Civil Resistance and Peacebuilding: The Experience of the Peasant Worker Association of the Carare River (Chapter in "Civil Resistance and Violent Conflict in Latin America")
Publisher: Springer
Author(s): Esperanza Hernandez Delgado and Claudia Patricia Roa Mendoza
Date: 2019
Topics: Governance, Renewable Resources
Countries: Colombia
This chapter analyses the successful experience of civil resistance of the Peasant Worker Association of the Carare River (ATCC) in the face of the Colombian internal armed conflict. It emphasizes its pragmatic and defensive character, the methods that it has employed and its outcomes. It portrays this experience as a genuine grassroots process led by farmers, which has achieved significant successes through civil resistance in spite of the high level of violent conflict generated by the protracted civil war in Colombia. It also highlights the meaning of this process for peacebuilding and its combination with conflict transformation practices such as mediation in disputes related to the internal armed conflict. This process, which has taken place for over 30 years, made the ATCC worthy of the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (Right Livelihood Award) in 1991. This chapter is based on extensive fieldwork and uses theories of peacebuilding and civil resistance.