“The Campesino Was Born for the Campo”: A Multispecies Approach to Territorial Peace in Colombia

Abstract

I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with a social movement, the Peaceful Process of Reconciliation and Integration of the Alta Montaña, to explore practices of peacebuilding in rural Colombia. I use a multispecies lens to interrogate the discourse of territorial peace (paz territorial), revealing the ways in which both violence and peace intertwine human and nonhuman lives and relations in the Alta Montaña. Through analysis of the everyday assemblages forged between people, animals, forests, and crops, I demonstrate how the multispecies approach to peacebuilding found in the Alta Montaña sharpens our understanding of the mutually reinforcing processes of violent conflict and environmental degradation. As a result, I argue that multispecies anthropological analysis also enables a capacious conceptualization of peace, one that recognizes the full life-worlds of people as they seek, in their everyday lives, to reweave-and create anew-the social and ecological fabric of their communities. [violence, displacement, multispecies, peacebuilding, Colombia] RESUMEN Me baso en el trabajo de campo etnográfico con un movimiento social, el Proceso Pacífico de Reconciliación e Integración de la Alta Montaña, para explorar las prácticas de construcción de paz en Colombia rural. Uso un lente de multiespecies para interrogar el discurso de paz territorial, revelando las maneras en las cuales tanto la violencia como la paz entrelazan vidas y relaciones humanas y no humanas en la Alta Montaña. A través del análisis de ensamblajes cotidianos forjados entre personas, animales, bosques y cultivos, demuestro cómo la aproximación de multiespecies a la construcción de paz encontrada en la Alta Montaña aclara nuestra comprensión de los procesos mutuamente reforzadores del conflicto violento y la degradación ambiental. Como resultado, argumento que el análisis antropológico de multiespecies también hace posible una conceptualización amplia de la paz, una que reconoce los mundos de vida completos de personas en la medida que buscan, en sus vidas diarias, retejer-y crear de nuevo-la fábrica social y ecológica de sus comunidades. [violencia, desplazamiento, multiespecies, construcción de paz, Colombia].

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…Elsewhere Stefanie Graeter () takes up a related task: her chemo‐ethnography, to extend the term used by Shapiro and Kirksey (), considers how a project that tests lead contamination that is run by the Catholic Church in Peru calls a form of biological citizenship into being by acting as though rights that are not (yet) there will be in the future, provided they can produce the expertise and evidence that might materialize them. In another approach to the political urgency of more‐than‐human relations, Angela Lederach () considers the work of a peace and reconciliation movement in Columbia. The movement emphasizes the need to repair the environmental damage that has resulted from decades of human violence; Lederach argues that its efforts demonstrate the need to attend to “an ecology of mutual relations of care” in conceptualizations of peacebuilding (590).…”

Conflict ecologies: Connecting political ecology and peace and conflict studies

“…Crosspollination seems all the more important because many conflicts are now interpreted through the lens of 'geo-politics' -the politics of earth itself. Further, this is important in the context of the rise of the socioenvironmental justice agenda, fostered by grassroots movements and inter-governmental appeals to develop more socially just and environmentally sustainable relations across the human and non-human world, including in terms of peacebuilding (Lederach 2017).…”

Cultivating Alternatives to Authoritarian Populism in Amazonia

“…The making and unmaking of political subjectivities, we show, are outcomes of acts of cultivation that involve not only humans but also soils, seeds, and plants (Bear et al. ; Lederach ; Lyons ; Moore ).…”

“…We advance these debates drawing on multispecies studies to argue that "the people" is never constituted-or challenged-in an ecological vacuum. The making and unmaking of political subjectivities, we show, are outcomes of acts of cultivation that involve not only humans but also soils, seeds, and plants (Bear et al 2015;Lederach 2017;Lyons 2016;Moore 2015).…”

“…Thus, to open alternatives to authoritarian populism is not a struggle against produtores that could be won by supporting one “people” over another. Rather, it entails composing novel ecological relations that may bring humans and nonhumans together in mutualistic relations (Lederach ; Lyons ).…”