small team of advisors, which reiterated their core demands for the creation of a ZRC, suspension of coca eradication, a subsidy for affected families, the right to prior consultation on development projects, recognition of their status as a civilian organization and an investigation into human rights abuses. Tensions further increased when the Minister of Agriculture –​named by Santos as his head of negotiations –​called for a military presence at discussions despite ongoing clashes, before making any further dialogue conditional on an end to the roadblocks. Santos soon came under renewed pressure to negotiate from the Congress Peace Commission, politicians and private industries who were facing substantial economic losses. Once again, he invited campesinos to discuss their demands in Bogotá.9 Yet, the government divided its agenda into political and humanitarian issues, while campesinos continued to argue the ZRC was the solution to both. Fearing a reputational backlash, Santos eventually sent Vice President Angelino Garzón to meet with campesino leaders, along with UN delegate for human rights Todd Howland as mediator. But ASCAMCAT leaders instead called on

9

Strikers initially lifted the Ocaña blockade as a gesture of goodwill. But discussions halted once again on the ZRC issue, with campesinos rejecting government negotiators’ alternative infrastructure investment plan as a ‘smokescreen’ intended to demobilise them. They instead proposed a referendum to consult the Motilón-Barí indigenous people, but when this was rejected again called for mobilization (El Tiempo, 2013b, cited in Rodriguez, 2017: 6).

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Francisco de Roux, a Jesuit priest, philosopher and subsequent President of the Truth Commission, to steer the negotiations. De Roux established a negotiating commission and, the next day, protesters withdrew one blockade at Campo Dos (a vereda, or village, we later engaged with during our project) as a gesture of goodwill. Shortly afterwards, an agreement was reached to discuss a so-​called Social Agreement for Catatumbo in which, it was promised, nothing would be left off the table (Mogollón, 2013). On 3 August, the blockades were finally lifted. Various forms of peace activism continued up until the 2016 nationwide referendum on the Final Agreement. Indeed, the tactics of ASCAMCAT and their allies –​ coupled with the state’s repressive response –​had brought widespread support. Faith-​based organizations, the Marcha Patriótica and the National Association of Campesino Reserve Zones offered statements of solidarity, and a major National Agrarian Strike was organized by regional campesino organizations facing similar challenges (Rodriguez, 2017: 7). Building on this, ASCAMCAT maintained communication with its allies, municipal authorities and international NGOs, also holding summits with residents beyond their own constituency in order to amalgamate varied perspectives into a shared agenda (Seminario Voz, 2014). However, there were tensions with other groups, particularly the Motilón-​Barí indigenous group, a faction of the urban population whose commerce had been affected by the protests, and others wary of contentious tactics. Negotiations on the Social Agreement for Catatumbo stalled when it became evident that state officials were unwilling to allocate the resources needed to meet campesino demands; while military officials continued to oppose the ZRC and representatives from the Barí indigenous group even sought constitutional guarantees that its creation would not intrude into their demarcated territory (Verdad Abierta, 2017). Still, there were hopes that these demands would be carried forward, particularly as the

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promise of peace with the FARC loomed closer, assuming –​ which many did –​that the YES vote would triumph in the forthcoming referendum. Contested implementation of peace and development The NO vote in the 2016 referendum won a surprising national victory and, although YES attained more votes in Catatumbo overall, turnout was very low and several municipalities actually rejected the peace agreement (Barrera et al, 2022). It appeared –​as the Mayor of Tibú stated –​that despite the efforts of ASCAMCAT and other activist groups which campaigned for YES, the referendum had become ‘a political issue’ in the strictest sense; that is, reflecting party allegiances rather than a shared regional experience and aspiration for the future (El Tiempo, 2016). Nevertheless, once the agreement was modified and ratified by congress in November 2016, the PDET programme emerged as the cornerstone of participatory development and comprehensive rural reform, alongside the Programa Nacional Integral de Sustitución de Cultivos Ilícitos (National Comprehensive Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops; PNIS) voluntary coca substitution programme. In Catatumbo, one of the conflict-​affected sub-​regions designated for the implementation of a PDET process, social engagement was substantial: a total of 8,136 Catatumbo residents participated in over 100 consultation events, advancing 1,115 proposals for infrastructural and public facility investments (ART, 2018). Pastoral Social, our project partner, bolstered this participation by supporting communities to insert their needs into the relevant consultative channels. However, significant external and internal challenges emerged including a proscriptive, exclusive approach; reorientation following the success of the Democratic Centre in the 2018 presidential election; intentional depoliticization and devolution of the process (giving way to its supplanting by economic growth

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plans); and a growing disconnect between community representatives and their constituents –​all amidst resurgent violence in the wake of FARC disarmament (CEPDIPO, 2020, 2021). Representatives of the newly-​e stablished Agencia para la Renovación Territorial (Agency for Territorial Renewal; ART), one of three state agencies responsible for PDET delivery,10 outlined three stages of the consultation process which they would lead. Firstly, residents would be invited to vereda-​level meetings to create Community Pacts which summarized local needs, and also to elect representatives to attend municipal-​level meetings. At the next level, said representatives would amalgamate Community Pacts into Municipal Pacts, and each municipality would elect a Motor Group which would play an ongoing role in overseeing PDET delivery. Finally, Municipal Pacts would be aggregated into a Plan de Acción para la Transformación Regional (Action Plan for Regional Transformation; PATR), to be instrumentalized through Roadmaps and delivered in a coherent and integrated manner, and in synergy with national development plans and other departmental policies in Norte de Santander. Building on earlier community engagement, representatives of Pastoral Social established the Participaz project to support community engagement with PDET consultation and delivery. To achieve this, the Community Life Plans that had previously been developed were adapted in accordance with the eight thematic pillars of the PDET consultation.11 These efforts were

10 11

Alongside the existing Land Agency and the National Rural Development Agency. 1) Social ordering of rural property and land use; 2) infrastructure and land adaptation; 3) rural health; 4) rural education and early childhood; 5) rural housing, drinking water and sanitation; 6) economic development and agricultural production; 7) right to food and 8) reconciliation, cohabitation and peace.

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to some degree successful: community inputs directly informed the Action Plan, which expressed the ambition to transform Catatumbo into a ‘biodiverse, agroecological, eco-​touristic and innovative territory’ (Verdad Abierta, 2019). In 2017, Phase 2 of the Participaz project began to evaluate the impact of the PDET alongside other components of the peace agreement. This evaluation –​backed by our interviews with participants and wider research –​revealed a number of issues. Firstly, while the PDET’s eight thematic pillars provided a degree of consistency, they were perceived by some as limiting the potential scope of discussions. Secondly, higher-​level meetings were frequently organized in hard-​to-​ reach locations such as Cúcuta, which lies beyond Catatumbo and is not easily reached –​especially for rural communities. Thirdly, the plans for delivery largely coincided with President Duque’s term in office (2018–​22), whose policy announcements sowed growing doubt that PDET would be implemented in accordance with its original aims. Specifically, Duque’s decision to introduce ‘peace with legality’ as a guiding principle –​and related securitization policies akin to a ‘modified democratic security’ –​had significant implications (Jerez, 2019). This was made particularly clear following the announcement that Catatumbo would be recategorized as one of five ‘Strategic Zones for Comprehensive Intervention’, triggering a return to military presence and forced crop eradication (Cruz, 2020). Furthermore, the disconnected bureaucratic channels established to oversee the PDET process undermined the possibilities for ongoing oversight, while allowing the national administration to supplant community aspirations with economic and infrastructural investments. This was a national issue that was not unique to Catatumbo: despite promises of a joined-​up approach, many action plans amounted to ‘grocery lists’ of low-​level projects (Vélez-​Torres et al, 2021: 597), while the ‘blurred responsibilities’ between different state organs

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resulted in disconnected and opaque communication channels (Vélez-​Torres et al, 2021: 594). Moreover, in November 2019, the decision to pass responsibility for PDET delivery to municipal governments introduced a new set of challenges, with many of those municipalities lacking the financial resources to implement projects at a regional level (CEPDIPO, 2021). This strategic depoliticization and devolution made it possible for the Duque administration to supplant the Catatumbo PDET with a new growth plan called Sustainable Catatumbo which, rather than fostering social integration, led to the emergence of a ‘new economic geography’ connecting urban and rural areas via transport infrastructure at the service of extractive industries rather than residents (CEPDIPO, 2021: 10). The limitations of the PDET (and other components of the peace agreement) contributed to a growing sense of disillusionment with the peace process, as well as new collective actions to redress its failings. This included the creation of an oversight committee comprising members of the Motor Group and other campesino and indigenous representatives to independently monitor PDET delivery (ATI, 2019). Other actions were more contentious, including a new roadblock on the Tibú highway to demand improvements to the roads for the benefit of residents (Estévez, 2020), as well as protest marches and direct calls on armed actors to ‘resolve their problems through dialogue’ (La Opinión, 2018). Notwithstanding these acts, which appeared to transcend some of the social and cultural divisions of the preceding years, the Participaz evaluation revealed another challenge which was undermining bottom-​up efforts and effective insertion into the formal process: a perceived disconnect between local leaders and the communities they (claimed to) represent. This issue –​ internal to the organizations themselves –​provided the basis for our project’s engagement in DST, which we explore in the next section.

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Community-​driven river conservation After outlining our project’s participatory ethos and core research strands to Pastoral Social and a group of local residents, we agreed a strategy to understand (and help to strengthen) capacities for communication between those organizational representatives and their communities, other organizations and the state institutions implementing the peace agenda. This communication skills-​focused approach, it was hoped, would help address the disconnect between local leaders and other key stakeholders in the territory and beyond, ultimately contributing to grassroots regional peace and development. This section follows one example of our (ongoing) engagement in the region: an incipient process of DST beginning in the riverside village of La Angalia and culminating in the co-​ production of a regional environmental pact involving multiple communities across the Catatumbo River Basin. In our early engagement, participatory video emerged as a useful tool for supporting communities to challenge the official narrative around PDET delivery, and to convey and discuss sensitive issues affecting their lives. In August 2019, we delivered our first training session with a group of young people from the village of Campo Dos, during which participants created a number of short films, while also exploring other communication methods like written text, oral presentations and radio. We then held a 4-​day workshop with 35 community leaders in the town of Chinácota, during which representatives from the ART were also invited to discuss PDET delivery. Here, once again, concerns about the government’s commitment to genuinely community-​led peacebuilding and development resurfaced: ART officials could not explain how the new economic growth policy, Sustainable Catatumbo, aligned with the PDET regional action plan. Still, the workshop had immediate resonance, with participants enthusiastically sharing videos and sound pieces they had created with colleagues and their wider communities, and we began working together to

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make plans for a region-​wide forum to amplify their voices, support leader-​community dialogues and identify areas for further capacity building. Pastoral Social was especially active in La Angalia, a village situated at a crossing point on the River Catatumbo used by more than 50 veredas, whose port had deteriorated and become unusable in previous years. Given the strategic location of the village in terms of developing dialogue with communities on either side of the river, Pastoral Social had actively lobbied for the port’s repair, securing resources from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the German Embassy (Relief Web, 2020). According to residents, the port’s re-​construction brought a significant change in community life, strengthening economic activity and raising awareness about environmental protection. In particular, it was clear that river contamination had reached alarming levels, undermining fishing as a livelihood opportunity and risking wider food insecurity for communities along the river. It was also evident that any solution to this problem had to be regional in scope: nothing would be achieved if downstream villages changed their practices while those upstream continued as before. Thus, the La Angalia Community Action Board (which included several attendees at our Chinácota workshop) reached out to Pastoral Social to support them in finding an effective region-​wide solution. Despite this emergent opportunity to support community-​ level work towards mitigating a pressing environmental issue, major challenges were posed by ongoing conflict. Especially in Catatumbo’s rural areas, the fragile peace that had once existed in the context of rebel authority had, since the FARC’s demobilization, been replaced by violent territorial contestation between armed groups seeking to exploit the vacuum left by the guerrilla. As such, we noted a general reticence among participants to discuss armed actors’ presence, or the social, economic and environmental effects of their illicit practices such as coca cultivation and trafficking of crude oil

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which, owing to its strategic positioning, were particularly salient for La Angalia.12 These conflict-​related concer ns were exacerbated following the outbreak of COVID-​19 in early 2020. While the UN Secretary-​G eneral’s Special Representative to Colombia warned that the pandemic must not derail the peace agreement (United Nations, 2020), and the FARC leadership publicly committed to combating the virus by calling on their members to ‘follow the guidelines of the health authorities’ (Consejo Politico Nacional, 2020), analysts predicted that the pandemic would give Duque ‘more room to drag his feet’ with regard to implementation (Guzmán et al, 2020: 11). Soon the government’s militaristic orientation was manifested in its pandemic response, with severe lockdowns undermining social and economic connectivity and exacerbating concerns over food insecurity, while also providing an opportunity for armed groups to assassinate social activists (Parkin Daniels, 2020; Zibechi, 2020). These challenges, combined with limited internet access in rural areas, imposed a pause in our collaboration with La Angalia, while also showing that any effort to redress environmental harm had to carefully navigate the risk of undermining armed actors’ interests. We called this approach ‘conflictive-​sensitive environmentalism’. Conscious of these multiple ongoing impediments, Pastoral Social and our project team were nevertheless keen to continue providing support. Members of the La Angalia Community Action Board had successfully arranged meetings with representatives of 59 riverside communities, establishing a Pact to protect and decontaminate the river via waste management and clean-​up campaigns, fishing controls, an 12

As one participant later stated, these issues were not only omitted because of the risk they posed in terms of personal and community security, but due to a preference for discussing issues over which the local community held a degree of agency (interview with a social leader, October 2019).

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end to wetland deforestation and the construction of a public rubbish dump. To ensure this would be adhered to, they also established the Comité Ambiental de La Angalia (La Angalia Environmental Committee; CALA), whose members consisted of representatives from multiple communities. When the CALA requested our support to help it oversee the Pact’s implementation, we coorganized a workshop on the subject of ‘communication and research’, with the intention that the CALA members we trained would subsequently replicate the training in their own villages. Through this initiative, it became clear that the CALA could serve (and indeed already was serving) multiple functions beyond environmental protection and food security: specifically, it had the potential to strengthen solidarity between communities in the wake of peace agreement disappointments, while delicately navigating the risk of further violence. The training workshop with CALA members provided the necessary inspiration for another region-​wide forum, Dialogues on the Catatumbo River, which we coorganized with previous project participants in March 2020, also inviting representatives from government and environmental organizations. During the forum, CALA members presented a self-​made participatory video outlining the complexity of the multiple environmental problems they faced, and the concrete solutions that had been agreed among communities. Alerted to the detrimental impact caused by the lack of an adequate refuse collection service, state officials committed to a new plan for recycling and solid waste management. This dialogue also provided the basis for the creation of ‘Guardians of the River’, a new group consisting of boatmen and bogas13

13

A boga is the term used to describe workers who provide local river transport; a historically common form of livelihood which continues in Catatumbo and other rural regions of Colombia.

