Narrating Peace: The Relational Construction of State (Il)Legitimacy in Colombia’s Peace Laboratory

• In Event: 3407 - Peace and Conflict: Peacebuilding in Local Contexts

Abstract

Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) follows the local turn in peacebuilding, including programs for rural development and the substitution of illicit crops that are meant to address the root causes of conflict. But how is the peace process experienced on a local level? The present article presents the case study of Briceño, a municipality in northern Colombia which experienced 35 years of continuous FARC presence, had an economy based 90% on coca cultivation, and as the pilot site of the peace agreement’s coca substitution program became known as the Peace Laboratory. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, it uses an analysis of four emergent community narratives to explain how locals talk about and experience the post-peace agreement transition: (1) replanting, in which coca is seen as the only viable economic option due to government failure to live up to promises to invest in the region; (2) rearmament, in which military harassment and economic collapse are blamed for driving young men to join a FARC dissident group that has grown rapidly in the region; (3) corruption, which locals invoke to understand why promised state aid doesn’t arrive; and (4) resource exploitation, in which the Briceño’s transition to formal state control has allowed the ongoing building of a hydroelectric dam and the potential entry of a multinational gold mining company, seen as attempts by outsiders to benefit from Briceño’s natural resources at the expense of the environment and local livelihoods. The regional developments that drive each narrative are explained, showing a major divergence between the policies, practices, and local experiences of peacebuilding.

Author

• Alex Diamond, University of Texas at Austin