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Peace does not come from them Divergent in Colombia’s ‘peace’ conjunctur

Peace does not come from them: Divergent territorialities in Colombia’s ‘peace’ conjuncture. Speaker: Christopher Courtheyn Department of Urban Studies University of the Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia Abstract: Debates about peace are pulsating across Colombia given the 'peace process' between the Colombian government and FARC guerrillas. While many state and social movement actors support the peace process as a step towards deescalating political violence and ensuring state-guaranteed rights. I argue that the country’s struggle for peace is undergirded by antagonistic territorializations regarding extractivism: President Juan Manuel Santos celebrates that the peace process will advance export-oriented mining and agribusiness central to his national development plan, while many Indigenous and Afro-descendant campesino groups protest extractivism and insist that peace requires communities’ territorial autonomy and food sovereignty. Inspired by the San José de Apartadó Peace Community's peace praxis, and building from two emergent subfields of peace studies-peace geographies and trans-rational peace research-this paper proposes a re-conceptualization of territorial peace as ecological dignity to subvert state-centric notions of peace. Biography: Christopher Courtheyn is a political geographer who studies how racialized communities in Latin America subjected to political violence re-create community spaces to create peace. He completed his Ph.D. in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Christopher is currently an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá.

Event Sponsor
Matsunaga Institute for Peace & Department of Geography, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Jose Barzola, (808) 956-6433, uhip@hawaii.edu,