Geopolitics

ISSN: 1465-0045 (Print) 1557-3028 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fgeo20

“Territorial Peace”: The Emergence of a Concept in

Colombia’s Peace Negotiations

Heriberto Cairo, Ulrich Oslender, Carlo Emilio Piazzini Suárez, Jerónimo Ríos,
Sara Koopman, Vladimir Montoya Arango, Flavio Bladimir Rodríguez Muñoz
& Liliana Zambrano Quintero

To cite this article: Heriberto Cairo, Ulrich Oslender, Carlo Emilio Piazzini Suárez, Jerónimo
Ríos, Sara Koopman, Vladimir Montoya Arango, Flavio Bladimir Rodríguez Muñoz & Liliana
Zambrano Quintero (2018): “Territorial Peace”: The Emergence of a Concept in Colombia’s Peace
Negotiations, Geopolitics, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2018.1425110

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1425110

Published online: 29 Jan 2018.

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GEOPOLITICS
https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1425110

“Territorial Peace”: The Emergence of a Concept in

Colombia’s Peace Negotiations
Heriberto Cairo a, Ulrich Oslender b, Carlo Emilio Piazzini Suárez c,
Jerónimo Ríos e, Sara Koopman d, Vladimir Montoya Arango c,
Flavio Bladimir Rodríguez Muñoz f, and Liliana Zambrano Quintero g
a
Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain;
b
Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA;
c
Instituto de Estudios Regionales, Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia; dSchool of Peace and
Conflict Studies, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA; eFacultad de Administración, Finanzas y
Ciencias Económicas, Universidad EAN, Bogotá, Colombia; fFacultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas,
Universidad Externado de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia; gInstituto de Derechos Humanos Pedro Arrupe,
Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, Spain

ABSTRACT
The essays collected in this forum discuss the political geogra-
phy of the recent Colombian Peace Agreements, which aim to
put an end to one of the most long lasting armed conflicts in
Latin America. Central to many arguments in this accord is the
concept of “territorial peace”. From a range of different aca-
demic disciplines and perspectives, the authors of this Forum
explore this concept, focusing on its genealogy during the
period of peace negotiations (2012-2016), its importance in
the content of the agreement, and some of its connected
dimensions, in particular to notions of ethno-territorial, sex
and gender issues, as well as formal party politics.

Introduction to the Forum

Heriberto Cairo, Ulrich Oslender, and Carlo Emilio Piazzini
On November 24, 2016, the government of Colombia and the country’s largest
guerrilla organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas
Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo, FARC-EP) signed a
historic peace accord: the “General Agreement for the Termination of the Conflict
and the Construction of a Stable and Lasting Peace.” Following the rejection of a
previously agreed accord in a plebiscite in October of that year and a number of
subsequent revisions, this agreement marks the formal end of the longest-running
armed conflict in Latin America, which was born at the beginning of the Cold War
and survived its end by more than a quarter of a century.
The geopolitical relevance of this development alone is immense, yet what we
want to focus on in this Forum is a particular factor in this peace agreement.

CONTACT Heriberto Cairo [email protected] Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad

Complutense de Madrid, Madrid 28223, Spain
© 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 H. CAIRO ET AL.

Central to many arguments in the final accord is a notion that has been termed
paz territorial, or “territorial peace.” For the first time, the territorial aspects of
Colombia’s conflict have not only been openly addressed by both sides but also
conceptualized as a central problem that needs to be resolved, with considerable
thought dedicated to what “territory” means to a diverse range of actors. That is
to say, different interpretations of what territory means to whom – the state, the
guerrillas, peasant associations, ethnic minorities, etc. – are openly acknowl-
edged and given a crucial role in “the construction of a stable and lasting peace.”
The centrality of the territorial to the Colombian conflict may seem obvious to
most observers, yet the explicit focus on “territorial peace” is a novel approach in
conflict resolution processes that deserves special attention, as it provides new
opportunities not only for peace-making but also for re-thinking the state, as
well as re-imagining the nation. Whether this new discursive focus leads to
concrete, tangible results is another question, and one we also speculate on in
this Forum. Yet, clearly this explicitly territorial discourse marks a significant
development in conflict resolution processes, which we believe to be of wider
geopolitical interest beyond the Colombian case study it represents. We want to
be clear though that we do not intend to revisit here the history of Colombia’s
internal conflict – this would clearly go beyond the scope of this Forum – but
focus on the particular territorial aspect of the peace negotiations.
This Forum thus explores in depth this novel concept of “territorial
peace.” It examines its genealogy during the period of peace negotiations
(2012–2016), its significance in the content of the agreement, as well as some
of its connected dimensions, in particular to notions of sex and gender issues,
formal party politics, and in relation to ethnic minorities. As a collective we
explore spatial tensions and processes of territorial appropriations and dis-
possession that lie at the centre of the Colombian conflict and that need to be
addressed in its resolution.1 This includes an examination of state policies of
“territorial ordering” (ordenamiento territorial), the establishment of “pea-
sant reserve zones” (zonas de reserva campesina), and the consolidation of
ethnic territories of black and indigenous communities. Together, the con-
tributors explore the multi-dimensional relations between space, politics and
society that underlay the notion of territorial peace. There is no way to be
sure of the success of the peace process, but the discussion of its conceptua-
lization is a meaningful contribution to its viability.

Territorial Peace: A Fuzzy Concept

Heriberto Cairo and Jerónimo Ríos
Perhaps one of the best qualifiers from which to approach the scope and mean-
ing of the concept of “territorial peace” is the one of fuzzy and/or polysemic. As
we shall see below, territorial peace means different things to different political
 GEOPOLITICS 3

actors, to a large extent because the peace agreement does not limit its meaning
specifically. Therefore, rather than parting from a fixed definition of territorial
peace, we examine the voices of the actors of this specific political process: the
negotiation, signing and implementation of a peace agreement in Colombia.2
Sergio Jaramillo, High Commissioner for Peace in the Colombian
Government, was the first to make reference to “territorial peace,”3 in a
conference in 2014:

What I want to emphasize is that we have to take advantage of the moment of

peace to align the incentives and to develop the institutions in the territory that
over time will assert the rights of all equally. In order to move in that direction, the
territorial approach must be complemented, first because the conflict has affected
some territories more than others, and because that change will not be achieved if
the efforts are not articulated and the population in those territories is not
mobilized around peace. That is what I call territorial peace (Jaramillo 2014,
translation here and in other quotes is ours).

