The Colombian Final Accord is an innovative agreement, particularly with respect to the amount of overall content devoted to transitional justice, victims, and the emphasis on subsequent implementation (Herbolzheimer, 2016; Nylander, Sandberg, and Tvedt, 2018). Some of the most contentious issues in the negotiations that produced the accord were related to truth and reconciliation processes, prosecution and sentencing for war crimes, prisoners release, and amnesty, and the armed actors and negotiators showed great interest in learning from other peace processes. The overall end result of these efforts was the reaching of what is almost certainly the most victim-centered comprehensive peace agreement ever negotiated.1

After the demobilization of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia [United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia] (AUC) in the mid-2000s, Uribe’s government declared that paramilitarism had ceased to exist and that the private armies that remained in existence were simply engaged in organized crime. He gave them a name: Bandas Criminales Emergentes (Bacrím) [Emerging Criminal Gangs].

Coming up to the end of the peace process in 2016, Colombia has experienced a general improvement in homicide rates and security in the last decade, yet targeted attacks against social leaders continue. For example, indigenous leaders, union leaders, mining and peasant leaders, and others have been attacked despite an earlier paramilitary demobilization effort and the recent peace processes. After four years of peace talks, with a full range of suspensions, re-starts, and flare-ups of conflict, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) and the government of Colombia agreed to formally end their decades-long conflict. After an animated campaign against the peace deal, led by former president Álvaro Uribe, Colombian voters narrowly rejected it (50.2 percent) on October 2, 2016. Despite the failure of the referendum, the Colombian Congress unanimously passed a revised accord in late November 2016, and the country officially entered into a post-conflict stage.

The objective of this chapter is to explore the future effect of organizational design on the likelihood of success or failure of the implementation of peace agreements using the Colombian peace accord as a case study. Previous exercises analyzing the implementation of peace agreements in the world have attributed great importance to aspects other than organizational design to explain the success or failure of the implementation. For example, the peace studies literature tends to explain problems in implementation by highlighting the factors associated with the war itself (type of conflict, types of spoils available, etc.) or by giving great importance to political factors (position of relevant actors, level of polarization, etc.) as the variables that explain each success or failure (Stedman, 2001; Hartzell, 2002; Cousens et al., 2003). However, these studies do not consider organizational design as a relevant factor for understanding why implementation processes fail or are successful.

Since the 1960s Colombian public universities have served as a stage for the violent enactment of dissent and resistance and have become one of the many theaters of the internal armed conflict. The images of armed hooded militias parading on university campuses, throwing explosives at the police, destroying public property, or interrupting the regular flow of academic life became part of the routine landscape of many public universities.

The last chapter of this volume is somewhat unusual for an edited book in social science research on peace and transitional justice. But, it is one that we thought it was important to include. “Geographies of Truth,” by personnel from the Casa de la Memoria (House of Memory) of Medellin, is a discussion of how individuals from the museum developed key exhibits on the violence in Colombia. This process begins with a great many similarities to social science projects as literature is reviewed, original data are collected, and all the materials are analyzed for their relevance and role in, in this case, museum exhibits. At this stage, scholars would typically then conceive of our understanding and representation of events of the past in fairly conventional, analytical products that are designed to communicate to fellow academics. But those who curate museums like Casa de la Memoria must arrive at a work product in ways that will affect people not just intellectually but also emotionally and physically through the various senses. Such exhibits are also constructed for a much larger audience − the people of the nation − whose experiences are being represented. Thus, the process by which these exhibits are created is both fascinating as both an alternative means of conveying understandings about war and violence, and for the responsibilities the museum personnel have toward society as a whole in representing their truths. There is much we, as peace studies scholars, can gain from understanding their work.

The establishment of a peace agreement in November 2016 between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was a landmark achievement for a conflict that has persisted since 1964 in a country that has experienced civil war dating as far back as the 1940s. This peace agreement to end a more than fifty-year-old insurgency is all the more remarkable given the past history of failed peace attempts between the two sides. Over the decades, the two sides have vacillated between violent efforts aimed at winning the conflict outright and imposing their own settlement terms on one another and efforts at dialogue aimed at settling the conflict through negotiation. While these two processes – violence and negotiation – seem distinct, they are inextricably linked to one another. Violence between the FARC and the Colombian government shaped the occurrence and outcomes of peace efforts between them. At the same time, negotiations between the two sides conditioned future violence between them.

The Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) announced an agreement on the fifth point of their negotiation agenda, namely attention to victims, in September 2015. The agreement on transitional justice mechanisms to uphold victims’ rights to justice, truth, and reparations marked the conclusion of the most contentious phase of the three-year-long peace talks. Yet the twists and turns of the peace process did not come to an end with the transitional justice agreement: another year of negotiations to finalize the deal, the signing of a first Final Agreement on September 26, 2016, its narrow defeat in a referendum on October 2, 2016, the renegotiation of the earlier deal to arrive at a second Final Agreement in late November 2016, its ratification by Congress a week later, and legislative efforts throughout 2017 to incorporate the components of the Final Agreement into the legal system as FARC members were demobilizing prolonged the drama around the peace process. President Juan Manuel Santos received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, even as he had to fight an uphill battle to legislate his peace agenda at home.

Colombia has embarked on one of the most complex and multifaceted efforts at building peace and delivering justice the world has ever seen. The sheer size and scope of the Colombian government’s agreement with the FARC guerrillas ensure the path will be neither easy nor short. In fact, there is more than one available path to peace and justice; those destinations may be accessed through a variety of new and novel trails, as well as well-worn roads. Some paths are narrow and difficult, while others “promise” a straight and wide transit to a brighter future. In this world of possibilities, the Colombian peace process offers no guarantees. The journeys are as diverse and difficult to traverse as Colombia’s geography. In this conclusion, we review the progress we have made in understanding how this journey will unfold, what challenges and opportunities may be waiting up ahead, and when and how the scholarly community can best explain how the future might look. More often than not, we must be content with posing the questions that we ought to pursue in the hope of finding these answers.

Negotiating peace in a democratic context where public opinion matters and an international context eschewing the past norm of forgive-and-forget to end conflicts poses new dilemmas for peace negotiators. With both domestic constituents and international law demanding retributive justice for the most egregious human rights abuses, how are negotiators to induce combatants to lay down arms and end a conflict? We examine these dilemmas in the Colombia peace talks of 2012–2016 – a case of a protracted conflict in a democracy with relatively strong rule of law institutions; well-organized civil society, and especially human rights organizations; and a vibrant political dynamic involving both the multi-party Congress and public opinion in the approval and implementation of the negotiated agreement.

Colombia is at a historic crossroads with the final approval of the second revised peace agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the government. While the peace process has progressed, the June 2018 election of Ivan Duque – the Democratic Center candidate seen as former president Alvaro Uribe’s hard-line protege – may generate challenges to the fragile peace. This issue – how to bring peace, justice, and reconciliation to post-conflict societies – is a central concern for the people of Colombia, for human rights activists and practitioners who want to end the culture of impunity, and for government and community leaders who need to build a society that is coming to terms with its past.

This chapter seeks to trace the trajectories of two emblematic peacebuilding initiatives at the local level in order to investigate the similarities and differences in their hybridization logics. The initiatives are the Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó [Peace Community of San José de Apartadó] and the Asamblea Constituyente de Tarso [Constituent Municipal Assembly of Tarsus]. The analysis of the trajectories of both these initiatives is based on the perspective of conflict transformation from knowledge of local circumstances in order to examine to what extent the concept of peace infrastructure is applicable to these two experiences. As long as the concept of “Infrastructures for Peace” refers to the networks of peacebuilding, it allows the analysis of the interactions between the local peacebuilding experiences and other actors and processes at different scales, from the very local to the international.

The Colombian government’s peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC) generated hope for an end to Colombia’s more than fifty-year civil war. One of the thorniest elements of the peace process is justice for massive conflict-related human rights violations. Both during the negotiations and in the implementation of the accord, debate has raged on the effects of transitional justice on Colombia’s long-term peace and human rights.

The Colombian Peace Accord1 is built upon a precarious balance between demands for accountability and the need for compromise between agents of violence. Of its major provisions, perhaps the one most disputed by the deal’s opponents is the Victims’ Agreement (Victimas). The fifth and final item to be agreed upon by government and FARC negotiators in December 2015, Victimas aims to establish The Comprehensive System of Truth, Justice, Reparation, and Non-repetition. This system includes five main planks: a truth commission, a special unit for missing persons, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a comprehensive reparations policy, and guarantees of non-recurrence.