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tasked with identifying pollution hotspots.14 The bogas have since coorganized arrangements with other riverside groups and the Bari indigenous community to strengthen their organizational structure and deliver training in environmental protection. Moreover, the wider exchange of knowledge with communities beyond the region and with our local partners in Buenaventura (discussed further in Chapter 4), motivated the design of a specialist diploma in Environmental Care and Protection.15 Conclusion Despite the promises of the ‘territorial peace’ agenda, fragile relationships between Catatumbo’s social organizations, state institutions and armed actors continue to divide the region, with life characterized by fragmented governance arrangements and multiple seemingly intractable conflicts over land and livelihoods. Yet efforts to realize transformative change have not wavered since news emerged of national peace negotiations, widely perceived as an opportunity to secure a stake in peace and development initiatives. Many of these efforts have had the notion of territory at their core: as reflected in the longstanding goal of establishing a Campesino Reserve Zone to secure devolved control over land use decisions. Yet, government actions during the Catatumbo agrarian strike –​including the overt violence of the Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios (Mobile Anti-​Disturbances Squadron; ESMAD), the delegitimation of campesinos as unwitting tools of the guerrilla and the separation of political and humanitarian concerns –​represented 14

15

This included the municipalities of Pacelli and Sardinata, where Pastoral Social has been working for years in the co-​production of Community Life Plans. The resultant developmental vision was captured in the book El Catatumbo que Soñamos by Garcia et al (2019). Between July and November 2021, 35 community representatives completed the module.

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the most repressive response to any mobilization throughout the peace process (Rodriguez, 2017). Still, the organizational capacities and persistence displayed by campesino organizations –​united through their pueblo and Catatumbo identity while incorporating diverse needs and interests –​garnered significant nationwide support and policy guarantees, with Catatumbo being earmarked to receive substantial investment through the PDET process. But efforts to develop a shared agenda once again showed the limits of cohesion in an unevenly developed landscape with a variety of political and economic interests at play; as also evidenced by the high abstention rate and wide range of responses in the 2016 referendum. Such tensions speak to a core dilemma of participatory peacebuilding: balancing the risks of contentious actions which may alienate potential allies or provoke overt violence, against achieving widespread consensus without delivering meaningful change. It also highlights the impossibility of a durable peace without an underlying rural reform. Following the election of President Duque in 2018, the challenge of participatory peacebuilding amidst an extractive political economy and an unwilling state came into even sharper focus, generating widespread disillusionment and stimulating new collective actions across the spectrum of contention. Our local partner Pastoral Social, with a history of supporting social processes for over a decade, was well positioned to identify challenges to organizational effectiveness, including a growing rift between campesino representatives and their constituents. Having faced violence and displacement in the preceding years, La Angalia residents successfully secured the repair of the village’s damaged port and, leveraging their strategic positioning, ensured adherence to a region-​wide environmental strategy through active dialogue between communities and a wide range of stakeholders. The subsequent (and ongoing) success of the CALA suggests that DST can unite diverse actors around common infrastructural, environmental and livelihood

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concerns, in a way that builds on the social energies released through earlier mobilizations and participatory platforms. In explicitly talking about the pollution of the river, the CALA and their interlocutors were implicitly engaged in a process of building peace. In June 2021, at the Improbable Dialogues national forum event, CALA members reported ongoing talks with the local administration on a large-​scale waste management project. This space, and the previous regional forum, also allowed for knowledge exchange with our partners in the city of Buenaventura, including the grassroots organization CORMEPAZ which had been involved in steering the Pacífico Medio PDET process and in bottom-​up efforts to reduce violence in Buenaventura. It is this context to which we turn in the next chapter.

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Transforming Buenaventura: Dialogue for Municipal Peacebuilding

In January 2021, a group of human rights defenders in Buenaventura received death threats and harassment by armed men who followed them as they went to and from their homes and workplaces. While typical of the threats faced by community leaders across Colombia since the 2016 peace agreement, in Buenaventura this also reflected the continuation of local struggles over the San Antonio Estuary. A project to dredge the estuary, led by the Instituto Nacional de Vías (National Roads Institute) and a consortium of private interests, had generated intense opposition from local residents. Although the public and private investors proposing the plan argued that dredging would allow for the expansion of commercial shipping operations, they had failed to persuade community leaders to drop their legal action to prevent the work. One representative of the local administration who was in support of the dredging called his opponents “enemies of the development of Buenaventura”. For those community leaders, however, opposition to the dredging was not only environmental: they also cited reliable evidence that the estuary was an acuafosa, or watery grave, containing the remains of hundreds of victims of forced disappearance (Avila and Parada, 2021). The dredging project, they argued, threatened families’ hopes of ever recovering the remains of their loved ones; a serious abuse of the rights of

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victims’ relatives. They demanded a detailed investigation of the area and, in February 2021, a request for protection of the Estuary was submitted to the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (Special Jurisdiction for Peace; JEP), who ordered the suspension of the dredging project. In April of that year, the Pact for the Search of the Disappeared in Buenaventura was signed, a commitment from the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s Disappeared Persons Unit and the Mayor’s office to conduct the first ever search for the disappeared in a maritime zone. At the time of writing, that search is about to begin. This incident perfectly encapsulates many of the issues that residents and social leaders in Buenaventura face: powerful commercial and economic interests pursuing forms of development that conflict with the wishes of local communities, an ongoing struggle to deal with the legacies of the city’s turbulent history of violence and continuing threats of violence against those who try to defend the interests of the community and address the city’s problems. As Colombia’s most important port, the conjunction of violence and capitalist expansion and contraction (Jenss, 2020) has produced a ‘violated urban space’ (Arboleda, 2020) in Buenaventura; a city with a majority Afro-​Colombian population in which ‘the confluence of paramilitary, drug-​trafficking and state violence produces the port city as a profitable geography of Black suffering’ (Alves and Ravindran, 2020: 196). Struggles such as that over the San Antonio Estuary, between ‘those who defend only port development’ and those ‘more concerned with the defence of life’ (Jaramillo Marín et al, 2022: 69), are emblematic of the fractured relationship between the port and Buenaventura’s Afro-​Colombian community, whose ties to the region’s ‘aquatic space’ (Oslender, 2002) are ruptured by the structural and direct violence they have suffered there. These struggles, and the demands that they articulate, reached their apogee in Buenaventura’s Paro Cívico (Civic Strike), a mass mobilization by local social movements which paralysed the port for 22 days in June 2017. The media was quick to

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highlight the $10 billion pesos (approximately $2.5 million US dollars) lost each day due to the port’s inactivity, hitting oil sales, restaurants, hotels and commerce in general. Such claims only compounded the sense of a profound paradox between the city’s economic and geostrategic significance, and the deprivation and daily violence faced by its inhabitants. As one protestor exclaimed, “A port like this should be like New York!” (Noticiero 90 Minutos, 2017). The Santos government’s failure to garner widespread support for the 2016 peace agreement –​particularly manifested in the 2016 referendum defeat –​signalled that ‘peace cannot be built without the cities’ (Currie, 2019: 213); yet in Colombia, the city cannot be understood without reference to the wider territory in which it is located. As we show in this chapter, the territorial underpinnings of the Colombian peace process, critical determinants in its design and implementation, are particularly salient in the Mid-​Pacific PDET region and specifically the rural–​urban continuum of Buenaventura. Yet the limited achievements of this approach point to its flawed conceptualization, resting on developmentalist conceptions of territory which misalign with the historical demands of communities in the Pacific. During the difficult days of the 2017 Civic Strike, organizers drew on long collective memories of grassroots organizing, reflecting the decades of struggle undertaken by Buenaventura’s social movements. Yet the 2017 Strike process was unique among these in its success in forcing a binding commitment from the government –​the Acuerdo del Paro Cívico –​described by some as ‘the real peace agreement for the city’ (Jaramillo Marín et al, 2022: 77). The historic election of Victor Hugo Vidal, a leading protagonist in the movement, as Buenaventura’s Mayor in 2019 offered the local government a mandate to ensure that the agreement would come to fruition in practice. Even though concerns about the institutional cooptation of his government have since surfaced, with many in the city today expressing dissatisfaction with the delivery of the promised improvements,

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the symbolic significance of his election continues to resonate, particularly in the light of Gustavo Petro’s 2022 presidential electoral victory, supported by Colombia’s first female and Afro-​Colombian vice-​president, Francia Márquez. In this chapter, we explore Buenaventura as a site of experimentation for DST-​based approaches to peace. We argue that diverse territorial ontologies in the Mid-​Pacific region are central to understanding these situated approaches to peace, as well as the relationship between development and territory. In the first section of the chapter, we show how this relationship is expressed on the one hand in the visions represented by port expansion, resource extraction, infrastructural development and articulation with global economic circuits; and on the other in the perceptions of local communities who refuse to abandon their territories and take action to defend their right to live in peace and with dignity. In the second section, we explore how, just as in Catatumbo, the implementation of territorial peace through the PDET programme fell short of its participatory aims in this part of the country, ultimately representing another iteration of planning for the reproduction of capital in the region. Nevertheless, development and peace imaginaries established by local Afro-​Colombian and indigenous communities became in many ways equally significant, with the potential to resist and counteract externally imposed conceptions. In the third section, we outline participatory experiments for peace in Buenaventura which have run alongside formal government-​ sponsored processes, specifically the Paro Cívico of 2017 and its antecedents. In the final section, we reflect on the strike’s consequences, including local peace education and policy initiatives, and the role of PAR and the Improbable Dialogues project in supporting these. The concept of DST, originally developed in relation to Buenaventura’s struggles, offers both analytical and normative potential, and we conclude by reflecting further on how it can be mobilized and applied in this setting and beyond.

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A port without a community Buenaventura (see Map 4.1) has been defined by local observers as a ‘port without community’ (CNMH, 2015), leading to its characterization as a ‘paradoxical territory’ (Jaramillo Marín et al, 2019). Situated in the Department of Valle del Cauca, in the mid region of the Colombian Pacific, it is home to Colombia’s principal port and the convergence of complex riverine and coastal geographies. However, despite its geostrategic significance for the national and international economy, it is one of the country’s poorest and most marginalized cities. According to 2018 statistics, 41 per cent of the population of Buenaventura District live in conditions of multidimensional poverty, compared to a national average of 20 per cent. Additionally, 14 per cent of the population are illiterate, 32 per cent have inadequate sewerage and 26 per cent do not have access to improved water sources (BCV, 2020; DANE, 2020). The city of Buenaventura is located in the district1 of the same name, the largest municipality in the Valle del Cauca Department (Cobo et al, 2020).2 While 77 per cent of the municipality’s total population of 311,824 live in the urban area (BCV, 2020), Buenaventura’s rural hinterland is one of the largest in the country. Its significance as an ‘ethnic territory’ is highlighted by the proportion of land collectively owned by the Afro-​Colombian (and to a lesser extent indigenous) 1

2

The 2007 denomination of the municipality of Buenaventura as one of Colombia’s five Special Districts (alongside Bogotá, Cartagena, Barranquilla and Santa Marta) reflects its significant characteristics –​industry, port, biodiversity and eco-​tourism –​and offers certain prerogatives, including greater autonomy in resource management. In this chapter, we focus on both the city, which is a locus for and site of resistance to the processes outlined previously; and the municipality, given the significance of its rural component. Based on this, we use ‘Buenaventura’ primarily to refer to the city, and where necessary specify reference to the municipality.

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communities who have populated the region for centuries. Buenaventura’s rural and urban areas are intimately connected, in a relationship characterized as a ‘rural–​urban continuum’ (Arboleda, 2004) based on the ties of migratory and displaced populations as well as shared cultural and territorial ontologies. The city itself is divided into two distinct zones: the Isla Cascajal, where most of the port activity is concentrated, along with the city centre; and the continental zone, which is mainly residential, although with the growing presence of port infrastructure. The two areas are connected by the Simon Bolivar Avenue and, latterly, a new bypass, constructed in 2004 to facilitate the rapid transit of goods from the port to the rest of the country. Administratively, the city is subdivided into 12 communes. These spatial characteristics have shaped, and been shaped by, three intersecting dynamics critical for understanding Buenaventura’s historic and contemporary condition: capitalist reproduction, racialized social relations and structural and direct violence. This section briefly outlines these in order to contextualize the subsequent analysis of participatory peacebuilding processes. Buenaventura’s significance as a port rests primarily on its historic and contemporary role in Colombia’s export economy, as a transport route connecting internal circuits of production, both legal and illegal, to global trade routes. It was established nearly 500 years ago as a transit port by Spanish colonial settlers, on the land of the indigenous populations who gave the Isla Cascajal its name. Its importance in the colonial era increased with the development of gold mining and other mineral and agricultural exploitation in the surrounding Pacific region, accompanying the growth of slavery and its role as a slave port in the 1800s. Its status as Colombia’s main Pacific port was consolidated by the construction of the railway in the early 1920s, and subsequent growth after the Second World War due to exports of sugarcane, coffee, cacao and rice, bolstering industrialization. Buenaventura remains central to national

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Map 4.1:  Map of Buenaventura’s port, urban and municipal area

Source: Agustín Codazzi Geographic Institute, Government of Colombia. Map author: Santiago Manuel Rodriguez Alonso.

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economic strategy and international trade, handling 35 per cent of Colombian imports and 60 per cent of its exports (Cobo et al, 2020; La Republica, 2021). The closest city in Colombia to the Panama Canal, equidistant from Vancouver, Canada and Valparaiso, Chile (CNMH, 2015), its transnational importance is symbolized by its role in three global trade circuits: as the ‘gateway to the Pacific’, based on the rise of Asian and particularly Chinese trade; as the capital, since 2013, of the Pacific Alliance trade bloc with Mexico, Chile and Peru; and as central to the Free Trade agreement signed between Colombia and the US in 2012 (Zeiderman, 2018: 1119). While the port’s nationally significant storage, distribution and shipbuilding functions are viewed as its main economic motor, commercial and service activities relating to the port are equally important for the local economy, and employ a greater proportion of the population (DANE, 2020). The systematic exclusion of thousands of local dock workers from the better-​quality port sector jobs resulted from privatization in 1993, which transferred management of 12 of 14 docks from state-​owned Puertos de Colombia (Colpuertos), to the Regional Buenaventura Port Society, a mixed-​economy company owned by the Colombian Ministry of Transport (2 per cent), Buenaventura’s local authority (15 per cent) and private national and international investors (83 per cent). This, alongside containerization, has contributed to high levels of unemployment, experienced long-​term by 44 per cent of households (DANE, 2020), as outside workers are brought in by transnational companies.3 This also accounts for Buenaventura’s extremely high degree of informal employment, with 89 per cent of households working in the informal sector (DANE, 2020).

3

The docks are owned by transnational companies (e.g. TCBuen, owned by a company based in Barcelona), and many have an internal dollar economy.