In some way this definition could be linked to the notion of pax democratica,
not so much in the sense of reducing the probability of war between demo-
cratic states – as proposed by Doyle (2000) or Gibler (2007) – but to point
out the necessary democratic consolidation of the Colombian state in order
to achieve a stable peace. Referring to territorial peace in Colombia implies
an overcoming of the social, economic, political and cultural conditions that
have endured violence for years, always under a deficit of local democracy. In
other words, territorial peace, as well as being integrated into the Galtungian
ideal aspiration of what is known as “positive peace” (Galtung 1969), is a
commitment to sustainability and to the future.
The same notion is shared by the FARC-EP, as expressed, for example, in an
interview we conducted in 2017 with one of the leaders of the guerrilla’s
negotiating team: “Our concept of territorial peace, although it has particula-
rities, responds to the idea of sustainable peace in the sense that the aim is to
build peace from within the regions.” (Interview with Jesus Santrich, 2017).
Thus, speaking of territorial peace implies accepting a kind of rural–urban
cleavage by which the conflict increased, especially during the last decade, in
the periphery of the country (Ríos 2017).
A complementary vision can be found in the discourse that the police and
the military raised about territorial peace. It is widely recognized that during
decades both were absent from significant parts of the national territory. It is
precisely for this reason that territorial peace can also be understood as the
return of the police to its traditional functions of public and citizen security,
and to a closer relationship with the citizens of those rural contexts that were
most hit by the internal armed conflict:

For the police [territorial peace] is simply the return to what we, in our conception,
call rural citizen security […]. In this case, the return of the police to what has to
4 H. CAIRO ET AL.

do with the countryside, to the rural, to work with peasants, not only to generate
security, not only to combat criminal phenomena that arise through or after a
post-conflict, but also to accompany that peasant in everything that has to do with
rural development (Interview with Ricardo Restrepo, Mayor General and
Subdirector General de la Policía Nacional, 2017).

However, beyond the approach of rights, necessary sustainability of peace, or its

association with security and control of territory, the fact is that a more ambitious
meaning associated with territorial peace would be one that has to do with an
effective process of decentralization and strengthening of local institutions. This,
however, is not necessary according to the political opposition to the process,
either because, as the former Minister of Defense, points out: “Unfortunately in
Colombia, it is the deficit of law enforcement, more than the deficit of the exercise
of the presence of the State in the whole territory that explains this conflict in large
part” (Interview with Marta Lucía Ramírez, 2017); or because it opens a window of
opportunity for the interests of the FARC-EP, as the former Attorney General of
the Nation argues, when referring to territorial peace as “a political threat and
ultimately, it is handing over part of the national territory” (Interview with
Alejandro Ordóñez, 2017).
Yet despite the opponents’ discourse, most of the actors who have negotiated the
peace agreement share an understanding of territorial peace as an instrument of
necessary decentralization. The government does it timidly, assuming that decen-
tralization, as the High Commissioner for Peace in the Colombian Government
warns, “must be a subsequent process, which gives sustainability to territorial
peace” (Interview with Sergio Jaramillo, 2017). The Chief of the Government’s
negotiating team with the FARC, poses something similar, understanding that “the
right path is still to seek bolder goals in decentralization without prejudice to
certain measures, controls and correctives” (Interview with Humberto de la Calle,
ex-minister and ex-vice-president of the Republic, 2017)
On the other hand, according to the peace agreement, the key factor that serves
as the decentralization effort – or better “deconcentration” of the state – rests on
the Territorial Approach Development Plans (PDET by its abbreviation in
Spanish). These are the instruments that channel the territorial dimension of
peace through resources and lines of intervention on the necessities that have
been identified by the municipalities that are most affected by the internal armed
conflict. Something that, for the FARC-EP, is only a starting point for a much more
complex and ambitious territorial restructuring process that must integrate greater
political participation, and is even closer to particular notions of the indigenous
worldview such as the sumak kawsay or progressive political philosophies such as
the Ecuadorian Good Living or buen vivir:
The concept of decentralization is very important in the vision of peace that we
had […] because all this has to be consulted with the communities. The govern-
ment cannot just impose its projects. It is necessary to talk to local authorities,
municipal authorities, the community action committees or the association of
 GEOPOLITICS 5

boards to articulate the PDETs, and in the case of the substitution of coca crops,
alternative plans. […] Thus, in our vision, in our conceptualization, territorial
peace, in addition to the consonance of intercultural and interethnic exchange, is
based on the exchange with mother earth; it is from that point that we introduced
the concept of “good living,” which is a derivation of the Aymara and Quechua
concept sumak kawsay (Interview with Jesus Santrich, 2017).

Based on the above, it could be said that the characteristic that best defines
territorial peace, as stated at the beginning, is its imprecision. However, it is
precisely its lax nature that makes it possible to understand territorial peace
as a yearning for prosperity and opportunities for the regions that, more than
abandoned by the state, were hardest hit by the armed conflict.
Thus, the provisions of rights, territorial control, citizen security, sustain-
ability, decentralization or even sumak kawsay are elements that would inte-
grate the melting pot of readings to which territorial peace invites. A territorial
peace that, in any case, offers multiple polysemies, more restrictive in the case
of opponents of the peace agreement and wider in the case of the FARC-EP.
In any case, far from the restricted reading that reduces territorial peace to
a handover of weapons by the guerrillas and the control of the national
territory by the Police and the Army, depending on how the cluster of forces
and political volitions are resolved, it may imply the strengthening of local
institutional structures that have been most affected by the conflict or, as the
FARC-EP proposes, an ideal setting for addressing much deeper structural
and cultural transformations.

Beyond the Countryside: Territorial Focus in the Process of

Negotiation and Implementation of the Peace Agreement in
Colombia
Carlo Emilio Piazzini
In November 2016, the FARC-EP and the Government of Colombia signed
the “General Agreement for the Termination of the Conflict and the
Construction of a Stable and Lasting Peace”. Three focuses were proposed
as axes structuring the agreement: differential, gender, and territorial. The
latter is considered as a condition to recognize the country’s economic,
social, cultural and environmental diversity and particularity. It was also
seen as a guarantee for a more participative implementation of what is stated
in the agreement (FARC-EP y Gobierno de Colombia 2016, 6). However,
throughout the document the territorial is referred almost exclusively to the
agrarian issue: the problem of distribution, tenure, and production of land in
the countryside (FARC-EP y Gobierno de Colombia 2012, 62). It is precisely
in relation to Point 1 on Integral Rural Reform (Reforma Rural Integral –
RRI) when the final agreement refers to territory:
6 H. CAIRO ET AL.

RRI conceives of rural territory as a socio-historical scenario with social and

cultural diversity, in which the communities – men and women – play a leading
role in defining the improvement of their living conditions and in defining the
country’s development within a vision of urban-rural integration (FARC-EP y
Gobierno de Colombia 2016, 10).

