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.

The conclusion of the peace agreement in Colombia with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in 2016, the country’s largest rebel group, provides a new opportunity for lasting peace. Yet as we know from previous long-running civil conflicts, new armed actors mobilize and security concerns are likely to persist even after major actors put down their weapons. In this chapter, we critically examine the counterinsurgency campaign that was a factor in bringing about the opportunity for a negotiated peace. We also examine the ongoing barriers to peace and security, including corruption, victimization, and armed actor territorial control. We then describe and contrast the distinct approaches of two different subnational USAID peacebuilding programs designed to support the government’s plan for peace.

This chapter explores the complicated question of ethnicity in Guatemala’s thirty-six-year armed conflict, a war primarily driven by economic and political grievances, but one that culminated in state “acts of genocide” against Maya communities. The war’s “ethnic component” was a significant concern of counterinsurgency strategists and guerrilla forces alike. This chapter examines ethnic dynamics both in the state’s counterinsurgency war and within opposition movements through an episode that put a public spotlight on the subject: the army’s capture and exploitation of guerrilla member and K’iche’-Maya organizer Emeterio Toj Medrano in 1981, followed by his remarkable escape. The case illustrates state efforts to exploit and exacerbate ethnic tensions on the left, and to try to prevent indigenous support for revolution. It also highlights the possibilities and challenges inherent in broad and multiethnic alliances among Guatemalan opposition movements. Attention to this subject helps us to understand the history of Guatemala’s civil war, and the fraught and unsettled “peace” that has followed it.

This chapter will examine the transnational militant political culture that emerged from the constriction of political space, socioeconomic crisis, and increased social polarization during the late sixties and early seventies. The elements of this political culture can be briefly described as follows: a Latin Americanist view supported by regional exile experiences; a set of ideas initially critical of the traditional left; and, lastly, a model activist associated with the idealized figures of the revolutionary soldier and the proletarian. This political culture was not merely the result of a number of preformed ideas. Rather it resulted from the interaction of previously held ideas and the political process that these activists had to face. It was in that process that these activists gradually developed a unique political culture, which was built in the course of the regional exchanges that were born of the uncertain historical contingency of local processes that often led them to places that were inconceivable in the mid-1960s.

This chapter examines friendships and their political importance among leading members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PRNP) and the Community Party USA (CPUSA) from the late 1930s to 1945. This was a time of heightened repression against the PRNP and also a time when the CPUSA had adopted Popular Front politics. They key figures in the chapter are Pedro Albizu Campos and Juan Antonio Corretjer, leaders of the PRNP, and Earl Browder and Consuelo Lee Tapia de Lamb from the CPUSA. The men's friendships developed in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where they were imprisoned, and continued in New York City. The chapter illustrates what we can learn about how parties and political activists function beyond or in contradiction to their printed statements by paying attention to how personal relationships affect politics and vice versa.

Sociologist Andrés Guerrero famously examined how nineteenth-century liberal legislation in Ecuador created a “ventriloquist’s voice” that mediated Indigenous expressions of resistance to exclusionary governing structures. The assumption is that intermediaries purportedly spoke out in defense of subaltern rights but in reality only desired to advance their own interests. Intermediaries allegedly added another layer of exploitation to an already marginalized and silenced population. Careful studies, however, reveal that Indigenous activists did advance their own agendas, both alone and in collaboration with sympathetic urban allies. Recovering subaltern voices, nevertheless, is complicated by a lack of the written archival documentation that typically forms the basis for scholarly examinations. This lack of sources is not the fault of local organic intellectuals, but rather a result of the racist attitudes of a dominant class who did not find the thoughts and actions of Indigenous people worthy of preservation. This essay examines the gap between the perception of both domestic and international surveillance operations and the realities of rural mobilizations.

On the afternoon of July 25, 1927, a young shepherdess set fire to a hillside on Florentino Serrudo’s estate, launching the greatest insurrection of indigenous peasants since the Federal War of 1899 – and the first in Bolivia to be labeled “communist.” This chapter takes seriously the fears that the Chayanta (Bolivia) rebellion of 1927 generated among landlords, state officials, and the press, and examines the dynamics of mobilization, the formation of alliances among indigenous caciques, artisans, and intellectuals, and the state response. It shows that in the years before the Chayanta uprising, rural caciques from indigenous communities and radical artisans and intellectuals in the cities of Sucre and Potosí formed a political alliance based on a shared commitment to rural education, communal land ownership, and redistribution of wealth and power. This incipient alliance sought to erase ethnic and class hierarchies in order to build a more democratic society, and largely succeeded in blocking further landlord advance in the southern Bolivian countryside.

The 1947 upheavals on haciendas outside La Paz were facilitated by a coalition between indigenous peasants and urban anarchists. Three factors were essential to this alliance. First, the urban anarchists’ own politics – their libertarian socialist vision, their attentiveness to both “ethnic” and “class” demands, and their organizational federalism – proved conducive to coalition building. Second, prior rural mobilization had created local leaders and networks that would form the rural bases for the coalition; those rural actors would also help to redefine the urban anarchist left, conferring it with a more antiracist and autonomist emphasis. Third, a series of coalition brokers bridged traditional divides of language, ethnicity, and geography. This account qualifies common dismissals of the Bolivian left as mestizo-dominated and class-reductionist while also illuminating the process through which the alliance developed. It concludes that ideologies and human decisions are often just as important as structural circumstances in determining the potential for popular coalitions and militant mobilization.