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Since 2000, plans for port expansion have threatened the local area and community on several fronts. Privately funded megaprojects to construct roads, airports, warehouses and wharves in the city, as well as the project to dredge the estuary discussed at the start of this chapter, have resulted in the displacement of communities from their homes and workplaces. Emblematic of this is the construction of a new sea wall and tourist pier (the Malecón Perimetral del Mar) on the Isla Cascajal, which in 2010 led to the ‘relocation’ (or more accurately, displacement) of an informal food market and local communities from the central harbour area to the Ciudadela San Antonio, an inland area more than 10 kilometres from the city centre. Such episodes epitomize the tension between the port’s rapacious economic development and the city as a site for social development, revealing how regional policies promote trade flows and tourism at the expense of the community (CNMH, 2015). Buenaventura’s development has both shaped, and been shaped by, changing imaginaries of the surrounding Pacific region, from ‘empty’ land populated by indigenous and formerly enslaved Afro-​Colombian people, to one of the most biodiverse regions in the world (Asher and Ojeda, 2009; Alves and Ravindram, 2020). While this has generated intensive regulatory activity due to its environmental significance, it has simultaneously resulted in further commercial exploitation at the expense of rural, largely Afro-​Colombian populations (Asher and Ojeda, 2009; Alves and Ravindram, 2020). Afro-​ descendant populations were initially brought as enslaved peoples to work in local mines, who as they gradually escaped or were freed (following Colombia’s abolition of slavery in 1851), settled in the surrounding rural area, often along a specific river basin (Oslender, 2002). Urban Buenaventura’s ethnic composition has been determined by decades of migration from the surrounding rural areas. This was initially motivated by its industrial development and employment opportunities in the city’s docks, casinos and

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restaurants, or in public industries such as the railway or the GranColombia Shipping Company. Later waves of rural–​urban migration, particularly since the early 1990s, have been the result of widespread forced displacement caused by conflict and other activities in the rural hinterland, which we will discuss later. Today, the city of Buenaventura represents ‘a racialized and gendered urbanity where Black people constitute 73% of the population, whites/​mestizos are 26% and indigenous people are 1%’ (Alves and Ravindram, 2020: 193). As a host city for internally displaced people and communities, Buenaventura maintains strong links with its rural hinterland. This is especially significant in the Pacific, where conceptions of territory are imbricated with Afro-​ Colombian communities’ histories of place. These have been recognized in law since Colombia’s 1991 constitutional reforms, which acknowledged its multi-​ethnic population for the first time. Following the reforms, the implementation of Law 70 in 1993 guaranteed the territorial rights of Afro-​ Colombian communities under certain conditions relating to historic occupation of an area, communal living and traditional economic and agricultural activities. The law was the result of decades of advocacy for the recognition of Afro-​Colombian communities and their rights, spearheaded by the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Black Communities Process; PCN), a regional social movement which developed the notion of socio-​territory (Escobar, 2008), and, as we will see later in the chapter, has been central to Buenaventura’s social and political landscape. Law 70 allows communities to obtain collective land tenure over their ancestral rural territory, and has been an important symbolic element in the struggles of both rural and urban communities for the freedom to live in dignity and without violence. At the time of writing, there are 39 collective titles in existence in the municipality (and seven more in process). Nevertheless, the legal provision for collective tenure does not fully extend to urban communities, despite claims by social

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movements and communities in Buenaventura’s urban setting (Zeiderman, 2016; Garzón, 2020; Lombard et al, 2021).4 Waves of violence in the city can be traced back to the early 1980s, when armed actors’ presence was first felt in the Pacific region, initially a product of guerrilla groups’ illegal crop cultivation and mining in the rural areas, later accompanied by paramilitary influence in the rural and latterly urban area. A victims’ representative in the Havana dialogues between the Colombian government and the FARC recalled that the first paramilitary massacres in La Delfina, in the rural area of Buenaventura, occurred in zones where inhabitants had refused to sell their lands for a new highway. Subsequently, with the rise of the Cali Cartel in the 1990s, drug traffickers installed themselves in the city, establishing important national and international trafficking routes. By 2000, disputes over territory and drug trafficking routes had erupted between different armed actors and criminal groups. Today, a multiplicity of rapidly changing armed groups jostle for position in Buenaventura’s urban zone. Rather than identifying with certain ideologies, they are driven by private interests and respond to legal and illegal macroeconomic logics. The lack of formal employment opportunities and stagnating social mobility mean that criminal organizations have become important sources of employment for local residents with few other options. Their range of illegal economic activities has extended beyond drug trafficking to include arms trafficking, extortion, illegal crop cultivation, illegal mining and money laundering (CNMH, 2015; 28–​9). Their resources and weapons are used to administer violence against the civil population. Between 1990 and 2013, there 4

There exist recent examples of peri-​u rban community councils retaining recognition as such, including the case of Vereda La Gloria, a rural territory situated 3 kilometres from the urban perimeter, where inhabitants have retained their rights based on the concept of ‘extended territory’ (Corpografias, n.d.).

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were 26 massacres, nearly 5,000 homicides and 475 forced disappearances (CNMH, 2015; Verdad Abierta, 2015). In 2006, the homicide rate was around three times the national rate at 121 per 100,000 inhabitants. By around 2010 it had fallen to 48 per 100,000 compared with 33 nationally (HRW, 2014; World Bank, 2020); but by 2014 had risen again to 71 (FIP, 2014; Jenss, 2020).5 These shifts in the dynamics of violence can be attributed in part to the reintegration of criminal actors following paramilitary demobilization in 2004, resulting in tighter control of the urban area and a consequent decline in high impact violence such as homicide. Nevertheless, far from signalling an end to violence, such shifts have resulted in other less visible victimizing acts increasing, such as forced disappearances, torture (including the infamous casas de pique6), sexual violence and ‘invisible borders’ which impede residents’ mobility (CNMH, 2015: 20). Of these, forced disappearance is the most consistently applied, sowing terror among the local population. Interpersonal violence, and fear of this, has resulted in high levels of intra-​urban displacement, particularly since 2010. Afro-​Colombian residents of the self-​built waterfront neighbourhoods known as Bajamar7 are regularly displaced, apparently by violent struggles between paramilitaries and cartels for territorial control. In 2013, it was estimated that over 13,000 residents were displaced in the municipality of Buenaventura (HRW, 2014). Behind the physical (threatened or actual) violence of displacement can be detected forces related to the structural violence of port expansion, as such

5 6 7

By early 2021, some observers suggested it had tripled from the previous year (WOLA, 2021). This term denotes houses used by armed actors for torture and dismemberment of victims, also spreading terror by their presence. An area estimated to house at least 100,000 residents, alternatively denoted by the term territorios ganados al mar or ‘land claimed from the sea’ (see Lombard et al 2021).

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processes often overlap with areas designated for infrastructural development (Lombard et al, 2021). These enduring conditions of discrimination and violence have led to Buenaventura’s characterization as ‘a racialized zone of accumulation and social death’ (Alves and Ravindram, 2020: 191). Nevertheless, its ‘paradoxical’ nature refers not only to the disjuncture between the port and the community. Amid these extreme conditions, resistance has emerged, driven mainly by local communities (Jaramillo Marín et al, 2019, 2022) and expressive of alternative conceptions of territory and development. At its inception, the notion of territorial peace contained in the national peace agreement appeared to represent a response to these conditions, in a context where territorial contestation is a determining factor. The next section explores localized implementation of national peacebuilding efforts since 2016, assessing its achievements and limitations in Buenaventura and the Mid-​Pacific region. The urban dimension of territorial peace ‘Here in the Pacific we are distrustful of all these planning processes because, in the end, they remain on paper.’ (Interview with social leader in Buenaventura, 21 August 2019) Buenaventura is one of four municipalities included in the Pacífico Medio PDET sub-​region. The other three, López de Micay, Guapí and Timbiquí, are remote and inaccessible by road, reflecting the programme’s primary focus on conflict-​ affected rural areas. As the subregion’s fourth municipality, Buenaventura is distinguished from these sites in several respects. Despite the significance of its rural hinterland, Buenaventura’s embeddedness in (legal and illegal) national and global trade circuits means it is one of the largest and most powerful PDET municipalities. As a primary instrument of territorial peace, seeking to improve material and relational conditions through

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planning, the two-​fold objective of the PDETs was to achieve a structural transformation in rural areas, and attain an equitable relationship between city and countryside (Centro de Memoria Histórica, 2016: 21). Nevertheless, as we saw in Catatumbo, the programme’s ultimately developmentalist foundations, which rested on particular conceptions of territory and development, limited it in both the diagnostic and implementation phases, explored next.8 In Buenaventura, the diagnostic phase of the PDET process was initiated with the establishment of a participatory mesa tecnica (technical committee) in 2017, in conjunction with the Territorial Renovation Agency (Agencia de Renovacion Territorial; ART), the national body with responsibility for the PDETs. The mesa’s 42 consejos comunitarios and eight cabildos indígenas were responsible for ‘socializing’ PDET,9 its purpose and underlying pillars (see Chapter Three, footnote 11) and subsequently steering and overseeing delivery. However, research participants noted a limited commitment among ART officials to meaningfully engage with the diverse needs of the sub-​region’s territories, which are particularly complex given the nine river basins which make up the Pacífico Medio sub-​region: ‘There has been some community participation in PDET construction. The issue is that the time allocated, or rather the methodology was designed such that … [w]‌hen you’re going to make a plan in a neighbourhood, you go to a meeting and the same day you make it. Here in our territories it’s different … If you go to the Yurumangui basin, you have to know the villages there 8 9

PDET’s diagnostic phase lasted from around 2017–​1 9, with implementation from around 2020–​21. Escobar (2008: 354) explains the concept of ‘socialization’ in the Colombian social movement context as the need to ‘discuss, debate and devolve’ project discussions and results with the communities involved.

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… so you have to have a meeting in every village … That would have been ideal in this case, but of course we also know that understanding the Pacific isn’t easy, and it’s also not economical for organizing social activities [given the difficulties and costs of travel].’ (Interview with local priest) Partly owing to the financial and logistical constraints associated with direct engagement, participants concluded that the majority of the sub-​region’s population remained unfamiliar with PDET content and objectives, as the same respondent suggested: “It hasn’t been explained to the communities themselves. It hasn’t had an impact or been disseminated sufficiently”. Some looked to other sub-​regions such as Sur de Bolivar, whose Regional Transformation Plan was among the first to be agreed, where organizations had created a process of popular education to facilitate widespread understanding and engagement among communities. Nevertheless, the idea that the PDETs needed to be explained in this way is indicative of a development model designed and implemented ‘from above’ (Escobar, 2008), as opposed to one created by and for participants themselves. Buenaventura’s 2019 PATR, the main diagnostic tool in the PDET framework, proposed (together with the Municipal Pact for Regional Transformation) more than 200 actions for the municipality. According to the PDET’s ‘Roadmap’ methodology, implementation is supposed to occur via the integration of PATR initiatives into local development plans. But local development planning in Buenaventura is extremely complicated, reflecting the region’s social, territorial and historical complexity. There are three current development plans: the 2014–​27 Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (Land Management Plan), the main planning mechanism under the national planning system, the Plan Integral Especial para el Desarrollo de Buenaventura (Special Integrated Development Plan for Buenaventura; PIEDB), formulated by the Civic

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Strike Committee; and the Plan de Desarrollo Distrital, 2020–​23 (District Development Plan, 2020–​23) formulated by Victor Vidal’s incoming local government in late 2019. We discuss the latter two plans further in the following paragraphs. Additionally, Afro-​Colombian and indigenous authorities are responsible for formulating development plans for their rural communities. These multiple development plans reflect different imaginaries corresponding to distinctive visions of Buenaventura, with some originating externally, and some internally. For PDET implementation, the most significant of these plans is the District Development Plan, which was formulated by the current Mayor with the aim of ‘Living with dignity and peace in the territory’ (Alcaldía Distrital de Buenaventura, 2020). It is structured around five priorities or ‘pillars’, echoing the language of the peace agreement. Set apart from these, it also includes an additional list of 49 PDET initiatives in the municipality, with a clear focus on ‘the rural and ethnic population’ (Alcaldía Distrital de Buenaventura, 2020). However, alongside the lack of articulation with its central themes, this ‘grocery list’ approach risked being more ornamental than transformative (Vélez-​Torres et al, 2021: 597), and more artificial than organic. Indeed, preliminary analyses suggest low levels of implementation in the Pacífico Medio sub-​region. For example, of the programme’s 16 sub-​regions, Pacífico Medio has the lowest number of initiatives undertaken relating to access and formalization of land rights under the PDET’s first pillar, Social Planning for Rural Property (VAP, 2022: 19). Moreover, in September 2021, representatives of the sub-​ region’s four municipalities suspended their participation in the PDET, in protest at the tokenistic community involvement, inadequate sub-​regional coordination and slow progress in implementation (Gutiérrez, 2021). So far, no PDET projects have been implemented in the Buenaventura municipality, highlighting the lack of resources, capacity and infrastructure

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to advance projects. As an alternative to the formal process, community representatives have advocated for the recognition of a sub-​regional committee (mesa) created by ethnic authorities (Gutiérrez, 2021). Taken together, these indicators suggest that the PDET in Buenaventura is far from achieving its objective of structural transformation in rural areas. The second PDET objective focused on the convergence of quality of life in rural and urban areas, and strengthening integration between the two spheres, while taking account of territorial, gender and ethnic considerations. However, reflecting the dominance of the rural–​urban dichotomy in national discourse, it did not contain any specific proposals for urban spaces, for example, cities like Buenaventura hosting displaced populations, or (again like Buenaventura) those interconnected to rural areas through armed actors’ activities (Cairo et al, 2018). As our previous respondent noted: ‘Buenaventura has a high proportion of rural people living in the urban area due to displacement, so there is an interesting rural–​urban relation. That was also a discussion around the mesa: how to support displaced people to participate in the assemblies … But the people in the [ART] office didn’t take this into account … [which] also made the situation more complex. The paracos [paramilitaries] began to arrive here in 1999. [Since then] … paramilitarism has been continually reproducing itself, from the urban zone they coordinate criminal activity in the rural zone … If the PDET process had been designed to socially transform the conflict here, Buenaventura’s urban area shouldn’t have been left out.’ In essence, amalgamating so many varied needs and interests across both rural and urban areas into a regional transformation plan proved challenging, as revealed by the response of a local social leader: “Construction of the Pacífico Medio PDET was very complicated because there are many communities, many

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organizational processes”. As already noted, Afro-​Colombian and indigenous communities are represented respectively by consejos comunitarios and cabildos indígenas which, in some cases, also belong to regional or nationwide umbrella structures, such as the PCN or the Asociación de Cabildos Indigenas Valle del Cauca (ACIVA). These bodies, with significant regional presence, could potentially offer an additional coordinating input for PDET. Yet, of the 32 consejos comunitarios represented in PDET discussions, just eight belong to the Proceso de Comunidades Negros, while of the eight cabildos indigenas which participated, only two were active members of ACIVA. Others operated independently or in smaller blocks, and as the same local leader observed, “That organizational subdivision means that everyone is thinking for themselves”. This uncoordinated, fragmented approach may help to explain the disjointed nature of PDET proposals and the limitations in its implementation. More broadly, the challenges of rural coordination, combined with the lack of attention to urban areas, explain why the PDET’s objective of attaining an equitable relationship between city and countryside remains distant. Once again, this could be attributed to the disconnect between local necessities and the programme’s centralized nature, apparent from its inception, and traceable back to the lack of meaningful regional representation and participation within the peace negotiations discussed in earlier chapters. As one respondent highlighted, “The negotiators didn’t know the community [here] … the government doesn’t know the communities here, so the negotiation was blind, based on calculations, guesses”. This is emblematic of Colombia’s disarticulated centre-​periphery relations, seen also in the example of the Truth Commission.10 In Buenaventura, the Truth Commission opened the Casa de la Verdad (Truth Centre), 10

The Truth, Co-​existence and Non-​repetition Commission is one of three institutions comprising Colombia’s system for Truth, Justice, Reparation

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one of four in the Pacific region, with the aim of presenting a local perspective on issues relating to truth and reconciliation. However, due to shortages of  human and financial resources, these centres were very limited in their effectiveness, again suggestive of the external design and control of initiatives which are then imposed locally. The experience of the PDET in Buenaventura reveals some of the serious obstacles faced in the implementation of Colombia’s peace agreement, hindered by a lack of sensitivity to the region’s social, organizational and logistical complexities, insufficient resources and capacity, and the failure to account for urban areas. Yet it also highlights the gap between the agreement’s guiding concept of territorial peace, and endogenous conceptions of territory as the basis for life. Territorial peace has come to be seen as another iteration of externally imposed territorial development models, and ultimately of the liberal peace project (Díaz et al, 2021). While such externally imposed ideas seek to reproduce Colombia’s existing development model, they are unlikely to achieve peace in the region. To put it starkly, local peace in Buenaventura appears improbable while the displacement and marginalization associated with neoliberal development continue to dominate. Indeed, Buenaventura experienced an upsurge in organized violence over territorial control of urban and rural areas following the signing of the peace agreement with the FARC. Nevertheless, local movements have mobilized and constructed alternatives. Beyond the formal provisions of the national peace agreement, these suggest the importance of peace from below, through alternative agreements resting on localized conceptions of the territory adopted and developed historically by the region’s ethnic communities. In the next section, we and No-​Repetition (alongside the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, and the Unit for the Search for Persons Presumed Disappeared), set up in 2017 to implement the peace agreement based on principles of transitional justice, and victim-​centred responses.