In this definition two aspects call attention: first, an understanding of terri-

tory as a scenario, and second, a vision of territorial development oriented
towards the integration of rural and urban spaces. The first aspect treats
territory as a passive entity, as a biophysical support and as the context in
which human activities are developed; a conception that is in tune with a
notion of land as resource and object of economic property, which is present
in much of the agreement. In these terms, simply adding “socio-historical” to
this “scenario” does not seem sufficient to conclude that we are facing a full
understanding of territory as social production. The idea of territory as a
simple container of resources and people is prone to a naturalization of the
spatial formations that organize society, since it doesn’t take into account
that it is an active factor in the production of social dynamics. The second
aspect is to a certain extent different in that it includes the urban issue.
However, in the development of the strategies defined in the agreement, the
intention to achieve a balanced and integrated territorial development
between the rural and the urban is limited to a series of measures mainly
oriented to the rural.
In general, a scheme operates in the agreement that opposes rural periph-
eries to urban centres; a scheme that has worked in Colombia at least since
the nineteenth century to understand and guide the process of the territorial,
cultural and political conformation of the nation-state (Serje 2005). During
the recent negotiation process, the parties at the table looked at the country
from both sides of that equation. The perception of the territorial as some-
thing peripheral and forgotten of the centrality of the state corresponds to the
position of the FARC-EP; whereas the Colombian Government articulates its
position from a metropolitan perspective. Talking about “territorial peace,”
Sergio Jaramillo, High Commissioner for Peace, referred to territories as
spaces that had not been properly filled by the state’s institutions: “We
have to fill the space, the territory must be institutionalized” (Jaramillo
2014). So the expansion of the conditions of democracy and welfare that
are supposed to prevail in the cities is part of both: the ideal posed by the
insurgent group and that by the government. In this sense, the problem does
not seem so much the territorial model of the Colombian state, but that the
state has not filled the peripheral spaces.
Similar conceptions to those that underlie the territorial focus of the
agreement have frequently been enunciated by scholars of Colombia´s con-
flict and violence. As has been suggested by several authors in studies on the
armed conflict in Colombia, territories have been treated as rural scenarios or
 GEOPOLITICS 7

repositories in which war was waged and as geostrategic spaces for armed
groups, as well as marginalized peripheries of a centralist state in risk of
fragmentation because of war (Blair 2004; González González 2009;
Velásquez and Peña. 2005). In particular, this can be seen in the final report
of the Historical Commission of the Conflict and its Victims (Comisión de
Historia del Conflicto y sus Víctimas 2015).
Addressing the socio-spatial dimension of the armed conflict and the
challenges for overcoming it, a number of factors arise that go beyond the
territorial focus as it has been raised in Havana: First, the causes and effects
of armed conflict have also taken place in urban and suburban areas. The
forced displacement of populations has been one important factor for
the growth of the urban population in Colombia since the second half of
the twentieth century (Ruíz 2008). Moreover, urban militias and other groups
have connected the rural armed conflict with the spaces of the city. And yet,
the agreement does not propose any concrete measures to deal with urban
spaces or to rethink urban–rural relations.
Second, during its historical trajectory the insurgent groups have inter-
acted in and influenced the very configuration of the state. Therefore, more
than dealing with the abandonment or territorial fragmentation of the state,
it is necessary to enable approaches that are concerned with a more integral
perspective of territory, with fundamental consequences of territorial orga-
nization (Hernández 2016), and an additional issue of equal weight: the
country’s electoral geography. In this perspective, the implementation of
the Havana Accord is an opportunity to deal with crucial issues that were
avoided or only tangentially addressed by the legislation on territorial order-
ing derived from the 1991 constitution.
Finally, the war has often radically transformed a wide range of relation-
ships with perceived, conceived, and lived spaces (sensu Lefebvre 1991, 38) in
a way that transcends the theme of land and territory as contested reposi-
tories of resources for the economy or war. Thus, there are a series of
practices and processes that must be considered when trying to understand
the geographies of war and peace: the sense of place and its links with
memories and imaginaries for the future; and the networks which connect
places and territories with other spaces in an economically, politically, and
culturally globalized world. In these socio-spatial dynamics, combats, the
establishment of territories of war and the displacement of people markedly
affected the natural-cultural landscapes and the associated sense of belong-
ing, as well as the dynamics of social interaction that were severely limited by
impassable boundaries.
In general, it can be said that in Colombia, both in academic and political
discourses, for decades, a hyper-territorialized view of the spaces of the past,
the present, and the future has prevailed. A view that needs to be trans-
formed by a conception of territory that fully understands it both as a
8 H. CAIRO ET AL.

product and as a producer of the social, that does not ignore the importance
of other space formations such as places, landscapes, and borders, and
recognize that many of its conjugations cannot be noticed if only the centre-
periphery or urban-rural dual approach is used.

A Plural and Territorial Peace

Sara Koopman
The Colombian peace accord took 4 years to negotiate because the parties
had such different ideas about what peace meant and required. They
finally agreed that peace meant different things to different groups, parti-
cularly those already marginalized because of age, ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, and other categories that suffered differently during the war,
and thus needed targeted support to experience peace and security. They
called this a “differential approach” (enfoque diferencial), and from the first
page of the accords it is named alongside what is called the territorial
approach. Both are presented as ways of creating more equality in a deeply
unequal country.
Colombians as a whole also had trouble agreeing on what peace meant and
what it required, and the original peace accord was narrowly voted down in a
referendum on October 2. The differential approach played a key role in the
vote, as well as in the renegotiation of a modified accord. Bias against
measures for greater gender and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender
(LGBT) equity also intersected with the spatialization of race in Colombia,
such that the impact of the territorial and the differential approaches cannot
be fully understood separately. The analysis of this particular case offers
insights into the complexity of the relationship between peace and space
more generally, as well as both the importance and the difficulty of a more
inclusive peace.
Although women make up 52% of the population of Colombia, and 40%
of FARC fighters, when negotiations began there were no women on the
government team, and only one woman on the FARC team: Tanja Nijmeijer,
a Dutch guerrilla, who was not taken seriously, at least by the media. Because
of pressure from Colombian women’s groups, in November of 2013 two
women were named to the government team, but they had no experience in
gender issues and did not consider themselves feminists. Pressure continued,
and nearly a year later, in September of 2014 a gender subcommission was
named. It did not just address gender but recommended a differential
approach. This recommendation was made at the end of July 2016, less
than a month before negotiations were finalized on August 24. The vote on
the accords was held October 2. This left only a little more than a month to
inform the public about it.
 GEOPOLITICS 9

