An Incomplete Peace examines local, national, and international peacebuilding communities in the context of Colombia following the 2016 Havana Accords.

An Incomplete Peace examines how peace is made, and unmade, in Colombia after the 2016 peace accords between the Colombian government and the leftist guerrilla organization the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Drawing on more than four years of ethnographic fieldwork throughout the country and hundreds of interviews, it argues that peacebuilding is not a technical project implemented by the state, but a contested field of governance in which communities, bureaucrats, armed actors, and international institutions all struggle to define what peace means and who it is for.

At the center of the book is a stark tension: despite Colombia’s innovation in peace and transitional justice stemming from the 2016 accords, the state continues to reproduce long-standing patterns of exclusion and militarization. Bureaucratic reforms are layered over structures that have historically treated marginalized communities in the country—Afro-Colombian, Indigenous, and campesino—as peripheral to the project of national political and economic construction. Even in the post-accord period, state violence has not disappeared; it has been reconfigured through bureaucratic frameworks.

Against this backdrop, the book illuminates the work of communities who build peace from below. Through everyday forms of civilian governance, communities construct their own institutions of justice and survival. These are political projects that reveal alternative understandings of legitimacy and authority, challenging assumptions that the state is the natural or primary site of peacebuilding.

International and transnational actors further complicate this landscape. Donor agencies, NGOs, religious organizations, diplomats, and solidarity networks bring resources, visibility, and pressure, but also can simultaneously reproduce hierarchies and impose competing definitions of peace. Communities navigate these relationships with strategically: sometimes leveraging them, and sometimes resisting them.

The book concludes by placing Colombia’s current moment in conversation with Northern Ireland twenty-five years after the Good Friday Agreement (1998). By placing Colombia’s current moment in dialogue with Northern Ireland, the book shows how time exposes both the promises and the profound limitations of state-centric peacebuilding. In doing so, it highlights the often overlooked work of communities who assemble peace from below within evolving landscapes of unequal power and ever-shifting security configurations.

Ultimately, the book argues that sustainable peace cannot be understood through the state alone. Instead, it emerges through negotiations across multiple, overlapping, and unequal systems of governance. By centering the perspectives and practices of communities who must navigate these systems every day, the book offers a more nuanced and politically honest account of what peace means in contexts where violence has transformed, not disappeared.