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explore this through the experience of Buenaventura’s Paro Cívico (Civic Strike), briefly outlining its antecedents and the strike itself, before exploring the subsequent Acuerdo del Paro Cívico (Civic Strike Agreement), which could be seen as a parallel process of participatory peacebuilding. The 2017 Civic Strike Territory is life, and life is not possible without territory. (Expression of the life–​territory relationship formulated by the Proceso de Comunidades Negras) If the national peace agreement and Buenaventura’s Civic Strike are seen as two parallel processes, the Civic Strike has arguably been as or more important for Buenaventura. As these processes have unfolded simultaneously, they have sometimes interacted with and influenced one another, while retaining distinctive ontological and political underpinnings. Yet the Strike can be understood as the result of multiple historical processes of resistance predating 2016. The demands of the protagonists related to the desire not simply for the state to be present, but also for an alternative model of development, suggesting a reading of local peace reconceptualized as DST (Jaramillo Marín et al, 2022), drawing on long histories of mobilizing, which we explore first in this section before turning to the Strike itself. The antecedents to the Civic Strike (see Table 4.1) can be traced back to the legacy of Archbishop Gerardo Valencia Cano, who pioneered liberation theology in Colombia, questioning the economic model and the inequalities it produced in 1950s and 1960s Buenaventura (Restrepo, 1995).11 The bishop’s promotion of education and pastoral 11

Religion has played a significant role throughout the history of social mobilization in Buenaventura, and continued to do so in the Civic Strike (Manrique, 2022).

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Table 4.1: Major social actions/​strikes in Buenaventura, 1960–​2017 1963

Port workers’ strike

1964

Civic Strike

1964

Port workers’ strike

1966

Port workers’ strike

1992

Port workers’ strike

1998

Civic Strike

2014

March to live in dignity and bury violence

2017

Civic Strike

Source: Adapted from Parrado (2022) and Jaramillo Marín et al (2020).

action in response to local social problems fostered a generation of social leaders and grassroots organizations. Buenaventura’s first civic strike was in 1964, led by educators and port workers protesting about salaries. This period paved the way for the creation in the 1990s of the PCN. Based on their central premise of territorial belonging, the PCN originally proposed an ‘anthropogeographic’ definition of territory, which included the ‘biological diversity of the environment, cultural heterogeneity of its inhabitants and diversity of land tenure’ (PCN, 1994: 1). Following the recognition of ethno-​territorial rights in Colombia’s reformed 1991 Constitution, the PCN incorporated territoriality as a core axis of its identity,12 in terms of space for constructing Afro-​Colombian communities’ social, political, economic and cultural projects, whether in rural, urban, coastal or river areas. Such framing resonates with the pluriversal ontologies discussed in Chapter Two, and indeed, the PCN has been a source of such ideas, disseminated more widely by Escobar (2008) among 12

The other dimensions were community, ethnic identity (including worldview, practices and ancestral knowledge) and community–​ nature relationships.

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others. In the late 1990s, it proposed a vision of Buenaventura as municipio-​región, with rural and urban integration based on participation, self-​determination and equity, in contrast to top-​ down understandings of local development as secured by port efficiency and profitability (PCN, 1994: 5–6​ ).13 Meanwhile, its leaders (including Chandolera, Don Manuel Bedoya and Don Narcilo) spearheaded local mobilizations in support of dock workers, small-​scale fishermen and communities demanding the provision of an adequate water supply. These actions coincided with the expansion of the neoliberal project in the Pacific region, leading to the construction of Universidad Del Pacífico and a new highway, but also the arrival of paramilitary forces serving private (il)legal interests, marking the beginning of the upsurge in terror and violence discussed previously. Although social mobilization diminished during this era, a series of small but seminal actions towards the end of Uribe’s ‘democratic security’ administration (2002–​10) strengthened the organizational processes which ultimately led to the Civic Strike. In 2009, an inter-​organizational committee was formed by local movements (including the PCN) seeking to collectively understand the pressing issues of deficient services and violence in the city, through the creation of multiple research-​led thematic sub-​committees (mesas). In 2010, the Inter-​organizational Committee and Fundescodes, which later became CORMEPAZ, organized Marcando Territorio (Marking Territory), a cultural and musical event contesting the invisible borders established by criminal groups (see Zeiderman, 2016). The fourth Marcando Territorio event in February 2014 was followed by the Marcha para vivir en dignidad y enterrar la violencia (March to live in dignity and bury violence). The march, originally envisaged as a strike

13

In particular, violence is notably absent as a significant problem in the analysis, compared to the lack of basic services, decent housing and education and employment opportunities (PCN, 1999: 16–​32).

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which was ultimately prohibited by the violence then ravaging the city, attracted 70,000 participants led by the Bishop of Buenaventura, Héctor Hepalza Quintero (2004–​17). It was opposed by then-​Mayor Bartolo Valencia,14 but garnered sufficient attention for the incumbent national administration to advance the 2014 Plan Pazcifico, which promised at least 17 infrastructural investments including reopening the Buenaventura Departmental Hospital (closed down in 2013 by the Conservative Departmental Governor), and a 24-​ hour aqueduct to service the city’s poorest neighbourhoods. However, by 2017, only five of these projects had advanced (Semana, 2017; Barragán, 2020). The march was followed in 2015 by a minga por la memoria,15 a collective action organized by the Centro Nacional de Memoria Historica (National Centre of Historic Memory) and local organizations which sought to bring together a range of local initiatives working with victims and memory (CNMH, 2015). Later that year, marking a year since the ‘March to bury violence’, the Inter-​organizational committee and the Comité por el Agua de Buenaventura (Water Sub-​Committee) undertook a ‘Totumatón’, a water-​based protest during which the bishop baptized people with rainwater to draw attention to the lack of adequate water supply in the city.16 The water problem became the unifying element around which different organizations articulated their demands, and was followed by

14

15

16

Bartolo Valencia was Mayor of Buenaventura from 2012 to 2018, when he was arrested for contractual irregularities relating to the construction of a waterpark, as part of a national anti-​corruption initiative. The imprisonment of acting Mayors and other civil servants has been a regular occurrence in Buenaventura over the last three decades, as the last three Mayors have been imprisoned on corruption charges. A minga is an organizational process involving working collectively. In Buenaventura these typically relate to ancestral, community-​based forms of meeting and resolving problems or generating actions. For a video account of the event, see Asociación Nomadesc (2015).

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the creation by President Santos in 2015 of the Todos Somos PAZcífico (We Are All [Peaceful] Pacific) programme, which included US$400m of regional investment for the most urgent social development needs, such as adequate water and sanitation (Government of Colombia, 2022). However, once again the promises extracted from central and regional government ultimately remained unfulfilled. Nevertheless, the significance of these organizational processes for the 2017 Civic Strike cannot be overstated, particularly the creation of new spaces for dialogue, and also their underlying critique. The Inter-​organizational Committee, instrumental in these processes, identified Buenaventura’s underlying problem as the development model, which deprived its inhabitants of their basic rights including peaceful lives and free movement. The Committee in turn drew on the preceding experiences of local social movements, particularly in its emphasis on local conceptions of territory, and the need to reclaim it as a space for life. These experiences ultimately led to the creation of the Civic Strike Committee –​formed of more than 110 local organizations representing informal workers, teachers, Afro-​Colombian and indigenous communities, small business and transport sectors and students, among others (CIDSE, 2021). It was this committee that organized the Civic Strike of 2017. Hora cero (zero hour) for the Buenaventura Civic Strike was at 05:00 on 16 May 2017. Just 6 months after a nationwide surge in hope for a substantive peace dividend following Congress’s ratification of the national peace agreement, Buenaventura’s Civic Strike Committee sent a manifesto to President Santos announcing an indefinite strike until he declared an Economic, Social and Ecological State of Emergency for Buenaventura. Signed by 80 organizations, there were two clear and intersecting goals: to mobilize on a grand scale against continued state failings, and to advance solutions to the structural challenges facing the District (Jaramillo Marín et al, 2020). Over the next 22 days, between 25 and 60 per cent of

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Buenaventura’s residents mobilized,17 at an estimated cost to the port and export-​based multinationals of $230 million pesos (US$77 million) (Barragán, 2020). Thousands marched that first day. Eleven strategic blockage points were established, including along the main roadway linking the port to Cali, the regional capital, while consejos comunitarios blocked alternative routes in rural areas (LAPORA, n.d.). People sang, chanted18 and waved the gold and green flag of Buenaventura, as major commercial, educational and transport activities were paralysed (El País, 2017 in Barragán, 2020: 49). Numbers swelled over the following days. Arriving on Day 3 to discuss terms, the government’s delegation –​including the Environment Minister and the Secretary General of the Presidency –​declined to declare an emergency, claiming that the relevant statute applied only to natural disasters. On Day 4, Mayor Eliecer Arboleda called for the Committee to end the blockades as a condition for dialogue and, after this was rejected, criticized the economic harm imposed by the strike: “People want to work and I’m sure that this strike won’t last” (Barragán, 2020: 50). The government’s delegation then unexpectedly withdrew from discussions. Soon after, the national riot police (ESMAD) made their first appearance. “As soon as the delegation retired, the ESMAD arrived to repress people”, said one Strike Committee member. Over the next few days, the ESMAD’s attempts to disperse strikers by attacking the blockades only intensified the conflict, resulting in at least 500 injuries, and leading to the Mayor decreeing a curfew even as the number of participants increased. On Day 6, the National Day of Afro-​C olombianity, 200,000 residents marched. The strike ‘jumped scales’ that 17 18

Precise figures are not available, but participants suggest that the majority of the population came out on the streets. Chants were reprised from the 2014 march, such as solo el pueblo salva el pueblo! (only the people can save the people!) (Barragán, 2020).

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day, stimulating solidarity mobilizations in Bogotá –​‘the symbolic centre of white-​mestizo state power’ –​and other cities (LAPORA, n.d.). Victor Vidal, then a prominent figure in the Strike Committee, suggested that “Even if the government delivers all the priority works that it promised, we would strike, because what we are looking for is to solve structural problems”. Meanwhile, Amnesty International (2017) denounced the state’s ‘excessive use of force’ which resulted in multiple gunshot injuries and the detention of at least 80 protestors. Violence surged again on Day 20 as food shortages began to take their toll on the city and smaller communities across the Pacific, equally dependent on the port for provisions. Pressure to reach an agreement mounted. During renewed talks, 300 representatives of the Strike Committee engaged in structured dialogues with the government, aligning with the Sub-​Committees’ eight themes, along with funding and human rights concerns. Finally, on the morning of Day 22, the national government and the Civic Strike representatives reached an agreement on funding and planning provisions. The Civic Strike represented a departure for organizational processes in Buenaventura in several respects, and success on its own terms. Its scale was unprecedented, in terms of participant numbers, geographical reach and economic effects. Its highly territorialized approach, in which streets and other public spaces were occupied, alongside the withdrawal of labour, united sectors and diverse social movements. An initially repressive state response gave way to negotiations which ultimately granted an exceptional number of concessions, informed by dialogue with the Civic Strike Committee. In doing so, the government found itself in effect responding to the strike’s second aim, to advance locally determined solutions. Before turning to explore Buenaventura’s post-​strike landscape and the role of PAR within this, it is important to note that the strike itself can be viewed as a process of DST, among its protagonists and with the state, which sought transformative outcomes, but was also transformative in and of itself.