Since the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing it has become

widely accepted in UN discussions that when discrimination exists, treating
everyone the same will not lead to equality but rather preserve the status quo.
This can now be seen in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), with
their call to leave no one behind. SDG 17.18 calls for closer tracking of
inequalities by age, gender, race, and other variables so as to address them.
Equity requires acknowledging difference and providing appropriate repara-
tions to those who have been discriminated against, so as to create conditions
of equality. To argue that conflict affects women differently is not a new
argument (Meertens and Stoller 2001). The UN Security Council passed
Resolution 1325 in 2000, calling for an incorporation of gender perspectives
in peace building. But although there has been a slowly growing use of a
gender perspective in other national peace accords, the Colombian ones are
the first to explicitly say that they take a gender approach. No other accord
has used a broader differential approach, though Nepal’s is grounded in the
inclusion of the excluded (Bell 2015).
These are also the first peace accords in the world to talk specifically about
building peace for LGBT people,4 and they describe creating safety for LGBT
organizing as part of what peace means. LGBT people have also been targeted
in other conflicts, but in Colombia they were attacked as part of how
paramilitaries established social control (CNMH 2015, 181). Of all of the
various differential categories, it was sexual orientation and gender identity
that was particularly controversial.
This was shaped by a backlash in Colombia against several other recent
LGBT rights wins. The constitutional court legalized adoption by gay couples
in 2015, gay marriage in April of 2016, and mandated coexistence manuals in
schools (to combat bullying) in July of 2016. The Minister of Education at the
time, Gina Parody, was the first ever openly gay cabinet member. The
Christian right argued that she was trying to impose a so-called “gender
ideology” so that girls would no longer be feminine nor boys masculine.
Because of this pressure the President temporarily pulled her out of her
position – and bizarrely named her chair of the campaign for the Yes vote
for the October 2 referendum. The political right used this to argue that there
was a gender ideology at work in the accords, and even to say that the
accords were trying to impose a “homosexual dictatorship.”
Much like the Trump and Brexit votes, the polls were wildly off, predicting
a comfortable majority in favour of the peace accord in the referendum.
Perhaps as a result, turnout was low, 62.6% of eligible voters stayed home,
and the No vote won by just under 0.3%, or 53,900 votes out of 13,066,025
ballots cast. The Christian right claimed that one in three no voters were
evangelicals voting to protect so-called “family values” (Cosoy 2016), a code
widely used around the world to signify the patriarchal family and LGBT
antagonism. This was reflected in that the first people that President Santos
10 H. CAIRO ET AL.

met with after the vote were evangelical church leaders. The Catholic Church
took a neutral stand on the vote, which was unexpected given their long
support for peace in the country. But the Vatican has been a leader in
denouncing “gender ideology” since 1995, when John Paul II coined the
term in response to the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing
(Mazzoldi, Cuesta and Álvarez Vanegas 2016). Since then, the Church has
promoted the growing global use of that frame for denouncing feminist and
LGBT civil rights gains.
Was anti-gay bias enough to turn the vote? Territorial differences were
also at play. In the weeks after the vote even President Santos began openly
speaking of “the two Colombias.” As a general pattern, those regions that
were most affected by the war voted for peace, and those who were less
directly affected voted no. The vote clearly reflected a crisis of empathy.
Those who had not experienced the worst of the war could not imagine what
it was like, and the urgency of ending it. It was more pointedly also a crisis of
solidarity, where those who faced the worst of the war were not seen as
similar enough, perhaps not even as fully part of the larger group of the
nation, to merit action for their wellbeing. Many of the agreements in the
accords on rural development were aimed at healing this rift between the
“two Colombias.” Yet areas with class and race privilege seem to have voted
to protect these privileges and against an accord that would have made some
minor inroads into those systems of inequality. LGBT antagonism became a
tool for that, as classism, racism and heteropatriarchy propped each other up.
As Campoy argues, it was people less affected by the conflict who had the
luxury to vote based on their fear that the accords would impose a so-called
gender ideology, rather than feeling an urgent need to vote for peace so that,
as she puts it, their kids would not have to worry about land mines on the
way to school. That is to say, they were more afraid of homosexuality than of
war (Casey 2016).
Amazingly, because of strong organizing and pressure, both the territorial
and the differential approach remained in the renegotiated accords. But these
contested aspects of the accords will be the hardest to implement, and will
require the most international vigilance and support.

Spatial Justice: The Territorial Dynamics of the Colombian Conflict

and Its Resolution
Vladimir Montoya
It has become common practice in Colombia to denounce the struggle for
land as the engine of the country’s armed conflict. However, such an analysis
is reductionist in that it focuses exclusively on land ownership and invisibi-
lizes other territorialities, such as those of local, peasant, indigenous, and
 GEOPOLITICS 11

Afro-descendant communities. In many cases, these traditional territorialities

present an obstacle to the territorial expansion and control of different armed
groups, the state, or of corporations and individuals interested in expanding
the concentration of property and the establishment of large economic
enterprises, such as in monoculture, ranching, infrastructure, and mining.
In the last decades in Colombia, armed actions were carried out against
local populations in order to expel them from their lands, or making it
impossible for them to continue their traditional life styles in their territories.
Violent coercion has operated in regionally differentiated ways, causing the
production of the spatialities of peasant and ethnic groups of rural areas, as
well as the current shaping of urban agglomerations, to be deeply related to
the armed conflict. Accordingly, territorial planning in Colombia has
resulted from geo-historical processes at a regional scale, in which both the
state and the armed actors in dispute have implemented strategies for sub-
jecting and controlling populations, while at the same time guaranteeing
their dominance in some territories. Under these conditions, Jiménez affirms
the importance of the critical revision of the territorial order for peace-
building: “The close relationship that has developed in Colombia between
territorial order and armed conflict demands to be questioned in a scenario
of peace construction. The geographies of war need to be disrupted to open
the horizon towards geographies of peace” (Jiménez 2016, 61). What then is
the meaning of justice and peace in these territories?
The use of terror against local populations was a common phenomenon in
the production of territorial order during the armed conflict in Colombia.
Massacres and displacement caused a multitude of people of diverse origins
to forcibly leave rural territories and reach urban centres, from which many
times they had to flee again. The number of displaced persons in Colombia
increased dramatically from around 720,000 in 1994 to over 2 million in 2005
to nearly 6 million in 2017. Structural violence against the rural population
was decisive for the armed actors and, as Salas proposed, “these practices of
violence are framed within a territorial logic of the actors of the conflict
regarding control, domination, and territorial incidence; and therefore of
territorial configuration” (Salas 2016, 51).
Despite these aggressions and drawing on their territorial knowledge and
memories, local communities organized in resistance against the order that
was intended to be imposed through violence. They claimed the dignity of
the peasant, indigenous or Afro-descendant being, promoting a dignified life
in the territories as an essential condition for peace. In these mobilizations
and resistances, unprecedented forms of governance inspired by spatial
justice have been forged, which understand that peace goes beyond the end
of the armed conflict and requires attention to structural social, ethnic and
cultural inequalities.5 As for example in the defence of the territorial rights of
the Nasa indigenous communities (Sandoval 2008), or in the struggle for
12 H. CAIRO ET AL.

