Land and Peacebuilding: The Case of the Peacebuilding Process in Colombia through the Peasant Reserve Zones (Chapter in "A Requiem for Peacebuilding?")
Publisher: Springer
Author(s): Cinthya Carillo Perdomo
Date: 2020
Topics: Governance, Land, Livelihoods, Renewable Resources
Countries: Colombia
In order to answer if the Peasant Reserve Zones, one of the most important projects on rural development of the last decades in Colombia and the most recent expression of peasants’ aspiration for territory, are a peacebuilding tool, Cinthya Carrillo Perdomo addresses the pessimistic assessments of the international peacebuilding field. The author contends that other types of decentralized cooperation equally directed to ‘build peace’ are taking the place of international peacebuilding. She states that the decline of the main approach of the liberal peacebuilding paradigm translates into the empowerment of other and numerous actors and the boost of a variety of approaches to peace and methods to achieve it, like the inclusion of land issues. This chapter thereby illustrates the above-mentioned dynamic through the case of the implementation of the Peace Agreement, signed in 2016 between the Colombian government and the guerrilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the inclusion of the Peasant Reserve Zones as a peacebuilding tool, which she describes as embodying an auto-affirmative approach that challenges the capitalistic presuppositions of international peacebuilding.