Community of peace: an ‘other’ peace in San José De Apartadó, Colombia

Abstract

This article problematizes the concept of peace by exploring the conception and practice of peace in the peasant Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, Colombia. This scientific research article is base don 16 months of ethnographic research in Colombia from 2011 to 2016, including 49 interviews with members of the San José de Apartadó Peace Community and other organizations. Given their definition and creation of peace as the refusal to collaborate with the armed groups and as the construction of community through community work, this experience embodies an active and empowered perspective on peace, rather tan depending upon what states or armed actors should do. In conversation with new subfields of peace studies in geography and transrational peace research, the article calls for a conceptualization of peace as the construction of dignified life through the solidarity networks of communities in resistance, which counter the intersectional violences of the ecological crisis of modernity.