From Indigenous Peace to Sustainable Peace: The Role of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Environmental Defenders in Building an Environmentally Sustainable Peace in Colombia (2016-2020)

Abstract

The issue of land distribution and of managing natural resources has always been a source of social-environmental disputes in Latin America and in Colombia. It was partly those disputes, when combined with unfathomable inequalities, that originated the armed conflict between the FARC and the Colombian Government - a conflict that only saw its official end in 2016. Even though the Peace Agreement was the fruit of a participatory? process which rendered the land issue as the top-one priority and even included an Ethnic Chapter, the end of the armed conflict did not exactly mean the start of peace for ethnic communities. Using non-violent ancestral techniques of mobilization, resistance and negotiation (such as mingas; protests; self-defence groups; making formal judicial complaints etc), environmental defenders have been struggling to advance what they call 'integral peace' - an holistic concept in which peace is only achieved and sustainable if human rights and social justice for ethnic communities are inseparable from the protection of the Madre Tierra. Drawing from concepts such as direct, structural and cultural violence, from 'local turn' theorisations of 'indigenous peace' and 'everyday peace' and the concept of 'emancipation', this research project analyses what has been the role of afro and...