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A strategy for peace with dignity The negotiations between the Civic Strike Committee and the national government resulted in the signing of the ‘Agreement to live with dignity and peace in the territory’ on 6 June 2017. To guarantee the agreement’s implementation, Law 1872 was passed to legally establish the PIEDB. The law also established FonBuenaventura, an autonomous fund to support implementation of the PIEDB’s provisions, via investment of $1.5 billion pesos. The plan guaranteed resources for public services, education, health, victims’ reparations, environmental protection and socio-​economic development over the next 10 years, largely responding to the thematic Sub-​Committee’s sectoral proposals. To monitor compliance with the agreement, and to mitigate against corruption, the fund’s governing body incorporated elected community members representing organizations from the Civic Strike Committee. The achievements of the Civic Strike were limited to some extent by local as well as national political dynamics, as the Committee’s progress reports in 2018 and 2019 noted. Implementation of measures included in the Civic Strike Agreement and formalized in the PIEDB has been uneven. For example, while funding was allocated for the first phase of a new hospital complex, the local government failed to allocate land for this. Nevertheless, alongside its concrete achievements (in terms of legal and financial concessions), the reports highlight the social gains achieved by the Strike, which put Buenaventura at the centre of national debate; and the hope, political consciousness and aspirations which it inculcated locally (Comité del Paro Cívico, 2019). Equally significant in the post-​strike period was the 2019 election of Víctor Hugo Vidal, one of the leaders of the Civic Strike Committee, as Mayor of Buenaventura for the 2020–​24 term. The electoral victory, which was far from guaranteed, generated widespread optimism. Amid the renewed local confidence emerging from the Strike and its outcomes, viewed

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by some Committee members as ‘Buenaventura’s peace process’, the Improbable Dialogues team saw an opportunity for deepening meaningful collaboration with local organizations and residents. Throughout 2018 and into 2019, during the project’s participatory scoping phase, the team (supported by local researchers) had undertaken 55 interviews with civil society and local authority actors, exploring local conflicts, peace initiatives and implementation gaps relating to the national peace agreement. During 2019, the team facilitated meetings to systematically feed back initial results from this phase to research participants, and to discuss plans for the next stage, including a regional forum on social dialogue. During these meetings, it was proposed by participants that, prior to the forum, a series of preparatory sectoral meetings should explore the question, ‘What dialogues does Buenaventura need?’. Due to the onset of the COVID-​19 pandemic in March 2020, the launch of these meetings was postponed. Nevertheless, the delay enabled the project to synchronize with post-​strike developments in Buenaventura. This section explores how PAR processes unfolded in Buenaventura, as the project team engaged with local organizations and community members, as well as the new Mayor and his office, to formulate a peace strategy for Buenaventura and to support and strengthen local capacities for dialogue. These processes took on the character of a new DST; crucially, one that built on prior local experiences of dialogue. The renaming of the ‘Mayor’s Office of Dignity’ signalled Vidal’s origins and his enduring links with the Civic Strike movement, even after his accession to institutional power. On entering office in early 2020, Vidal set about formulating a new District Development Plan for Buenaventura, subtitled ‘Buenaventura with Dignity’. This was distinguished from earlier plans by both its participatory processes and its content. The plan was formulated through participatory workshops involving various local social, ethnic, rural and urban community sectors, including more than 200 representatives

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from Community Action Boards (Juntas de Accion Comunal) in Buenaventura’s 12 comunas. Over several days, participants discussed how the new plan could guarantee residents’ human rights while responding to local development needs, signalled in the plan’s five horcones (pillars): 1) territorial planning and environmental conservation: life; 2) restoring social, family and community fabric; 3) production: government allied with producers, businessmen and entrepreneurs; 4) realizing the first revolution in health and the second in education; and 5) recovering governability and consolidating governance. As already discussed, a significant (and arguably unmet) challenge of this planning process was to articulate with PDET initiatives. Meanwhile, the Improbable Dialogues team was starting to collaborate with local organizations, including our local project partner CORMEPAZ, to coorganize a series of online dialogues on peace and human rights with local leaders. These meetings inevitably involved discussion of Buenaventura’s new District Development Plan, including its links to the PDET. In mid-​2020, violence in the city reached a symbolic nadir when a fight over a bicycle resulted in one child killing another. This led Mayor Vidal to request CORMEPAZ Director Adriel Ruíz Galván, also an Improbable Dialogues team member (and co-​author of this book), to lead the design of an action plan for affected communities, where it was feared that prolonged conflict had normalized violence in everyday life. CORMEPAZ and the Improbable Dialogues team proposed the instigation of a process to develop a new district peace policy, to be codesigned with communities. This resulted in the extension of the existing dialogues to include affected communities throughout Buenaventura, to support initial discussions around the formulation of the peace policy. Following these discussions with local leaders and communities throughout 2020, it was determined that the first step towards the district peace policy should be a local

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peace strategy. The key elements of a strategy were developed through a series of consultative meetings, with the first draft, incorporating this community input, being prepared by team members Ruiz, Jaramillo and Díaz, with additional input from local leaders and project team members. This draft strategy was subsequently consulted on and modified through further meetings with communities, and Mayor Vidal. At the same time, CORMEPAZ proposed to the Mayor’s office the creation of a peace department, to respond to national and local demands relating to the peace accord. Buenaventura’s ‘Office for Peace, Reconciliation and Co-​existence’ was formally created in December 2020, and a few months later the Mayor appointed a Peace Manager. Buenaventura’s Peace Strategy –​ a concrete product of a process of DST involving communities, institutions and researchers –​has three main axes. The first relates to the creation and strengthening of institutional spaces for mediation and dialogue, with social ownership of these. In addition to the new Peace Office and the legitimization of the Strategy by the local administration, this axis sought to extend the relationship-building initiated by Mayor Vidal via an extensive series of meetings with comuna residents. The second axis, which has seen slower progress, sought to establish relationships with other significant political actors in Buenaventura, particularly the business sector. The third relates to the implementation of the strategy via three strategic areas: institutional strengthening; local capacity building; and social mobilization and community advocacy. In line with PAR’s emphasis on popular education and capacity building, the Improbable Dialogues team has made its most substantive contribution to the Peace Strategy under this third axis. From February to November 2021, the Improbable Dialogues team and CORMEPAZ, along with other expert contributors, ran a diploma for local social leaders on Facilitating Socio-​Territorial Dialogue. The Diploma’s curriculum was designed and developed after a series of

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roundtables with different sectors, with the course (which was free of charge for local residents) being accredited by Universidad Javeriana. The Diplomado initiative was a key experiment in the potential for PAR to play a role in the support of DSTs –​and, ultimately, in the building of peace. The curriculum involved training and mentoring in a wide range of skills that were of direct relevance to local community leaders who wanted to play a role in moving the local peace strategy forward. It included training on research methods, communication techniques and strategies, dialogue facilitation, political education and participatory approaches. It drew consciously on the work of Fals Borda with communities in Colombia decades earlier, in which he sought to support grassroots community action through engagements that challenged the divide between ‘research’ and ‘activism’ and which sought to use knowledge production in the service of political action. Yet, as Rappaport (2020: ­chapter 7) identified as a common problem in PAR, there were limits to the extent to which the project could fully live up to Fals Borda’s legacy. Indeed, Rapport’s contention that ‘today’s participatory researchers work within the system –​the political system, public education and the university, nongovernmental organizations –​in an attempt to reform it, as opposed to overturning it’ (Rappaport, 2020: 205) could certainly be levelled at the Improbable Dialogues project, which was a collaboration of precisely such actors; which worked in collaboration with the local government (albeit in many ways a non-​c onventional government, representing a departure from previous administrations); and which was funded by both the UK and Colombian states. In all of these ways, our PAR approach was compromised. Nevertheless, as we discuss further in the concluding chapter of the book, we were able to carve out a role for PAR to support local processes of DST, making at least some contribution to the process of developing Buenaventura’s local strategy for peace.

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Conclusion The effects of the dialogic processes and activities outlined in this chapter have been to widen and deepen already vibrant peace initiatives in Buenaventura, while garnering significant recognition of these efforts beyond the region. Following the successful launch of the Diplomado, the Improbable Dialogues team set up a parallel training initiative in Tibú (discussed in Chapter Three), based on the curriculum and process developed in Buenaventura. Meanwhile, in August 2022, Jhon Erick Caicedo, CORMEPAZ member and local researcher for Improbable Dialogues, was appointed as Buenaventura’s Peace Manager. Under his management, axes one and two of the strategy (institutional spaces and implementation) have been strengthened. In light of the Petro administration’s ‘total peace’ approach, the Peace Manager is contributing to the proposed demobilization of armed groups in the region, while providing humanitarian aid to the most vulnerable sections of the community. The activities undertaken in Buenaventura since the strike, negotiations and ensuing institutional changes, which have been supported by elements of PAR, can be seen as constituting DSTs in several ways. Firstly, the district development plan formulated by the Mayor’s office has a strongly territorial underpinning, deriving from its social movement origins, taking as its guiding principle the vision for Bonaverenses ‘to live with dignity and peace in the territory’. Moreover, this vision encompasses an understanding of territory rooted in the regional context and the identity and cosmovision of its communities, as expressed by the PCN. Secondly, these processes have been locally led throughout, deriving from the Civic Strike and its antecedents, which go back to earlier historical periods of organizing from within the community. Nevertheless, they have always engaged with the state and outside actors, from the significant role played by regional religious protagonists, to the social movement’s

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struggle for recognition by the Colombian state, alongside engagement with local state actors. Throughout, academic actors, including the Improbable Dialogues team (but also many others, such as CNMH, 2015; Escobar, 2008), have collaborated in and supported these initiatives. While the PIEDB’s focus on service deficiencies has been partly superseded by the peace strategy’s emphasis on direct –​as opposed to structural –​forms of violence, the unfolding of the Civic Strike and ensuing negotiations can be seen within a historic arc of peacebuilding across the region: building on earlier struggles, bringing together different actors through dialogue and giving way to notable institutional change. Finally, informed participants with capacity for facilitating and engaging in dialogue have driven the design and ongoing implementation of the Diplomado, which continues to play a critical role in the strengthening and implementation of the peace strategy, in support of the future creation of the peace policy. This is not to underestimate the ongoing difficulties with participatory peacebuilding in Buenaventura. Local conflict continues to be acute, and surges in violence regularly impede participatory processes at the neighbourhood level. At the same time, there is a gradually increasing sense of disillusionment in Buenaventura with Vidal’s administration which, in the eyes of some, has not been able to fully meet expectations. There are also tensions between the Mayor’s Office and the Civic Strike Committee from which he originates, reflected in the challenge of integrating the District Development Plan with the PIEDB. While the Civic Strike Committee retains many characteristics of a social movement, over the last 5 years it has developed processes to support its participation in local policy m ​ aking and planning, including practices of consensual (rather than majoritarian) decision-​making. The most enduring legacy of the strike as part of a longer continuum of social mobilization may therefore be its instigation of a more participatory, consensual dynamic in decision-​making

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processes, with the potential to affect transformation, however slowly, at the municipal level. While they are still a work in progress, these processes have been more meaningful and effective in Buenaventura than those instigated by the formal peace agreement.

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This book has been inspired by two central questions. First, how are communities in Colombia seizing the initiative to build peace in the wake of the historic 2016 peace agreement? And second, what can participatory research contribute to these efforts, both within and beyond Colombia? As is the case with any project in such a complex and shifting social and political situation, the findings we present and discuss here are necessarily provisional and partial. Colombia’s conflict, the changing local and national politics surrounding it and associated efforts to understand and reduce violence –​efforts that include local actors, NGOs, governments, international agencies and the research community alike –​continue to evolve with dizzying speed. A meaningful or comprehensive peace in Colombia is a long way from being successfully ‘built’. Yet notwithstanding the limitations of our own efforts, we are confident of the significant untapped potential for engaged, immersive and non-​extractive research in ‘post-​conflict’ scenarios and, however embryonic and limited they may be, it is plainly evident that many communities beyond those we have examined here are constantly engaged in the careful, gradual and difficult business of constructing their own visions of more peaceful lives and futures. In this concluding chapter, we present a synthesis of the book’s central empirical, theoretical and methodological insights. We begin by placing the key findings from the two empirical cases in dialogue with one another and in relation to the wider story of the Colombian peace process, including the ‘territorial peace’ agenda. Here we return to the book’s core concept of DST and ask what potential lessons these experiences can offer for other community-​based actors. In

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the second section, we outline our key reflections for peace scholars and practitioners, making the case that DST is not only a descriptive concept describing a particular form of dialogue practice, but also a normative one which provides an entry point for PAR-​based research to play a meaningful role in partnering with and supporting communities within and beyond Colombia to overcome the conflict(s) that inhibit their ability to live with dignity. Finally, we offer a brief analysis of recent events in Colombia, specifically the election of President Petro in 2022, and the implications of his early efforts towards a lasting form of ‘total peace’. Learning from Catatumbo and Buenaventura This book explored two simultaneous processes of community-​ led participatory peacebuilding during the negotiation and early implementation of the historic 2016 peace agreement. This was not Colombia’s first effort at peace, nor even the first to be predominantly centred around discussions between representatives of the FARC and the national government. Yet, as we explored in Chapter One, the idea of peace as a nation-​wide and inherently participatory endeavour was –​at least to some degree –​novel and transformative. It promised opportunities for historically excluded actors, including women and indigenous communities, to voice their grievances and become part of a wider dialogue about what peace could and should mean for their communities. In practice, though, optimism about how transformative the process would be soon began to dissipate. In part, this was due to key elements of the peace accord being only partially implemented (or not implemented at all). But it also reflected the limitations of that agreement, not least its failure to grapple with wider socio-​economic and environmental injustices resulting from neoliberalization and the pursuit of economic development through the expansion of extractive industries. With these issues excluded from the negotiations, and government-​sponsored

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‘invited spaces’ of participation often amounting to little more than performative consultation, communities in both Catatumbo and Buenaventura saw the advantages of creating, or revitalizing, their own vernacular forms of participation and action. Nevertheless, there are limits to the extent to which we would want to generalize beyond the communities with which we have worked. One of the distinguishing features of DST, readers will recall, is that they are territorial. Territorial, that is, in the Latin American sense, which is deeply-​rooted in social and human–​ecological relations, and based upon local (often very local) forms of knowledge and history. Campesinos in Catatumbo and Afro-​Colombians in Buenaventura have different collective histories, are facing different contemporary challenges and do so based on different cultural and social traditions. Thus, despite the common challenges faced in these two regions of study –​violence, poverty, inequality, social fragmentation and more –​the aspirations and practices that we documented in Chapters Three and Four varied substantially. To understand this variation, we needed to engage with each region’s history of place-​based collective action. That history has not merely involved calls for ‘peace’ in a direct sense; rather, actors have advanced an array of demands including better access to public services and much-​needed improvements to living conditions through greater control over land, support to pursue alternative livelihood opportunities, environmental protection and other collective needs. Such efforts began long before the most recent peace negotiations. They were sometimes directed towards the formal process, although they often occurred beyond the institutional bounds prescribed by it. This is a central lesson of our work: community participation in and around a formal peace agreement must be understood through reference to local and regional histories of collective action. The ‘local’, as critiques of some of the earlier ‘local turn in peacebuilding’ work have rightly argued, is not a singular or uniform category. It is inherently a situated one.

