More-than-Human Entanglements in Conflict and Peacebuilding: Implications for Justice in Colombia's Transitional Restorative Justice Process

Aleithia Low (United States and Singapore)

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Montes de María subregion, Colombia, this article examines how campesino communities navigate the overlapping legacies of armed conflict, ecological transformation, and Colombia’s peace process. Using participant observation, autoethnography, and archival research, the research foregrounds campesino practices of care for land, seeds, and forests, highlighting how more-than-human agency—embodied in soils, waters, and cultivated ecologies—shapes memory, survival, and territorial restoration. A creative writing section, developed in dialogue with campesino narratives and scholarly and archival research, extends the ethnographic analysis by evoking the sensory and affective dimensions of human–ecological relations, offering an alternative mode of witnessing and repair. These practices complicate state-centered transitional justice frameworks, which often privilege legal and institutional mechanisms while neglecting ecological dimensions of harm and recovery. The findings suggest that campesino-led initiatives expand the meaning of restorative justice by embedding it in everyday struggles for land, autonomy, and coexistence, and that sustainable peace in Colombia requires integrating human and more-than-human relations into the pursuit of justice and reconciliation.