Building ‘Graveyard Peace’? An inside-out perspective on the violent legacies of five years peacebuilding in Colombia

The building of peace, ideally, should be a means for ending violence.

Yet, the current Colombian peace process is only the most recent example of how peacebuilding projects—even context-sensitive, inclusive, and homegrown ones—occur not only amidst violence, but are also deeply entangled in, or productive of, continuing violence.

We draw on the Colombian case to better understand this fundamental aspect of the lingering crisis of peacebuilding as it plays out on the ground in the institutionalized and granular practice of building peace.

Our project aims to analyse how and why peacebuilding has itself become a conflict dynamic through exploring the question: how and why have Colombian peacebuilding interventions aggravated societal conflicts and spurred political violence?

We adopt an ‘inside-out’ perspective, tapping the experiences of peacebuilders who have worked in, or in close cooperation with the institutional infrastructure designed by the 2016 peace agreement.

Taking the wealth of knowledge, experience, and insight of Colombian peace professionals as its central vantage point, this project produces backstage insights into how a peace drawn on paper is practiced, and how these practices may produce unintended, conflict-aggravating effects.

The insights of our research collaborators, largely absent from the reports of monitoring research institutions, also build the foundation of a wider dialogue that we facilitate among peacebuilding experts in the Global South.