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A second lesson relates to the relationship between participation and exclusion. Both Catatumbo and Buenaventura have long histories of quasi-​official marginalization from the Colombian state: the former frequently seen as a lawless and inherently violent border region; the latter being bound up with wider issues of racial inequality and discrimination against the inhabitants of a poor, under-​developed and predominantly Afro-​Colombian city. While the government’s rhetoric of a participatory peace took hold in the national psyche to some extent –​ crystallized in the concept of territorial peace and cemented in the promise of a nation-​ wide referendum and public input into future plans for local and regional development –​exclusionary dynamics continued to make themselves felt. The government’s initial disregard of contentious actions in Catatumbo indicated a continuing unwillingness to commit the resources necessary for transformative and structural change. The subsequent incorporation of some parts of Catatumbo into the PDET scheme and the omission of others facing similar challenges, the practical exclusions that emerged from logistical decisions and the scalar mismatches between a fundamentally centralized process and vereda-​level consultation, all evidenced the limits of formalized platforms as a means to aggregate the needs of varied social actors and cohere these into a robust agenda for peace. In Buenaventura, meanwhile, it was only the success of the 2017 Paro Cívico in bringing the port to a halt, inflicting significant economic pain at a national scale, that led the government to engage seriously with the demands of local residents. The election of President Duque in 2018 demonstrated the peace agreement’s susceptibility to reorientation. Rather than being led by social concerns, regional development initiatives focused on trade-​o riented transport infrastructure and commercial development were prioritized, seen for example in the planned construction of 2,309 kilometres of tertiary roads nation-​wide (Presidencia de la República, 2018), widely

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critiqued as a disavowal of the peace agreement’s original vision for participatory transformation in favour of further bolstering a neoliberal development model often at odds with the wishes of communities (Ortega, 2020). At the same time, Duque’s renewed securitization policies led to a number of atrocities as government forces attempted to control the civilian population, as well as clashes between the Colombian armed forces and FARC dissidents (HRW, 2019). This dissatisfaction fed into the 2019–​20 National Strike, which exploded across multiple regions of Colombia while our project was still ongoing. This unprecedented social mobilization occurred shortly after the October 2019 local elections, which in many places saw resounding defeat for traditional parties and strong support for independent and progressive alternatives. This was especially the case in Buenaventura, where the leaders of the Strike Committee were elected to form the new local administration. In April 2021, the country witnessed another explosion of social grievance in opposition to the incumbent government. For 3 months, citizens from a wide range of regions and backgrounds took to the streets to express their exhaustion with accumulated historical debts, exacerbated by the government’s poor management of the COVID-​19 pandemic. Both of the regions explored in this book were active scenes of mobilization during this time. In a manner akin to the 2013 strike, thousands of Catatumbo residents marched and created roadblocks, rallying against the failures of the peace agreement, ongoing militarization and renewed armed conflict. In Buenaventura, protests were also high-​profile, although Victor Vidal’s local government prevented the security forces from engaging aggressively with protestors, avoiding the violent clashes that were seen in Cali and other major cities. Local politics cannot remain immune from changes at the national level, but the forms of social mobilization and participation that we examined in this book can dramatically affect what those dynamics mean for communities.

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It is worth noting that the formal peace process of 2010–​22 occurred under two distinctly ‘establishment’ presidents. First, Santos initiated negotiations with the FARC, agreed the Havana accords and ended –​at least nominally –​the armed conflict with the FARC (although not with other guerrilla and paramilitary groups). This unquestionably remains a historic achievement. However, it was an imperfect and in many ways disappointing process: as we have discussed at various points in the book, it ultimately generated (or failed to prevent) new and more fragmented patterns of conflict in the power vacuums that emerged after FARC demobilization (Meger and Sachseder, 2020). It also, as we have already discussed, deepened the neoliberalizing influence and thinly veiled links with violence of corporate extractive interests in places that had already suffered significantly from conflict. What is more, it continued to rest on a problematic and increasingly militarized relationship with the US that often served those same vested interests (see, for example, Hylton, 2010; Hobson, 2014; Paley, 2015; Tate, 2015; Bartilow, 2019). Moreover, as the failure of the 2016 referendum and subsequent election of Duque in 2018 demonstrated, the peace process was also vulnerable to the enduring scepticism of a weary public and ongoing divisions across the national political establishment and its varying economic priorities. Duque was a vocal critic of the peace deal and rode a wave of reactionary sentiment to become president, before spending his term of office either explicitly stymieing or implicitly neglecting the process, during a period when killings of activists multiplied dramatically and the country –​in part due to the privations of the pandemic –​witnessed a sustained period of social mobilization which was met with the very state and police brutality that was a key driver of the unrest. It is therefore remarkable that the peace process has survived in any form. It is particularly striking that, in this somewhat inauspicious context, amidst the relative failure of the top-​down process, the kinds of bottom-​up, civil society-​led initiatives with

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which we have been interested in the book flourished, albeit tentatively and hesitatingly in places. Indeed, despite the Duque administration still seeking to claim credit for successes wherever they appeared, these were resolutely social processes, led by territorial actors imaginatively exploiting the new spaces for dialogue that had opened up since 2016. A crucial point to note here –​to which we return shortly –​is that this era is now over. The election of Colombia’s first overtly left-​wing president, Gustavo Petro –​undoubtedly its most radical leader of the modern era –​potentially represents a new start, and poses a new set of questions, about the prospects for peace going forward. Implications for peace scholars and practitioners It is here that the idea of DST as both a set of practices and an aspirational ideal becomes essential to understanding emancipatory efforts to achieve peace. As outlined in Chapter Two, DSTs are predicated on four core characteristics. Firstly, they are deeply rooted in the territory (broadly conceived) in which they take place. Secondly, they are locally led –​although their effectiveness depends on also being able to maintain links with outside actors (not least the state). Thirdly, they can explicitly relate to a variety of different topics according to the priorities of the participants, but the process itself is in essence a form of participatory peacebuilding that brings together conflicting parties to address common challenges. Finally, as was evidenced by the success of our methodological approach, DSTs are dependent on a skills base which may well already be better-​developed than many might imagine, but which can also be strengthened and supported through education and training in order to effectively enact the commitment to peace-​as-​dignity. Despite the significant potential of DSTs as emancipatory forms of peacebuilding, we were never blind to the fact that –​notwithstanding moments of unity –​grassroots efforts

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to represent community interests are themselves subject to tensions and exclusionary dynamics. Both the Catatumbo and Buenaventura/​Mid-​Pacific regions have become increasingly fragmented by a range of social and economic interests, each with associated claims to the territory and ideas for how land and resource use should be optimized, while clientelism and party-​political allegiances also undermine shared political projects. Pragmatic responses to such constraints are often the norm. This was evidenced in Catatumbo by the fact that campesinos’ vision of a Campesino Reserve Zone were not supported by all; meanwhile, even following Victor Vidal’s successful election in Buenaventura, claims of cooption by the state have cast doubts over the whether the gains borne of the 2017 Paro Cívico will be sustained. The local turn literature emphasizes the importance of local agency in peacebuilding, and that certainly aligns with our findings. People want to participate in pursuing peace, and many of those living in communities affected by conflict actively seek out opportunities to change their situation. Yet participation is not always simple to achieve in practice. Even a (relatively) progressive peace agreement may not succeed in creating forms of participation that truly allow people to influence their own futures or feel listened to by the state. ‘Invited spaces’ are just that, and the power remains with the party doing the inviting. At the same time, we need to be careful not to romanticize DSTs as ‘invented’ spaces of participation in peace. Even these have their exclusions. They reflect local power dynamics, including local inequalities. We saw examples where these were being challenged, as with the efforts of the PCN in Buenaventura, but even these struggle to effectively challenge longstanding historical forms of discrimination and exclusion. DSTs may be a route to change, especially perhaps when they have external support, but that change is not guaranteed, and even where it happens it may be a long-​term process. Related to this, participation in peace is not always a harmonious process. DSTs can stir up new tensions, as can

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participation in government-​led processes. Yet we often found in engaging with these processes that there is not a simple relationship between the harmoniousness of a process and how effective it is in achieving its aims. Indeed, as Barrera et al (2022) argue, the most effective forms of participation can sometimes be the most divisive and destabilizing. In Chapter Two we made a case that PAR brings distinct advantages as an approach to researching efforts towards peace. While it may well be that other social science approaches can help us to understand empirically what works and what doesn’t at the local level –​even those that use participatory methods merely as a form of data collection –​we argue that PAR allows us to go beyond this. Put simply, PAR in such situations allows researchers to also participate in peace. As such, the Improbable Dialogues project, and the framing of this book, is an openly normative endeavour: we see research as a route to supporting community efforts –​an inherently ‘political’ intervention in what are always highly complex and politicized processes. There are, of course, dangers in this, especially when (as in the case of our project) the researchers are ‘outsiders’ to the communities in question; either from other parts of Colombia, or from another country entirely. Our response to these dangers is not to retreat from political engagement and instead seek an objective external view on these processes, but rather to attempt to ensure that the research is undertaken from an ethic of care, with communities in the lead and the researchers providing support (often behind the scenes). We are certainly not the first proponents of this approach: indeed, we have drawn explicitly on the work of Fals Borda who pioneered this work in Colombia. Through adopting this approach, we found that we as researchers could claim to become true collaborators in DST, while allowing the process to remain community-​led. The implication for peacebuilding more broadly is the potential to overcome the ambiguities of the ‘local turn’ and its iterations (everyday, hybrid, etc), by showcasing the real-​world potential of post-​liberal/​non-​Western ideals.

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There are, we hope, wider applications of the lessons we have drawn from this work. While our study is embedded in the Colombian context, we see potential for comparisons with other examples of peace-​seeking in fractured and volatile contexts. Such comparisons would be especially interesting given the engagement with indigenous knowledge and histories that are required by such an approach, pointing to the potential to fruitfully explore a range of other non-​Western cosmologies of place which have not been addressed in this book, such as southern Africa’s Ubuntu. Other promising analytical entry-​ points could include a more refined environmental/​ecological perspective, as well as deeper consideration of how emergent digital technologies create opportunities and challenges for participation in peace. A new era for dialogue in Colombia Having narrowly lost the 2018 election, Petro came to power in August 2022 alongside his Vice Presidential candidate, Francia Márquez, an environmental and human rights activist and the first Afro-​Colombian woman to hold that office. ‘Peace policy’, they announced, ‘will be a priority in state affairs, transversal and integral, both in relation to the implementation of agreements, as well as in relation to negotiation processes, dialogue and acceptance of justice’ (quoted in El Espectador, 2022). Later announcements of an agenda for total peace prioritized the concepts of human security and acogimiento a la justicia (respect for the law), which ‘tends towards dialogue, reconciliation, forgiveness, coexistence and inclusion, which uses transitional and restorative justice to contribute to the construction of peace from the territories and thus imagines a hopeful future for new generation’ (El Colombiano, 2022). One of the specific policy proposals underscoring total peace is the creation of a Social Service for Peace. This new governmental body will provide financial remuneration –​equivalent to military service –​for participation in work with victims,

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promotion of human rights and supporting the implementation of the peace agreement. This emphasis on citizen participation was, of course, also essential to the territorial peace agenda. Thus, once again, a major concern of opposition parties is that armed groups will use their influence in communities to shape the direction that peace takes. There is no question that, after years of ongoing festering conflict left unresolved by the formal peace process, this is an exceptionally auspicious –​and exciting –​moment for Colombia’s peace activists and their international interlocutors. It also reflects a marked shift in Latin America more widely: a new ‘pink tide’ has swept across the region in the early 2020s, with the right-​wing governments that held sway throughout the post-​global financial crisis era that followed the unwinding of the commodity boom (Grugel and Riggirozzi, 2012) having now been swept away. Petro finds himself among friends in a region where all of the most influential states –​Boric in Chile, Boluarte in Peru, Fernández in Argentina, Obrador in Mexico and, most recently, Lula in Brazil –​are now led by centre-​left or in some cases radical-​left presidents, many with mandates to serve until the mid-​to late 2020s. With both the US and Canadian incumbents, Biden and Trudeau, also of the liberal left, this is the first time in living memory that the entire hemisphere has simultaneously had progressive, reformist governments in office. The commitment to reversing austerity and rebuilding social programmes after the pandemic is a key part of the policy offer from Latin American governments to their increasingly younger and more demanding electorates (Stiglitz and Weisbrot, 2022). While it may not lead to the more radical shake-​up of the dominant economic model that some of our community partners would wish for –​and, indeed, in many places, has been accompanied by serious opposition and dogged by instability –​there is a feeling that such topics can now at least be discussed once more. So, are we witnessing a new dawn of peace? It is clear that Petro has a strong commitment to reform, and has

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already outlined a radical set of policy ambitions relating to strengthening the peace process, talking to other armed groups such as the ELN, assuaging the militarization of the interior, attenuating corporate power and bringing peripheral communities –​such as coca growers –​into more regularized forms of activity. There is much, then, for peace activists to be hopeful about. Nonetheless, the structural constraints facing any Colombian government, especially one that aspires to radical reform, are daunting. The country remains deeply conservative in general, and extremely polarized: in the first round of the 2022 election, Petro was the resounding frontrunner; but, in the second, his victory against the populist Rodolfo Hernández was considerably more narrow (and he won by just 3 per cent, or 600,000 votes). Colombia’s elites –​both the powerful corporate interests that dominate the extractives sector and also the military and paramilitary groups that police it –​remain deep-​rooted and influential. They are, in many cases, sceptical of the direction of travel signalled by the new administration and are already beginning to offer fierce resistance to it. At the very least, Petro will have to deploy extremely deft political skills in order to navigate what will possibly be a strong elite backlash. There is also little he can do about the enduring fact that the Colombian state’s writ does not cover the whole country: endemic state weakness and patchy provision of public goods are both a facilitator of clientelist networks and an obstacle to dismantling them (Robinson, 2016; Fergusson, 2017). As Jacobo Grajales (2016: 1294) suggests, the apparent ‘re-​monopolization of state violence’ evident since the Santos era ‘does not necessarily lead to the marginalization of criminal actors but to a reconfiguration of the links between statutory institutions and unofficial networks’. Consequently, like all governments, Petro’s will have to negotiate with powerful interests which are democratically illegitimate but which enjoy de facto legitimacy in various parts of the country. Moreover, today’s Latin American pink tide is operating in a very different context to its forerunner

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in the 2000s: almost everywhere, debt burdens are higher, countries have not delinked themselves from commodity-​based development and, with Chinese growth and demand slowing, prices are likely to remain unstable. To add to these pressures, most countries in the region are grappling with the economic and social consequences of another lost decade, the decimation of health systems wrought by COVID-​19 and the supply-​side shocks generated by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. All face right-​wing opponents that are even more radicalized and populist than those that governed in the interim (as, indeed, is the case in the US and Canada too). In Brazil, Lula was confronted by an attempted coup d’êtat mere days after taking office in January 2023. In Peru, Castillo was effectively unable to govern from the outset, and lasted barely 18 months from July 2021 to December 2022 –​amid unrelenting opposition from Congress and the media –​before he was impeached, for the third time, and imprisoned, with his Vice President, Boularte, succeeding him. In Colombia, the fractious social strife of the past few years adds another layer of grievance which has only served to deepen the cleavages that exist. Yet there is cause for cautious optimism. As we have discussed throughout the book, the peace process, however problematic it was, opened a crucial space for meaningful dialogue led by communities themselves. They may not always have the power to resist the powerful interests ranged against them, but that particular genie will not be put back in the bottle, not least given how widespread, albeit fragmented, those bottom-​up processes are across the country. There are, then, three broad lessons that emerge from the analysis here that should guide Petro’s approach to peace. First, given the prevalence of those local initiatives –​and the enormous range of genuinely imaginative dialogues that have been deployed to build local peace –​the government should not ignore them, but rather learn from them and use them as templates for the future. Second, Petro should be very wary of replicating previous exercises, especially wasting precious

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resources and political capital on undertaking diagnostic work that has already been done. Put simply: just because the peace process began under a right-​wing president with a different vision and to serve particular sectional interests, it does not follow that the left needs to start from scratch. Much of the work undertaken under Santos was valuable: this should be built on and reformed where necessary, not repeated or repudiated. Third, the key question guiding this work should pertain to what, exactly, is and is not on offer. The only way that this can be achieved is to facilitate meaningful participation, not simply consultation. Colombia is an exceptionally diverse country with myriad overlapping interests and power centres, many of which are poorly served by an extractive, exploitative economic system. For peace to be built, those participating must be able to change the contours of that system, not simply offer grudging assent to piecemeal reforms that leave it intact.