autonomy and self-determination of the peace community of San José de

Apartadó (Uribe 2005).
The cartographies of economic power that reduce the representation of
territory to a mere source for the accumulation of wealth are subverted in
community territorialities, where communities defend their permanence in
territory, nature, water, and forest, as well as their memory of alternative and
traditional economic and cultural practices, their identity and their often disin-
terested ways of collaborative association. According to those communities, it is
not enough for the construction of peace to merely demobilize and withdraw
armed actors, but rather one must protect their community territorialities that
have been filled with memory and ancestral knowledge for generations. They call
for the recognition of the value of solidarity and harmonious relationships with
nature as principles of collective life. Their struggle is not only for land and
property but for an alternative territorial order resisting the state’s intent to
subject them to a hegemonic idea of economic development. This can be seen,
for example, in recent opposition to the implementation of large-scale mining
projects, including disputing national land-use laws and the national develop-
ment planning and mining code.
The current model of Colombian territorial order does not favour peace,
understood as spatial justice and social equity. Therefore, the challenge that
continues after the demobilization of armed groups lies in the production of
political conditions for the emergence of a new territorial order with inbuilt
local communities’ autonomy. According to Montañez, in order to build
peace, “we must build territories of life and dignity, because these options
together are the greatest seeds of peace” (Montañez 2016, 26). Peace in the
territories comes from the right of local communities to have influence on
decisions about the use and care of water, about the productive use of land
and on models of ecological conservation. Peacebuilding in Colombia
amounts to the production of a different society, for which it is required
“to design a radically different organization of space” (Jiménez 2016, 60).
How willing are we as a society to democratize territorial planning?
Colombia has taken an important step towards social transformation with
the peace agreements between the government and the FARC-EP. However,
the construction of a new geography of peace will demand the vindication of
the rights of obliterated territorialities in Colombian national history. It is
time to remake the territorial order, bringing it closer to people and their
memories, taking into account community territorialities and democratizing
decisions on economic development. In the end, the construction of peace in
the territories in Colombia will involve a commitment to a culturally inclu-
sive, socially equitable, and environmentally fair policy of territorial manage-
ment and planning. This is the risk and uncertainty in which the nascent
route of peace is debated and in which we hope the co-operation and
contribution of the international community continue.
 GEOPOLITICS 13

Peasant Reserve Zones: Internal Geopolitics, Territorial Ordering, and

Territorial Peace in Colombia
Flavio Bladimir Rodríguez
Peasant Reserve Zones (Zonas de Reserva Campesina – ZRCs) are a legal
entity created under Law 160 of 1994 in order to enable territorial and
environmental management by the Colombian peasantry. They are also
concrete spatial expressions of a set of dissimilar socio-territorial processes
and configurations, by people organized in peasant associations that advocate
peasant rights, economy, and territoriality in Colombia. Amongst others, the
regulation of ZRCs stipulates legal mechanisms to obtain lands for the land-
less peasantry that have been considered “wasteland” of the nation. Both the
legal figure of ZRC and the territorial and political process implicated in its
constitution now converge in the integral implementation of peace agree-
ments in Colombia. It is therefore useful to examine, if only briefly, the roots,
achievements and future of this legal figure in Colombian rurality, as it
acquires a crucial role in the territorial construction of peace in the country.
Law 160 of 1994 and the figure of the ZRC emerge within the framework
of the dismantling of the institutionality of the state and is a product of the
rise of neoliberalism as a global trend. Agrarian market reform promoted by
the World Bank was implemented in Colombia through this law, which
created the National System of Agrarian Reform and Rural Development.
One of its tasks would be the establishment of ZRCs, but the decree that
regulated the legal framework (Decree 1777 of 1996),6 was only issued after
intense mobilization of coca farmers in the south of Bolivar, Caquetá,
Guaviare and Putumayo Departments, where they demanded the constitu-
tion of these zones as a form of alternative development and a way of
overcoming illicit crops. This allowed the formation of six ZRCs in different
regions of the country between 1997 and 2002 (Estrada Álvarez 2013, 37–38).
After the first zones were established, some pilot projects were carried out
between 1998 and 2003 with direct participation of peasant organizations in
Cabrera-Cundinamarca, Calamar-Guaviare and El Pato Basillas-Caquetá
(Ortiz et al. 2004). However, half way through 2002, and during the Uribe
administration, a process of persecution began, which delayed the imple-
mentation of ZRCs. Since mid-2010, peasants have restarted a process of
mobilization and denunciation against the government for non-compliance
with the law, as well as promoted processes of peasant associations seeking to
establish their territories as ZRCs. Currently about sixty processes have
declared ZRCs.
The call for ZRCs was also a reaction to a wider national process of
territorial claims enabled by Colombia’s new Constitution of 1991, which
was mainly associated with the recognition of cultural and ethnic differences
by black and indigenous populations. Crucially, peasant rights, culture and
14 H. CAIRO ET AL.

territoriality were ignored in the drafting of this constitution. The peasantry

and peasant organizations have built their identity from their status as
economic and political subjects, not as ethnic minorities. As such, peasant
territoriality must recognize both the advantages and limitations of the
territorial processes of black and indigenous communities and consider an
intercultural territoriality where the cultural is not restricted to the ethnic.
Instead, links should be considered between culture, political economy, and
the environment.
It is also important to note that the peasant struggle in Colombia has been
marked by the creeping appropriation of areas of the country inhabited and
worked by excluded and marginalized rural communities, a constant fact in
the history of territorial ordering and the conformation of the Colombian
nation-state (González 1992, 26). In this history, which has colonial roots, we
can find the origin of the demands for ZRCs. The first peasant populations,
or rochelas, survived with social rules different from those established by the
colonial political and spatial order, which constituted a challenge to the
power of the colonial state (Herrera Ángel 2002, 248). These were experi-
ences of territorialization by rural communities outside the power of the
colonial state, people in search of socially necessary spaces for their survival,
looking for a place of recognition (Serje 2005).
This historical trend has been played out in different periods and regions.
In the 1950s and 1960s, peasant communities besieged by government troops
sought refuge on isolated slopes of the eastern mountain range to settle and
organize their lives, while those interested in concentrating land and political
power persecuted them under the umbrella terms of “independent republics”
and “armed colonizations” (González and Marulanda 1990). This “rebel
labelling” intended to justify the destruction of these peasant communities
by official forces (Fajardo 2002, 48). It is important to stress that this search
for socially necessary spaces for rural communities has developed in the
midst of a geography characterized by conflicts over the control of resources
and population.
This long history of peasant struggles for land and for the recognition and
inclusion in the spatial order of the state has allowed peasant organizations to
know the real possibilities and legal limits of Law 160 and its ZRC figure.
Population mobility and migratory processes that have characterized peasants’
lives have led them to claim their participation in the social and economic
construction of the country’s rural and urban spaces (Sánchez Steiner 2012).
The power of the peasants, it may be argued, resides in a set of socio-territorial
and economic alternatives not seen, but historically rooted in the configuration
of Colombian cities and rurality. In recognition of these engrained processes,
the redistribution of land must be the path for territorial peace. Agrarian
market reform, promoted by Law 160, should have led to a de-concentration
of the land and a consolidation of ZRCs as one instrument to carry out this
 GEOPOLITICS 15

