The geometry of violence in Colombia: a brake on the articulation of restorative justice and the achievement of positive peace

• In Event: Transitional Justice, Conflict, and Transformation

Abstract

The armed conflict in Colombia, which has lasted almost sixty years, has exacerbated the fracturing of the trust and social fabric in the country. The collective trauma passed down from generation to generation, whose political socialization has been structured in most cases around violence understood at all levels, has prevented the structuring of an effective and widespread project of restorative justice and has slowed down the construction of a positive peace.
The present investigation focuses specifically on analyzing how the different spheres and strata of violence in Colombia have impeded the aforementioned objectives. While it is true that both legal and theoretical tools regarding the conceptualization and development of restorative justice and different notions of peace have experienced significant progress, especially since the signing of the Peace Agreement in Havana, these have remained mainly at the level of theorization without much progress in terms of their materialization in reality, leading to a relative failure to transform the geography of violence and the structural and cultural modifications that underpin direct violence.
The impossibility of dialogue with the different armed groups and the protracted negotiation processes, sabotaged by an illusory intention of a peaceful end to the conflict, prevent any kind of attempt at reparation for the victims who are continually revictimized by the lack of a halt to and the continued development of the violence, in addition to the lack of the fundamental pillar of the perpetrators' abandonment of violence and their refusal to renounce it, which acts as a primary containment dyke to a joint structuring of restorative justice and positive peace, which in the end constitutes the main focuses of support and binding necessary for the end of the armed conflict

Author

• Luis Conde, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid