Today, the prospect for peace in Colombia is not promising. Violence is surging throughout the country, and armed groups are expanding their territorial control. This stands in stark contrast to the promise of Nov. 24, 2016, when the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, signed one of the most ambitious peace agreements in history.
There are many reasons for this and many causes for pessimism. But our work as peace researchers in Colombia highlights an underrecognized element of peace, both in Colombia and in other conflict-affected countries globally. These are the small-scale, everyday practices and resources that exist at the hyperlocal level, through which people construct meaning out of the harms they have suffered and ultimately build their futures. These local practices provide cause for hope and should guide domestic and international policy choices moving forward.
In daily life, such small-scale peace looks deceptively simple. Examples from our research include an aqueduct in the middle of the desert, the restoration of devastated mangroves, memory exercises in isolated rural areas, restoring a village soccer field, and rebuilding a market. They can be personal and intimate, and they can be social and political. They are often surprising, as in one Colombian village where peace was expressed as improving the local systems for trash management that had been disturbed during the war.
There is little space for these examples of small-scale peace in narratives of armed group resurgence and state dysfunction that dominate news coverage in Colombia and drive policy decisions. Yet it is precisely in these areas of daily life where the prospect of nonrepetition of war is also rooted.
The state’s ‘transitional promise’
In countries emerging out of violence, the state makes a “transitional promise” to its citizens, based on a global gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation that has its roots in South Africa. In the townships of Cape Town, it was understood that pain must be socially recognized to create a new imagined nation — that the public exposure of suffering would have restorative capacity.
But Colombia complicates this picture of the transitional state. In this country and similar places, conflicts are not so clean as to have concrete phases of “during violence” and “after violence.”
Colombia, like most conflict-affected states, is governed by systemic violence, where building peace relates more to the daily lives of concrete human beings than to changes in the structure of the state or to other components of the international peace-building script. It is in this transformation of the everyday that the expectations of communities are grounded and that they can guarantee sustainability when formal processes and institutions fail.
And it is precisely at the level of everyday life in Colombia, where people experience conflict and peace in their small-scale, intimate forms, that the peace process has been undermined.
This includes the systematic murder of community leaders, including those advocating for human rights and those representing Indigenous groups, people of African descent, and farm laborers. It includes the weakening and underfunding of programs seeking to integrate community-oriented development into peace building. It includes offering little in the way of productive and sustainable alternatives to cultivating coca. It includes few guarantees for the safety and re-integration of FARC soldiers.
It means having to cut corners and make broad policies when tailored ones are necessary, and it means not listening to the needs of communities affected by war and violence. From this vantage point, it is easy to remain pessimistic about peace in Colombia.
Building the local
If it is only up to the local communities to pursue peace, what then is the role for the state? In Colombia, the absence of the state is acutely felt: daily injustices of not knowing what happened to loved ones who were murdered or disappeared, of not receiving a promised land title or reparation award, of not seeing the state repair local infrastructure, invest in schools, provide security, and much more. The rupture between the state’s actions and people’s everyday realities cultivates and reproduces systemic violence.
But again, the picture is not so simple; everyday life is intimately structured by state policies and promises. We believe that the state is vital to building local resources for small-scale peace, but its efforts must be directed accordingly and its transformational promises must be fulfilled.
The 2016 agreement between the FARC and the government foresaw much of this. While peace deals are traditionally centered around a negotiation over peace and justice that focuses on governments and armed groups, the Colombian agreement went far beyond that.
The agreement established provisions for restorative justice, agrarian reform, collective re-integration of members of armed groups, and truth and memorialization, among other things. Unlike many other peace agreements that only attend to elite interests, these are the sorts of policies that permeate down to touch people in their daily lives. No single accord can create and sustain the kinds of social transformations needed to establish durable peace, but their inclusion shows how transformative the agreement sought to be.
The truth commission’s mandate was set to expire on Nov. 28 of last year but was extended to June 2022, when it will become the first of the institutions created by the peace process to shut its doors. As the transitional system is dismantled, what remains will be ordinary citizens building their everyday worlds. It will remain up to them to stand up for peace and demand the change that their communities need in order to move further.
The challenge for Colombia, and those invested in its future, will be how best to identify, engage, and reinforce the local resources upon which individuals and communities can draw to re-imagine their future as the transitional promise in the country fades.
The international community’s job now is to recognize points of consensus and support local efforts to preserve the gains that have been made by the peace process. Beyond Colombia, the key lesson is that there is no template for peace. Peace building happens in the messy, complex, everyday lives of ordinary people and their daily struggles. This does not make for easy formulas. But it still requires the support and attention of international and national groups and individuals interested in localization efforts.
About the authors
Alejandro Castillejo Cuéllar
Alejandro Castillejo Cuéllar is a commissioner at the Colombian Truth Commission. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes and director of the program for Critical Studies of Political Transitions. Castillejo holds a degree in anthropology from the National University of Colombia, a master’s degree in peace and conflict studies from the European University Center for Peace Studies, and a doctorate in anthropology from The New School for Social Research. His work and research focus on memory, violence, and the dynamics of small-scale peace, which he has studied in countries around the world.
Peter Dixon
Peter Dixon a research scientist in the Conflict Resolution and Coexistence program at the Heller School for Social Policy at Brandeis University, where he co-leads the Everyday Justice and Everyday Indicators for Policy Innovation projects. He uses mixed methodologies to study how the everyday experiences of people and organizations during and after conflict enable or limit transformative solutions toward peace and justice. Dixon’s research addresses issues of measurement, political violence, peacebuilding, and transitional justice — both in the United States and abroad.
Pamina Firchow
Pamina Firchow is an associate professor of coexistence and conflict at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy. Previously, she was assistant professor of conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason University, as well as a Senior Jennings Randolph Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in 2016. Her main research interests surround the study of the international accompaniment of communities affected by mass violence and the localization of international development and peacebuilding aid. She has published widely on participatory approaches to design, the measurement and evaluation of transitional justice, reconciliation, and peacebuilding interventions.