task. This did not happen, and the state’s task of enforcing Law 160 was made
the harder amid the recrudescence of the Colombian armed conflict and the
systematic persecution of peasant leaders promoting ZRCs.
The deepening of the war made social mobilization in favour of a political
negotiation of the conflict even more urgent. Peasant organizations made
themselves present in these debates, promoting criteria such as “the dialogue
is the route” and “Peasant Reserve Zones are an agrarian peace initiative.” The
final peace agreement leaves the ZRCs as one of the “territorial dynamics of
implementation” with a transformative potential of the territorial, economic,
and environmental order, as they are recognized within the Territorial
Approach Development Programs (PDET) that are prioritized in the imple-
mentation of the peace agreements. They will also serve as a fundamental pivot
in the reconfiguration of the Colombian territorial regime, opening up possi-
bilities for the recognition of emerging territorial regimes, promoted by poli-
tical and cultural subjects not recognized by the 1991 constitution.

FARC and Territorial Peace: Transforming a Guerrilla Movement into

a Political Party
Liliana Zambrano
One of the central issues surrounding the peace talks with the FARC had to
do with the likelihood of this guerrilla group making the transition to legal
politics. As stated in the agreements, the end of the conflict not only involves
the guerrillas laying down their weapons, and entering into a process of
disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration; it also opens up the poten-
tial for the armed group to be transformed into a political party and work
towards the transformations it deems necessary from within the democratic
system.
Research on civil wars has identified the transformation of rebel groups
into political parties as one of the key elements for sustainable peace. As
Söderberg points out: “the essence of the transformation from a rebel group
into a political party lies in the change of means of the political struggle, the
move away from violent to non-violent means, from arms to votes, and the
arena of that struggle, inside or outside the existing legal framework of
politics” (Söderberg Kovacs 2007). Comparative studies on this topic have
identified four factors that explain this phenomenon: nature of the rebel
group, social backing, peace settlement arrangements, and international
support (De Zeeuw 2008; Dudouet 2009; Söderberg Kovacs 2007).
However, when analysing the case of Colombia, it is impossible to think
about this transformation without taking into consideration the differences
among various regions inside the country. Colombia is a “country of
regions,” with different levels of development, local capacities, state presence,
16 H. CAIRO ET AL.

and geographic particularities. The conflict has impacted some regions more
than others, the confrontation has essentially taken place in rural commu-
nities, and it has been agreed that the implementation phase will have a
territorial approach, a “territorial peace.”
Here I present some reflections on how the political reincorporation of the
FARC could take place, particularly emphasizing that it may occur differently in
various geographical settings. Although this phenomenon has not yet occurred as
such, it is pertinent to engage in prospective analysis in order to identify risks and
opportunities that may be useful in designing strategies for a truly stable and lasting
peace.
A framework to incorporate a territorial approach to the study of rebel to party
transformation may take into consideration: first, the level of insertion of the rebel
group in a particular territory (relation of the rebel group with the territory and
with the local population); secondly, the conditions of the territories where the
political transformation will take place (local power dynamics, links between
guerrilla and socio-political movements, local capacities for peace).
Following this approach, it is possible to identify four territorial profiles
that reflect potential geographical variation of this political transformation.
Establishing such a geographic typology to understand the dynamics of the
armed conflict in Colombia is not something altogether new.7 Yet, the
relevance of the classification proposed here is to recognize a variety of
territorial profiles to reflect on post-conflict issues. At the same time, it
should be noted that this classification is not intended to create bounded
and exclusionary categories of analysis. The dynamics proposed here are
complex and overlapping in some areas, as Agnew and Oslender point out
with the notion of “overlapping territorialities” (Agnew and Oslender 2013).

Profile 1. Areas with Historical Presence of FARC

Rural areas with families with long-standing blood ties to the guerrillas, where
the latter have a strong social base, exert control over the population and local
economies and have a close relationship with the peasants. Areas where the
guerrillas have managed to co-opt local leaders and do solid social and political
work through local power structures. These tend to be remote regions, char-
acterized by low governance levels, with little or no state presence. The
insurgents have filled this power vacuum performing almost all state functions
(taxes, justice, security) (Kalyvas 2006). In these areas, the success of a political
transition of FARC is highly likely. They would have real chances of obtaining
votes and political representation, either with their own candidates, in coalition
with other parties, or through an intermediary (e.g. south of Tolima).

Profile 2. Areas in Dispute among Different Armed Actors

These are areas that have been under constant disputes between different
illegal armed groups for the control over territory, revenues, and population.
 GEOPOLITICS 17

There has been a strong military presence of the state. They tend to be
regions characterized by having a high potential for economic development
and resources of high strategic interest. Under this logic, the community
takes sides with whoever provides the greatest security. The prolonged armed
conflict and the presence of several illegal groups have led to a “blurring
between the armed actors,” and sometimes even to a “lack of distinction”
between the civilian population and the armed population. Under these
circumstances, the rebel-to-party transformation could be more problematic
(e.g. Catatumbo region).

Profile 3. Areas Co-opted by Paramilitary Forces

These are areas where local economic and political powers have become well
established, which would have little or no interest in the arrival of guerrilla
ex-combatants who would challenge their power. They are characterized by
consolidated traditional powers with extensive political machinery and eco-
nomic control. This is a political and economic class that is not always
aligned with the central government and usually operates through its own
logic and interests. Due to the history of some of these regions, many of these
powers have been associated with the paramilitary phenomenon, and have
instituted a “legitimate illegality” that has permeated the institutions. A
scenario for the political reincorporation of FARC in these contexts would
be practically unfeasible, and to attempt to implement it would be highly
conflictive (e.g. Córdoba).

Profile 4. Areas with Low Presence of Armed Groups

These are areas of the country where it could be said that the armed conflict
“is not felt.” They are mainly urban areas, with strong state presence (both
through public force and access to justice and social services), which have not
been the scene of direct armed confrontations. Violence in these areas goes
beyond the actions of guerrilla groups. These areas are often easily accessible,
well connected and with a standard of living that is higher than the country’s
rural areas and more remote regions. The presence of the FARC has been low
or none. In these areas, the success of the political transition is unknown. It is
probable that some people see in the FARC a new political alternative and
support them, but also the social imaginary of FARC as “terrorist” may have
generated strong opposition to their eventual political participation (e.g.
Bogotá).