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Svampa, M. (2021) ‘Social movements in times of extractivism: the ecoterritorial turn in Latin America’, in A. Haroon Akram-​Lodhi, K. Dietz, B. Engels and B.M. McKay (eds) Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Swantz, M.L. (2016) In Search of Living Knowledge, Dar- ​ e s-​ Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota. Tate, W. (2015) Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: U.S. Policymaking in Colombia, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Telleria, J. (2021) ‘Development and participation: whose participation? A critical analysis of the UNDP’s Participatory Research methods’, European Journal of Development Research, 33(3): 459–​81. Ulloa, A. and Coronado, S. (eds) (2016) Extractivismos y Posconflicto en Colombia: Retos para la Paz Territorial, Bogotá: Cinep, Programa por la Paz y Universidad Nacional (Grupo de investigación de Cultura y Ambiente de la Facultad de Ciencias Humanas). United Nations (2020) ‘COVID-​19 pandemic must not be allowed to derail Colombia Peace Agreement, Special Representative tells Security Council’, Press Release Security Council [online], Available from: https://​press.un.org/​en/​2020/​sc14​160.doc.htm United Nations Sustainable Development Group (2022) Good Practice Note: Conflict Sensitivity, Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace, New York: United Nations [online], Available from: https://w ​ ww. un.org/​peaceb​uild​ing/​sites/​www.un.org.peaceb​uild​ing/​files/​ docume​nts/​good​praci​ ceno ​ te.cs-p​ b-s​ p.2205​ 10.v6.fin​al_​.web-​com​ pres​sed.pdf United Nations and UNC/​Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2012) Foro Política de Desarrollo Agrario Integral (Enfoque Territorial), 17–​19 December, 2012. Informe y Balance General [online] Available from: https://​www.undp.org/​es/​colom​bia/​publi​cati​ons/​foro-​ polit​ica-​de-​des​arro​llo-​agra​r io-​integ​ral-​enfo​que-​terr​itor​ial United Nations Women (2015) ‘Women take the reins to build peace in Colombia’, [online] 28 May, Available from: https://​ www.unwo​men.org/​en/​news/​stor ​ies/​2015/​5/​women-​build-​ peace-​in-​colom​bia

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References

United Nations Women (2016) ‘Joint statement by Phumzile Mlambo-​Ngcuka and Zainab Hawa Bangura on the historic commitment by the Government of Colombia and FARC-​EP at the Havana Peace Talks Table’, 26 July, Available from: https://​ www.unwo​men.org/​en/​news/​stor​ies/​2016/​7/​joint-​statem​ent-​ by-​phumz​ile-​mla​mbo-​ngc​uka-​and-​zai​nab-​hawa-​bang​ura United Nations and World Bank (2018) Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict, Washington, DC: World Bank. Uribe-​López, M. and Correa-​Barrera, V. (2019) ‘Two emblematic peacebuilding initiatives in Antioquia: a comparative analysis of peace infrastructures’, in J. Meernik, J.H.R. DeMeritt and M. Uribe-​López (eds) As War Ends: What Colombia Can Tell Us About the Sustainability of Peace and Transitional Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vaittinen, T., Donahoe, A., Kunz, R., Ómarsdóttir, S.B. and Roohi, S. (2019) ‘Care as everyday peacebuilding’, Peacebuilding, 7(2): 194–​209. VAP (Verificación Acuerdo De Paz) (2022) ‘Informe regional de verificación de la implementación del Acuerdo Final de Paz en Colombia en las 16 zonas PDET’, Secretaría Técnica del Componente Internacional de Verificación CINEP/​PPP-​ CERAC [online], Available from: https://​www.cinep.org.co/​ es/i​ nfor​ me-r​ egion ​ al-d​ e-v​ erif​i caci​ on-d​ e-l​ a-i​ mpl​ eme​ntac​ion-​del-​ acue​rdo-​final-​de-​paz-​en-​colom​bia-​en-​las-​16-​zonas-​pdet/​ Vargas Prieto, A. and Figueroa Córdoba, D.P. (2020) ‘Acciones colectivas en el Catatumbo como medio de reconfiguración ocupacional del sector agrícola’, Cooperativismo & Desarrollo, 28(117): 22. Väyrynen, T. (2019) ‘Mundane peace and the politics of vulnerability: a nonsolid feminist research agenda’, Peacebuilding, 7(2): 146–​59. Vélez-​Torres, L., Gough, K., Larrea-​Mejía, J., Piccolino, G. and Ruette-​Orihuela, K. (2021) ‘“Fests of vests”: the politics of participation in neoliberal peacebuilding in Colombia’, Antipode, 54(2): 586–​607.

153

Participating in Peace

Verdad Abierta (2015) ‘La oscura noche de Buenaventura’, [online] 2 June, Available from: https://​verdad​abie​r ta.com/​la-​osc​ura-​ noche-​de-​buena​vent​ura/​ Verdad Abierta (2017) ‘Las tensiones tras la Zona de Reserva Campesina del Catatumbo’, [online] 20 January, Available from: https://​verdad​abie​rta.com/​las-​tensio​nes-​tras-​la-​zona-​de-​ rese​rva-​campes​ina-​del-​catatu​mbo Verdad Abierta (2019) ‘Catatumbo: los PDET de la incertidumbre’, [online] 15 February, Available from: https://​verdad​abie​rta.com/​ catatu​mbo-​los-​pdet-​la-​incert​idum​bre/​ Villamizar, D. (2020) Las Guerrillas en Colombia. Una Historia Desde los Orígenes Hasta los Confines, Bogotá, DC: Debate. Winstanley, L., Muñoz, I., Farjado, J., Cabrera, L., Salamanca, R.E., Lozano, J., Paz, E. and Mendoza, E. (2017) Towards Transformative Change: Women and the Implementation of the Colombian Peace Accord, ABColombia [online], Available from: https://w ​ ww.abc​olom​bia. org.uk/w ​ p-c​ onte​ nt/u ​ ploa​ ds/2​ 019/0​ 3/T ​ owar​ ds-T ​ ra​nsfo​r mat​ive-​ Cha​nge-​ENG-​f-​WEB.pdf WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America) (2021) Annual Report [online], Available from: https://​www.wola.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​ uploa​ ds/2​ 022/0​ 4/S​ ingl​ ePag​ e_2​ 0​ 21-W ​ OLA_​ A ​ nnu ​ al Report.pdf World Bank (2020) Intentional Homicides Colombia (per 100,000 people), UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s International Homicide Statistics Database [online], Available from: https://​data.worldb​ ank.org/​indica​tor/​VC.IHR.PSRC.P5? Zambrano, A.J. and Otero, B.A. (2022) PDET una Apuesta por el País: Presente y Futuro, Bogotá: Agencia de Renovación del Territorio. Zeiderman, A. (2016) ‘Submergence: Precarious Politics in Colombia’s future port-​city’, Antipode, 48(3): 809–​31. Zeiderman, A. (2018) ‘Endangered city: security and citizenship in Bogotá’, in S. Hall and R. Burdett (eds) SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City, London: Sage. Zibechi, R. (2020) ‘Coronavirus: la militarización de las crisis’, La Jornada, [online] 28 February, Available from https://​www.jorn​ ada.com.mx/​2020/​02/​28/​opin​ion/​020a1​pol

154

Index References to footnotes show both the page number and the note number (231n3).

A

B

ACIVA (Asociación de Cabildos Indigenas Valle del Cauca)  100 Acuerdo del Paro Cívico (Agreement to live with dignity and peace in the territory)  85, 102, 109 ADF (Agrarian Development Forum)  26 Afro-Colombian communities Buenaventura  53–​4, 84, 87–​8, 91, 100, 103, 107–​8, 119, 120 constitutional reforms  6 histories of place  92 Agenda for Peace (UN, 1992)  14 agrarian strikes  57, 58, 66, 69–​70, 71, 80 agri-​business  23, 60, 62, 68, 69 agricultural employment  60, 62, 63–​4 Amnesty International  108 Amnesty Law  5 Annan, Kofi  16 Arboleda, Eliecer  107 archivos de baúl (kitchen archives)  41 Arenas, Jacobo  5–​6 ART (Agencia para la Renovación Territorial –​Agency for Territorial Renewal)  72, 73, 76, 96 ASCAMCAT (Asociación Campesina del Catatumbo –​ Association of Campesinos of Catatumbo)  67, 68, 69, 70–​1, 72 Asociación Nacional de Zonas de Reserva Campesina (National Association of Campesino Reserve Zones)  26, 71 assassinations  6, 32, 78

Bajamar  94 ‘balloon effect’  63 bandas criminales (criminal gangs)  6, 32 barrio associations  7 Betancur, Belisario  5 biodiversity  91 blockades/​roadblocks  69, 70, 71, 75, 107, 121 bogas (river transport workers)  80 border zones  63 see also Catatumbo bottom-​up peacebuilding  12, 15, 21, 25, 34–​5, 122–​3 Boutros-​Ghali, Boutros  14 broad-​based participation, importance of  20 Buenaventura  50–​5, 83–​116, 118–​23 bureaucracy  33, 74

C cabildos indígenas (indigenous councils)  96, 100 Caicedo, Jhon Erick  114 CALA (Comité Ambiental de La Angalia –​La Angalia Environmental Committee)  79, 81, 82 Cali Cartel  93 campesinos  Asociación Nacional de Zonas de Reserva Campesina (National Association of Campesino Reserve Zones)  26, 71 Catatumbo  54, 57, 62, 65, 66–​72, 119, 124 Campo Dos  71, 76 capacity building  16, 42, 49, 77, 112 capitalism  14, 15, 47, 84, 88

155

PARTICIPATING IN PEACE

Casa de la Verdad (Truth Centre)  100–​1 casas de pique  94 Catatumbo  50–​5, 57–​82, 118–​23 Catholic church  31, 54–​5 cattle farmers  27 ceasefires  23 CINEP (Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular Programa Por la Paz)  54, 55, 68 citizen-​based peacemaking  16 Civic Strike  84–​5, 102–​13, 115, 120 Civic Strike Committee  98, 106, 108, 109, 121 civil ‘referenda’  32 civil society  Buenaventura  110 citizen-​based peacemaking  16 CORMEPAZ  54–​5 fractured relationships between groups  60 Improbable Dialogues  38, 39 ordinary people versus elites  19 peace agreement 2016  29 role in peacebuilding  12 women’s organizations  28 civil war  5–​7 class  19, 40 clientelism  124, 128 closed-​door negotiations  26, 66 coca production  6, 60, 62, 63–​4, 67, 72, 77 collective land tenure  92–​3 collective memory exercises  41 Colombian Communist Party  6 Colombian conflict, history of  5–​7 Colombian Congress  30 colonialism  18, 88 Comité del Paro Cívico  98, 106, 108, 109, 121 Comité por el Agua de Buenaventura (Water Sub-​Committee)  105 commodity boom  62, 127, 129 commodity price shocks  24 communitarianism  15

Community Action Boards (Juntas de Acción Comunal)  65 community leaders  19, 21 Community Life Plans  68, 73–​4, 80n14 community organizations  21, 36 see also civil society Community Pacts  73 community-​driven river conservation  76–​80 community-​led peace zones  25 comunas  111, 112 conflict resolution scholarship  15, 16 ‘conflict transformation school’  16 conflict-​affected collectives  21 ‘conflictive-​sensitive environmentalism’  78 conflictividades  39 Congress Peace Commission  70 consejos comunitarios (community councils)  96, 100, 107 consensual decision-​making  115–​16 conservatism  30, 31, 32, 40, 128 constitutional reforms  6, 92, 103 consultative approaches  33 cooperatives  62 co-​production  34, 41, 46, 49, 51 CORMEPAZ (Corporacion Memoria y Paz –​Memory and Peace Corporation)  54–​5, 82, 104, 111–​12, 114 Corridor of the Grand Alliance initiative  68–​9 COVID-​19  40, 78, 110, 121, 122, 129 CRIC (Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca –​Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca)  7 critical recovery of history  41 Cúcuta  74 cultural imperialism  15

D de Roux, Father Francisco  27, 71 demobilizations  11, 63, 77, 94, 114, 122

156

Index

democracy  14, 15, 47 ‘democratic security’ framework  6, 104 development, geographically uneven  60 development and peace  25, 26, 29, 48, 96, 97, 120–​1 development plans  24, 33, 64–​5, 97–​8, 109–​11, 115 Development Studies  15 devolución sistematica (systematic feedback)  41–​2, 46, 49, 50 dialogues from below  34 dignity and peace  109–​13, 114, 123 diploma in Environmental Care and Protection  80 diploma on Facilitating Socio-​ Territorial Dialogue  112–​13, 115 Disappeared Persons Unit  84 disenfranchizement  31 displaced businesses  91 displaced people  32, 58, 88, 92, 94, 99 District Development Plan  110, 111 dredging  83–​4 drug trade  6, 60, 62, 63, 67, 93 DSTs (diálogos socio-territoriales –​ socio-​territorial dialogues)  Buenaventura  83–​116, 110–​13 civic strikes  108 community-​driven river conservation  76–​80 concept/​definition  2–​3, 37, 45–​50 contextualization of origins of  12 lessons learned  119, 123–​6 Participatory Action Research (PAR)  36 Duque, Iván  1, 30–​3, 74, 78, 81, 120–​1, 122–​3

Ecopetrol  57 elites  13–​14, 16, 19, 23, 24, 43, 128 emanciaptory models of peacebuilding  17, 18, 23, 29 enclosure (land)  24 environment  assassinations of environmental leaders  32 Buenaventura  83–​4, 91 Catatumbo  62, 76–​80 community-​driven river conservation  76–​80 ‘conflictive-​sensitive environmentalism’  78 dialogue as conflict-​sensitive environmentalism  57–​82 environmental implications of peace  34 extractivist economics  60 non-​Western cosmologies of place  126 pollution  58 Escobar, Arturo  15–​16, 47, 92, 96n9, 97, 103, 115 ESMAD (Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios –​Mobile Anti-​Disturbances Squadron)  80, 107 ethics  42–​3, 125 ethnographic research  41 ethno-​territorial rights  103 ‘everyday peace’  17–​18 exoticization  15 experiential knowledge/​lived experience  12, 19–​20 exports  23, 88, 90 ‘extended territory’  93n4 extractive research practices  44 extractivist economics  23, 48, 59–​60, 75, 118

F Facilitating Socio-​Territorial Dialogue diploma  112–​13, 115 facilitation of dialogue  21 Fals Borda, Orlando  2, 37, 40–​1, 43, 50, 113, 125

E economic growth  75, 76, 84, 91 economics  23, 25, 26, 29 see also extractivist economics

157

PARTICIPATING IN PEACE

family, threat to institution of  31 FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia –​ Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)  community governance  20 COVID-​19  78 disarmament  73 economics  24 formal peace processes  26, 122 history of Colombian conflict  5–​6 inclusion of women in peace negotiations  28 peace agreement 2016  1, 29 peace negotiations  7, 22, 23 public consultative events  26 rejection of peace agreement by dissidents  31, 32 FEDEGAN (Federación Nacional de Ganaderos –​National Federation of Cattle Farmers)  27 feminist scholarship  18 film  76, 79–​80 fishing  77 FonBuenaventura  109 food insecurity/​shortages  57, 77, 78, 79, 108 fora, thematic  26–​7 forced disappearances  83, 94 forced displacement  63, 92 Fortaleza (military operation)  65 forum on political participation  27 forum on victims  27 free trade agreements  25, 90 freedom of movement  94 Freire, Paulo  40

global value chains  24, 47 ‘good governance’  14 government-​led dialogue initiatives  4, 29, 33–​4 see also ‘invited spaces’ Grajales, Jacobo  128 grassroots communities  16, 20, 21, 68, 123–​4 guerrilla groups  Buenaventura  93 Catatumbo  58, 65, 80–​1 FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia –​ Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)  5, 122 Petro administration  1

G

identity  3–​4, 81, 103n12 illicit crop cultivation  32, 33, 57, 60, 62, 63, 93 Improbable Dialogues  4, 38–​40, 57, 110, 111, 113, 115, 125 indigenous communities  ADF (Agrarian Development Forum)  26 Buenaventura  92, 100 Catatumbo  54, 57

H Hall, Budd  41 Hepalza Quintero, Bishop Héctor  105 Hernández, Rodolfo  128 histories of place  92 history of Colombian conflict  5–​7 history of Colombian peace processes  22–​30 Holocausto (military operation)  65 homicide rates  94 see also assassinations; massacres Howland, Todd  70 human rights  7, 14, 25, 62 human security  126 humanitarian aid  114 hybridity  17, 18, 22, 125

I

Galtung, Johan  14, 15, 16 gangs  6, 32 Garzón, Angelino  70 gender  19 see also women Gender Sub-​Commission  28 gender-​based violence  62 Germany  77 global trade  88, 90

158

Index

constitutional reforms  6 CRIC (Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca –​Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca)  7 environmental pacts  80 public participation  28 indigenous knowledge systems  15, 19, 41, 119, 126 informal employment  90, 93 infrastructure attacks  62 infrastructure development  23–​4, 48, 64–​5, 75, 95, 105, 120 Instituto Nacional de Vías (National Roads Institute)  83 intercambio de saberes  40 internally displaced people  92 international community  14, 19, 23, 25 international mediators  14 International Network of Participatory Research  41 Inter-​organizational Committee  104, 106 ‘invisible borders’  94 ‘invited spaces’  4, 34, 46, 119, 124 Isla Cascajal  88

Law 70  92 Lederach, John Paul  15, 16, 17, 19, 39 left-​wing politics in Latin America  127 LGBTQ+​ communities  28, 31 liberal peacebuilding  13, 14, 15, 16, 101 lived experience/​experiential knowledge  12, 19–​20 ‘local,’ as concept  18 local elections 2019  121 local government  64–​5, 121 local identities  3 local knowledge  119 ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding  2–​4, 7, 13–​17, 19, 29, 40, 119, 124 ‘locomotive’ sectors  24

M Mac Ginty, Roger  17, 18, 22 Macarena-​Guaviare sub-​region  51 Marcando Territorio (Marking Territory)  104–​5 Marcha Patriótica (Patriotic March)  7, 68, 71 Márquez, Francia  1, 86, 126 massacres  62–​3, 93, 94, 122 May, Theresa  39 mesa tecnica (technical committee)  96 mesas (thematic sub-​committees)  104 MIA (Mesa de Interlocución y Acuerdo –​Bureau for Dialogue and Agreement)  67 micro-​acts  18 migration  60, 62, 88, 92 militarized approaches  23–​4, 33, 63, 65, 74, 78, 122 minga por la memoria  105 mining  23, 24, 60, 88, 93 mobility, restrictions on  94 monocrop agriculture  60 Motilón-​Barí indigenous people  57, 59, 65, 70n9, 71, 80 Motor Groups  73, 75

J Jaramillo, Sergio  25 JEP (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz –​ Special Jurisdiction for Peace)  84 Juntas de Acción Comunal (Community Action Boards)  65, 111

K kitchen archives (archivos de baúl)  41

L La Angalia  63, 76, 77, 81 La Delfina  93 land tenure  24–​5, 58, 62, 65, 67, 91–​3, 103 land use planning (ordenamiento territorial)  47

159

PARTICIPATING IN PEACE

movimientos en defensa de la vida (movements to defend life)  46, 48 multilateral institutions  25 Municipal Pacts  73, 97

‘othering’  18 oversight committees  75

P Pacelli  80n14 Pacific Alliance trade bloc  90 Pacific Region  53 Pacífico Medio PDET sub-​region 54, 95, 98, 99–​100 Pact for the Search of the Disappeared in Buenaventura  84 palm oil  57, 62 PAR (Participatory Action Research)  and DSTs  45–​50, 112–​13 ethical challenges  42–​3 history  4 lessons learned  125 limitations of  113 methodological approach  2, 36–​56 research methods  41–​5 paramilitary organizations  Buenaventura  93, 94, 99, 104 Catatumbo  58, 62–​3 history of Colombian conflict  6, 122, 128 Paro Cívico (Civic Strike)  84–​5, 101–​8, 120, 124 paro nacional (national strike)  32, 121 participation, as concept  21, 40 ‘participation fatigue’  45 participatory peacebuilding  2–​5, 11–​35, 118–​23 Participaz project  73–​4, 75 Pastoral Social (Diócesis de Tibú)  54, 55, 58, 68, 72, 77, 78–​9, 81 PATR (Plan de Acción para la Transformación Regional –​ Action Plan for Regional Transformation)  33, 73–​4, 97 patriarchy  45 Patriotic March (Marcha Patriótica)  7, 68, 71

N ‘narco-​frontiers’  63 National Agricultural Association of Colombia  26 National and International Meeting for Humanitarian Agreement and Peace  7 National Day of Afro-​ Colombianity 107–​8 National Development Plan (2010)  24, 33 National Rehabilitation Plan  5 national riot police (ESMAD)  80, 107 National Strike  32, 121 National Summit of Women and Peace  28 National University  68 natural resources  24, 58, 62 neocolonialism  15 neoextractivism  46 neoliberalization  24, 46, 47, 68, 104, 118, 121, 122 NGOs (non-​governmental organizations)  19, 71 non-​human elements  3–​4 non-​participation  22, 27 non-​Western cosmologies of place  126 Norte de Santander  57, 60–​2, 64

O occupations  68 ‘Office for Peace, Reconciliation and Co-​existence’  112 oil  23, 38, 57, 60, 62, 77–​8 ontological struggles  48 ordenamiento territorial (land use planning)  47

160

Index

Paz total (total peace)  1, 114, 118, 126–​30 PCN (Proceso de Comunidades Negras –​Black Communities Process)  92, 100, 102, 103, 104, 114, 124 PDETs (Programas de Desarrollo con Enfoque Territorial –​ Development Programmes with Territorial Focus)  Buenaventura  54, 95–​102, 109–​13 Catatumbo  53, 57–​8, 61, 72–​3 as cornerstone of participatory development  72 impact evaluations  74–​5 and ‘Improbable Dialogues’  38, 39, 51 intentions of  33 lessons learned  120 map  52 thematic pillars  33, 73, 74 peace agreement  and 2022’s ‘total peace’  1 ambitions of  11 broad-​based participation  20 development and peace  24 ‘double defeat’  30–​4 emphasis on participation  3, 7, 33 opposition to  22 post-​agreement commissions/​ hearings  21 referendum  31–​2, 71, 72, 81, 120, 122 reliance on dialogue  28–​9 peace and dignity  109–​13, 114, 123 Peace Commission  5 ‘peace for extractivism’  23 peace from above  23, 29, 97 Peace Laboratories  25 peace negotiations  7, 20, 26–​7 peace processes  Buenaventura  83–​116 Catatumbo  66–​72 Colombian (history)  6, 11, 22–​30

disillusionment with  75 evolution of post-​conflict peacebuilding  13–​22 intra-​state conflicts  14 opposition to  27 use of social dialogue  12 Peace Studies  14, 123–​6 ‘peace with legality’  74 ‘peacebuilding’ as concept  14 peacebuilding from below  15, 16, 34, 36, 55 peacebuilding pyramid  19 ‘peacemaking’ as concept  14 peace-​promoting activities  22 peri-​urban community councils  93n4 Permanent Assembly of Campesinos  70 Petro, Gustavo  1–​2, 32, 86, 114, 118, 123, 126–​30 PIEDB (Plan Integral Especial para el Desarrollo de Buenaventura –​ Special Integrated Development Plan for Buenaventura)  97–​8, 109, 115 ‘pink tide’  127, 128–​9 Plan de Desarrollo Distrital, 2020–​23 (District Development Plan, 2020–​23)  98 Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (Land Management Plan)  97–​8 Plan Pazcifico  105 pluriversality  47, 48, 103 PNIS (Programa Nacional Integral de Sustitución de Cultivos Ilícitos –​ National Comprehensive Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops)  72 police brutality  122 pollution  58 populism  128 ports  77, 84–​5, 87–​95 ‘positive peace’  14 positivism  41 post-​agreement commissions/​ hearings  21 post-​colonialism  17

161

PARTICIPATING IN PEACE

resguardos (land reserves)  65 resistance to inclusion  22 rights  6, 28, 92 see also human rights right-​wing paramilitary groups  32 right-​wing politics  129 river conservation  76–​80 Riveros, María-​Paulina  28 rivers  59 roadblocks  69, 70, 71, 75, 107, 121 Roadmaps  73, 97 roads  60, 75, 88, 93, 104, 120 romanticization  43, 124 Ruíz Galván, Adriel  111 rule of law  14, 25, 29, 126 rural–​urban divide  29, 85, 87–​8, 91, 96, 99

post-​development theory  15–​16 post-​liberalism  125 post-​structuralism  15 poverty  62, 87, 119 prevention of conflict  20 privatization  90 ‘progress’  24 protests  22, 31, 57, 66, 68, 69–​70 see also roadblocks; strikes public consultative events  26 public land  24 public participation  activities of participation  23–​7 definition  21–​2 peace agreement 2016  3, 7, 33 Puertos de Colombia (Colpuertos)  90

R

S

race  19 racial inequality  120 racialization  34, 88, 92, 95 radicalization of protest  66 Rahman, Anisur  41 RCUK-​Colciencias  38 referendum  31–​2, 71, 72, 81, 120, 122 refugees  64 see also displaced people refusal to engage  27 Regional Buenaventura Port Society  90 regional government  64–​5 regional identities  3 Regional Transformation Plans  33, 73–​4, 97 region-​based peace and development  25 reintegration of ex-​combatants  21, 27, 94 religion  19, 21, 102n11 Rentería, Nigeria  28 research design  39 research outputs  50 researcher–​researched divide  41, 42–​4, 125

San Antonio Estuary  83, 84 San José de Apartadó  25 Sandino, Victoria  28 Santos, Juan Manuel  7, 22, 23, 24, 38, 39, 69, 70, 85, 106, 122, 130 ‘Santos’s peace’  23, 30, 32 Sardinata  80n14 ‘second local turn’  17, 23 securitization policies  74, 121 sentipensantes  41 sexual violence  62, 94 silenced communities  19, 34 Simanca-​Herrera, Judith (Victoria Sandino)  28 slavery  88, 91 Social Agreement for Catatumbo  71 social class  19, 40 social dialogue  and DSTs  46 for implementation of peace agreements  28–​9 refusal to engage  27 state-​sponsored  22–​3, 25 social justice  26

162

Index

Social Planning for Rural Property  98 Social Service for Peace  126 social trust  65 socio-​territories  92 solidarity  18, 30, 71, 108 state of emergency  106 state-​sponsored dialogues  46 state-​sponsored participatory peacebuilding  12, 22–​3, 26, 34 strategic blockages  107 strategic networks  19 ‘Strategic Zones for Comprehensive Intervention’  74 strikes  agrarian strikes  57, 58, 66, 69–​70, 71, 80 Civic Strike  84–​5, 102–​13, 115, 120 National Strike  32, 121 structural violence  16, 18, 94–​5, 115 Sur de Bolivar  97 survivors of atrocities  21 Sustainable Catatumbo  75, 76 systematic feedback (devolución sistematica)  41–​2, 46, 49, 50

and histories of place  92 as relational concept  3–​4 ‘territorial turn’ in Latin American social movements  2–​3 terrorism  6 thematic pillars  33, 73, 74 ‘third wave’ transitions from authoritarianism  14 Tibú  57, 59, 64n2, 68, 75, 114 Todos Somos PAZcífico (We Are All [Peaceful] Pacific) programme  106 tokenistic participation  98 top-​down peace processes  23, 29, 97 torture  94 ‘total peace’  1, 114, 118, 126–​30 Totumatón  105 tourism  91 transnational corporations  24, 90n3 transnational value chains  24 transnationalizing illiberal governance  24 Truth Commission  27, 71, 100–​1

U Ubuntu  126 UK  38–​9 Ukraine invasion  129 UN (United Nations)  ADF (Agrarian Development Forum)  26 Agenda for Peace (UN, 1992)  14 concept of ‘peacebuilding’  14 delegates in peace processes  70 ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding  16 Office for Human Rights  69 participatory peacebuilding  21 Special Representative to Colombia  78 Sustainable Development Group  40 Truth Commission  27 UN Women  28 unemployment  62, 90, 93

T Temporary Humanitarian Community Refuge of Catatumbo  67 Teorama refuge  67 ‘territorial peace’  23, 25, 29, 37, 46, 47, 95–​102, 120 territorial rights  92 territory  anthropogeographic definitions of  103 definition of  3–​4, 120 DSTs (diálogos socio-territoriales -​socio-​ territorial dialogues)  119

163

PARTICIPATING IN PEACE

Universidad del Pacífico  104 Universidad Javeriana  50, 54, 55, 113 UP (Unión Patriótica –​Patriotic Union)  6 Uribe, Álvaro  31, 104 Uribe, President  6 USAID (United States Agency for International Development)  77 US–​Colombian alliance  5, 6, 24, 122 US–​Colombian free trade agreement  25, 90

veredas  33, 71, 73, 77, 120 victims in public participation  27, 28, 33 Vidal, Victor Hugo  85, 98, 108, 109, 110–​11, 112, 115, 121, 124 video, participatory  76, 79–​80 visual/​arts-​based research methods  41 voluntary non-​participation as form of agency  22

W water  62, 87, 104, 105–​6 Western-​centricity  15, 18 women  20, 26, 28, 45, 62 World Bank  21

V Valencia, Bartolo  105 Valencia Cano, Archbishop Gerardo  102 Valle del Cauca Department  87 Venezuela  64 Verdad Abierta  74 Vereda La Gloria  93n4

Z ZRC (Zona de Reserva Campesina -​ Campesino Reserve Zone)  67, 69, 70, 71, 80, 124

164