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

How does peace get done? An Incomplete Peace focuses on interactions between the state government, the international community, and local communities as they attempt to build peace once again after the 2016 Peace Accords between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Hope prevailed in the immediate years after the signing of the divisive peace accords, as different communities and populations within Colombia imagined a new future. But five years later, it is now clear that rather than ending the conflict, the accords and their implementation refigured the context for ongoing violence. This book examines the bureaucracy of peace in Colombia, the ways that the international community has shaped this bureaucracy, and how marginalized populations utilize strategies of resilience and self-help in the face of everyday violences committed by the state. From the halls of the British, Colombian and United States’ Congresses, to rural communities in the Pacific Coast of Colombia, this book interrogates the complex and ever-changing relationships between various state and non-state actors which determine how peace is made.

I argue that when we only look at top-down, elite-led processes, we cannot see the complete picture and fail to imagine different possibilities of what peacebuilding can and should look like. In contrast to a conventional top-down perspective, I examine four different communities and organizations in Colombia and their international and national relationships with humanitarian organizations and transnational solidarity networks. The reality of many Colombians far from the capital city of Bogotá is that they have not experienced significant changes in their lives because of the accords, and even less so as time goes on. While there were initially some important institutional gains, such as the work of the transitional justice tribunal court, there have also emerged distinct challenges.

Since January 2016, Colombian think tank INDEPAZ estimates that over 1,600 human rights activists and signatories to the accords have been assassinated for their work in implementing the accords. Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and campesino activists are particularly targeted for their advocacy work on themes such as rights to land return, eradication and replacement of illicit crops, resistance to illegal mining, and environmental protections. These activists are a part of the national territory that the state government refuses to ‘see.’

Colombia has embarked on over 30 internal peace processes and attempts in less than a century, from the late 1940s to 2020– more than any other country in the world. After each of these attempts or processes, the violence which accompanied those different periods and processes do not disappear, much to the chagrin of the local, national, and international peacebuilding communities. Rather, they transform the political, social, and economic landscape in which peace is trying to be established. This project engages with these transformations of violence and reactions to them, operating under the constructivist assumption that the relationships between the local, national, and international stakeholders working to build peace, as well as their relationships with actors engaging in direct violence, are mutually constitutive and ever evolving.

This monograph is organized thematically and answers questions about transnational solidarity, the implications of international involvement in grassroots peacebuilding processes, and alternative security networks. These themes transcend the specifics of Colombia to provide a wider intervention into understanding shifting power relations between regions, states, and citizens that materialize in the local lives of everyday people.