To summarize, the transition of the FARC into a political party is likely to

be more fluid in areas where they have had a historical presence (Profile 1)
and more problematic in areas that have been in dispute with other illegal
armed groups or where the presence of former paramilitaries is still strong
(Profiles 2 and 3). In areas where the state has been strong and there has been
18 H. CAIRO ET AL.

little or no presence of illegal armed groups (Profile 4) the probabilities are

unknown.
No doubt there will be several challenges ahead. First, the group will have
to maintain internal cohesion during the transition to guarantee that it can
fulfil its part of the agreements. The risk of dissident and divided units
breaking away is real. Second, “becoming familiar with armed actors is not
exactly legitimizing them” (Ortiz 2001), so the question is how to make
people follow them without the pressure of weapons. Third, there is a risk
that the FARC’s reincorporation into civilian life may be accompanied by
threats to their members’ personal security, and selective violence may occur.
Fourth, in some regions the peace agreement does not change the dynamics
of violence: one armed actor disappears but other illegal armed groups take
advantage of potential power gaps left by the FARC, and often the economics
of war continues. Finally, there is no clarity about the real opening of the
political system and how local elites will react to the entrance of a new player
into the electoral competition.

Overlapping Territorialities: The Afro-Colombian Experience Before

“Territorial Peace”
Ulrich Oslender
Before the concept of “territorial peace” emerged in the Colombian peace
negotiations, there were efforts by the state to “pacify” territories in which
conflict reigned. One strategy was to extend the state’s institutions into
territories where its formal reach had been relatively limited until then,
often granting semi-autonomous territorial rights to local communities.
This intervention examines the case of Afro-Colombian communities that
were granted collective land rights in the Pacific coast region in the 1990s.
Crucially I want to argue that once formal territorial re-ordering had been
sanctioned, the state showed little interest in supporting local efforts to create
a lasting “territorial peace” in this region. Quite on the contrary, successive
governments continued to hand out mining and agricultural concessions to
multinational companies against the will of black communities and their
organizations. A region that in the 1980s was seen as a peace haven turned in
the late-1990s into what I call “geographies of terror,” as rural black com-
munities were forcefully displaced from their lands in their thousands
(Oslender 2008, 2016). Thus, this intervention wants to sound a word of
caution when examining the real possibilities that Colombia’s peace accord
and the notion of “territorial peace” may hold for the country’s future and
reflect on what can be learnt from a regional experience (of rural black
communities in the Pacific lowlands) for the implementation of the national
peace accord.
 GEOPOLITICS 19

In 1991 Colombia passed a new constitution that was to significantly

reshape the relations between the nation and its Afro-descendant population.
Transitory Article AT-55 made specific reference to the country’s “black
communities” (comunidades negras), which was the first official acknowl-
edgment of the country’s black population as a distinct cultural group. It
marked the beginning of the “ethnicization of blackness” in Colombia
(Restrepo 2004). “Blackness” became a state-regulated discourse, a field of
struggle, a structure of alterity. AT-55 required the promulgation of a law
that would, amongst other, grant collective land rights to rural black com-
munities living along the river basins of the Pacific Coast region’s tropical
rainforests. Adopted in 1993, Law 70 has become one of the most remarkable
legislations concerning Afro-descendant populations anywhere in Latin
America. Among other dispositions, it laid down the legal framework to
allocate five million hectares of riverine tropical rainforest lands in the Pacific
lowlands – 50% of this coastal region – to communal ownership by rural
black communities that was to be administered by newly created “commu-
nity councils.”
These community councils are an ambiguous organizational figure. On the
one hand, they constitute a legally recognized new territorial authority in the
Pacific region that for the first time officially acknowledges claims to collec-
tive land rights by black communities. On the other hand, they form part of a
wider state strategy of “territorial ordering” (ordenamiento territorial). This
was the state’s response in the 1980s to the perceived fragmentation of its
sovereign authority and national territory, as state institutions were charac-
terized by weakness and unequal spatial reach, with alternative authority
regimes thriving in the face of the state’s failure to control large areas of
the country. In other words, while black communities have gained some
degree of territorial autonomy, they have also become subject to the state’s
institutionalizing reach. Rather than providing a radical departure from the
modern territorial state model, the community councils may be seen as
enhancing its legitimacy, as they become integral to a territorial reorganiza-
tion in which local communities’ territorial rights overlap with state terri-
toriality; a process that elsewhere we have termed “overlapping
territorialities” (Agnew and Oslender 2013). From today’s perspective one
may indeed argue that this process of territorial reordering in the Pacific
lowlands carried with it the notion of “territorial peace.” It was meant to
create a new territorial and administrative actor – the community council –
that would act as interlocutor for the state to deflect potential conflict and
promote a more peaceful interaction between local communities, the state
and capital interests.
And now to the irony of it all. While the formal land titling process may be
seen as a success on the technocratic level – by 2016 some five million hectares,
or 50% of the entire Pacific lowlands, had been titled collectively to black
20 H. CAIRO ET AL.

communities – the reality on the ground looks far from cheerful, as thousands
of communities have been forcefully displaced from their lands since the mid-
1990s as a result of multiple and complex violent territorial and resource
conflicts. I cannot go into great detail here, but they include the brutal
implementation of large-scale oil palm plantations, the spreading of illegal
coca crops and the accompanying aerial fumigation courtesy of Colombia’s
anti-narcotics police, an explosion of commercial gold mining since 2005 due
to the skyrocketing gold price on the global market, and the continued pre-
sence of guerrillas and paramilitary/criminal gangs despite claims of demobi-
lization of the latter. What we have seen emerge since the mid-1990s are
veritable “geographies of terror” and “landscapes of fear” in Colombia’s
Pacific lowlands (Oslender 2008), a far cry from “territorial peace.”
So, what went wrong? Black activists have continuously denounced the
lack of support from government institutions in the implementation of their
rights. Most notably perhaps is the routine failure of government bodies to
guarantee the application of the “prior consultation” (consulta previa), of
local communities for permissions given to economic projects that may affect
these communities. The right to consulta previa is a central part of
International Labour Organization Convention 169 (ILO 169), which the
Colombian state signed into national law. Nevertheless, mining concessions
have been granted to multinational corporations for the exploitation of
alluvial gold deposits in the rivers of the Pacific lowlands (a resource that
initially attracted Spanish colonizers to the region in the sixteenth century),
and agricultural concessions have been granted for the large-scale implemen-
tation of oil palm cultivation (pushed by the powerful lobby of the national
Federation of Oil Palm Growers; FEDEPALMA 2007) without free, informed
prior consent having been obtained from local communities affected by these
development projects.
The result has been increasing territorial conflict, as capital interests in
those two sectors in particular have often resorted to the use of extreme
violence at the hands of paramilitary organizations to guarantee local
compliance or to “empty” lands occupied by resisting communities
through concrete threats made against community leaders and targeted
killings, including massacres. These threats and killings continue today, as
black activists, national and international NGOs, the ombudsman, the
International Red Cross and the UN Human Rights Council routinely
denounce the lack of protection afforded to community leaders by the
state.
In sum, while the state passed a progressive legislation in Law 70 that
provides territorial rights to rural black communities – which I argue can be
seen as creating a legislative context in a part of Colombia (the Pacific
lowlands) for the implementation of what now gets sold as “territorial
peace” – it has since routinely failed to protect these communities and
 GEOPOLITICS 21

