Imagining Peace Otherwise: Five years of the Colombian peace accords experienced from the margins

About the conference

The conference has two overarching aims: First, we are interested in shedding light on the practices, experiences and future visions of the people who have both lived the reality of organized violence, and fought at the forefront of achieving peace and justice. Since their critical voices often play a marginal role in policy debates concerning the implementation of the Peace Agreement, we want to foster dialogue among alternative views on peace and post-accord development, including the perspectives of social leaders, human rights defenders, community activists, women, campesinxs (peasants), ethnic groups and students, among others. Second, we want to better integrate researchers who are conducting cutting-edge work on post-accord challenges in Colombia.

The five-year anniversary represents a natural occasion to review and evaluate the progress of the implementation of the peace accords. We want to enrich this review process by shifting the emphasis from top-down implementation of policies to the perspectives and experiences of the people at the margins of power, who often put themselves at risk to voice their concerns and demands for a different future. Systematic political violence, high impunity rates, and political stigmatization have further deteriorated the already precarious situation of activists and communities that advocate for transformative peace.

Rather than thinking about people in the margins as a homogeneous group, we are interested in how this group of people challenge the ideas of peace and development from different perspectives. By paying attention to the experiences and voices of the people in the margins, we are particularly interested in the ways in which gender, race, class, age, citizenship and social hierarchies shape the experiences and visions of those at the forefront of building transformative peace in their communities and territories.

Conference structure

The conference will address two themes in two sequential days. It will take place during morning hours in Colombia (08:00 –13:00) and in the afternoon in Europe (14:00 – 19:00). Each day is reserved for one theme, beginning with a keynote and followed immediately by Q&A. The keynotes will be followed by academic panels, where participants present their research. A third keynote will close the conference at the end of the second day. The official languages of the conference are English and Spanish.

Theme 1: The narratives that divide and unite us

25 November, 2021

We open the critical debate about the grand narratives that sustain hegemonic visions of peace and post-conflict development in Colombia and the alternative ideas that emerge in their shadows. As historical examples of peacebuilding in Colombia illustrate, the vocabulary of these narratives is not neutral, or apolitical, but may reiterate divisive binaries that linger from colonial and militarized thinking, such as: developed/underdeveloped, civilization/wilderness, center/periphery and conservation/development, among others. The narratives and language we use to understand conflict, peace and development not only shape how we conceive the past, but also order the present and govern the future. Suggested topics for contributions are:

• An interrogation of the vocabularies of peace and conflict: Rural Colombia is often described either as the dangerous place where armed conflict "actually happens" , or as a place of resistance to neoliberal capitalism and violence. What does the vocabulary of the peace process, centered around terms such as victims (víctimas), human rights defenders (defensores de derechos humanos), communities (comunidades), peasants (campesinos), or territories (territorios), reveal about the potentials and limits of imagining and practicing peace? What are there different languages of (violent) conflict and reconciliation? What qualifies a language as violent or peaceful? What concepts, words and ideas do we need in order to talk about a radical project of peace based on justice and egalitarian relations?
• What historical understanding is reproduced by contemporary discourses of peace and development? Old conflicts haunt the political present, while new ones emerge. What role do the narratives the divide and unite us play in the polarized political context of postaccord Colombia?
• Narratives of development and security are prominent in the peace accords. Rather than connecting with the stories of those affected by violence, these narratives often reproduce the language of international academic and policy communities. Which counter-narratives of peace and development can we observe on the ground? How do narratives of peace, victimhood, justice include and exclude?

Theme 2: Knowing peace

26 November, 2021

Peace is not just a field of practical intervention but also of multi-disciplinary knowledge production. The epistemic field of peace is not only informed by decades of peace and conflict studies, but also the psychology of reconciliation, the military strategies of counterinsurgency, the technologies for accessing natural resources, as well as policies to conserve the environment. This epistemic field is inherently political, because it ultimately decides upon what kind of knowledge is admissible for building peace. This theme reflects on knowledge production on the 2016 Peace Accord and the role that critical scholarship and activism can play in diversifying knowledge. Suggested topics for contributions are:

• How is knowledge production governed in peacebuilding and/or development interventions? What tensions and conflicts between knowledge on peace and development can we observe? What space is given to alternative epistemologies and ways to think about development in the 2016 peace process? On this matter, we explicitly welcome discussions on indigenous, afro-Colombian and peasant constructions of the territory, the symbolism of coca cultivation and eradication, as well as controversies around the neoliberal script of extractivism and land grabbing.
• In academia, we must ensure that we speak truth to power, or we risk becoming tacitly complicit. How can we make visible the biases and potential pitfalls of knowledge that we ourselves help to create about peace in Colombia? We invite critical self-reflections concerning scholars’ positionality on matters of class, gender, citizenship, etc.
• How is international expert knowledge accommodated with the politics of peace in Colombia and the demands of local communities? Can we speak of hybrid regimes of knowledge and how is power mediated between them?

The organizer

The conference is hosted by the School of Global Studies (SGS) at the University of Gothenburg. The School of Global Studies has a strong tradition of research on peace and development, always with an eye on critical perspectives and the interdisciplinary entanglement with, among others, environmental social science, social anthropology, and human rights.