their rights. There is then a gaping disconnection between text and on-the-
ground lived reality. It is worthwhile bearing this regional experience in the
Pacific lowlands in mind, when examining today the real possibilities that
Colombia’s peace accord may hold for the country’s future, and to make sure
that “territorial peace” does not merely remain a concept on paper, but can
be turned into an on-the-ground lived reality, a geography for peace.

Conclusions
Carlo Emilio Piazzini, Ulrich Oslender, and Heriberto Cairo
While we were writing the conclusions to this Forum in August 2017, the
United Nations successfully oversaw the final instalment of the handing
over of over 8,000 weapons that were in the hands of FARC-EP rebels.
That same day, leaders of the guerrilla organization announced that the
new political party into which the organization would dissolve would be
called Fuerzas Alternativas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Alternative
Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, keeping the acronym FARC (later
this name would be changed to Fuerzas Alternativas Revolucionarias del
Común, or Revolutionary Alternative Common Force, still maintaining the
acronym FARC). We are thus writing at a moment that marks the
irreversible transition from a period of armed conflict to one of the
construction of peace; at least as far as the historical relations between
the Colombian State and the FARC are concerned (there are, of course,
still ongoing negotiations between the government and the other major
guerrilla group, the ELN). That means we are now at the beginning of the
process of implementation of the agreements reached in Havana, that is to
say, towards a construction of “territorial peace.” From the mere enuncia-
tion of a territorial focus, we now need to pass towards an effective
implementation “in the territories.”
As the various contributions in this forum have shown, there are major
challenges that need to be overcome. The risks are many: the biggest of all
perhaps is the danger that what has been proposed in the final agreement on
“territorial peace” remains mere lip service or leads in a perverse way to the
“pacification” of different regions consolidating a territorial model of the
centralized state at the service of oligarchic economic interests. Another
danger lies in the possibility that the various peace initiatives weaken or
are falling apart where they coexist with violent dynamics that continue to
shape the geographies of war in the country, promoted by a range of political
and economic actors that did not participate in the process of negotiation
and that were opposed to its successful resolution from the beginning. There
is no doubt that powerful reactionary forces are still trying to derail the peace
process at every opportunity.
22 H. CAIRO ET AL.

At the same time, it is important to understand that what has been

achieved so far under the umbrella term of “territorial peace” in the
Accords of Havana is not some untouchable, unmodifiable recipe for
peace. On the contrary, it is still necessary to discuss, refine, and continue
to explore the meaning and reach of a territorial focus; arguments that at
times are supported by diffuse conceptions or rather limited by a conven-
tional geopolitical understanding of the territorial. It is therefore important
to approach the territorial in ways that acknowledge the multi-directional
relations between space, politics and society, so that the strategies defined in
the Peace Accords are implemented in a context of concrete geo-historical
processes.
We hope that the various angles of analysis offered by the authors in this
Forum contribute to a discussion and a better understanding in the deci-
sion-making process with regard to the geographic dimension of the peace
process in Colombia. To be sure, in terms of spatial justice the notion of
“territorial peace” promises to be an exciting condition of possibility for the
exercise of democracy. And while we recognize the singularity of the
Colombian peace process – both in terms of having been one of the longest-
running armed conflicts in the Western hemisphere, and regarding the
novel approaches to resolve this conflict as stipulated in the accords
reached in Havana – we would also like to stress the possibility of extending
the insights generated here to a conceptual development of themes that are
of interest to students of geographies of war and peace in other parts of the
world.

Notes
1. All contributors previously presented on these themes in sessions about peace in Colombia
organized in the context of the IGU Thematic Conference “Geographies for peace/
Geografías para la paz” that took place in La Paz, Bolivia, in April 2017. The editors
(Piazzini, Cairo, Oslender) are based in three geographical regions (Latin America,
Europe, USA) and have worked together since 2006 in the Network of Socio-Spatial
Relations (Red de Estudios Socioespaciales, RESE) anchored at the University of
Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia.
2. This section draws on preliminary results of our research on the discourse of “territor-
ial peace” in Colombia, which includes in-depth interviews with the main actors of the
negotiation and the posterior referendum.
3. Before the concept of territorial peace was coined there was a widely accepted under-
standing that the conflict shaped differently according to the different regions of the
country, and that state institutions work in different ways “according to their relation
with the previously existent power networks and their insertion in economic life and the
degrees of social cohesion and hierarchical organization that they could have achieved”
(González González 2009, 202). This idea was developed in the Centro de Investigación y
Educación Popular (CINEP) and in the Observatorio Colombiano para el Desarrollo
Integral, la Convivencia Ciudadana y el Fortalecimiento Institucional (ODECOFI).
 GEOPOLITICS 23

4. In the Northern Ireland agreement, sexual orientation was included amongst the list of
groups that public authorities would not discriminate against. Likewise the new post-
conflict constitutions in South Africa and Nepal include prohibitions against discrimi-
nation on the basis of sexual orientation; see Nagle (2017). The Colombian accords go
far beyond non-discrimination to discuss actual targeted affirmative peacebuilding
measures. The terms of different peace agreements can be searched at languageof-
peace.org. See also <peaceagreements.org>, specifically for gender provisions.
5. By referring to spatial justice, I adhere to Soja’s proposal, according to which the search
for justice must be understood as “More effective ways to change the world through
spatial practices and conscious policies” (Soja 2008, 490).
6. Reglamentación de las zonas de reserva campesina (Bogotá DC: Instituto Colombiano
de la Reforma Agraria, Ley 160 de 1994, normas que la reglamentan y desarrollan,
febrero 2003) p. 275–278.
7. See, among others, research carried out at CINEP/ODECOFI by Fernán González and
Teófilo Vásquez.

ORCID
Heriberto Cairo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1083-731X
Ulrich Oslender http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1330-2601
Carlo Emilio Piazzini Suárez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6675-6183
Jerónimo Ríos http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3574-0116
Sara Koopman http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4093-5567
Vladimir Montoya Arango http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8000-9405
Flavio Bladimir Rodríguez Muñoz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9419-5157
Liliana Zambrano Quintero http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3513-4685

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