Publication Date

Summer 7-2022

Abstract

Following the 2016 National Peace Accords in Colombia, violence targeting human rights activists and community leaders increased. Thus, it is essential to study peacemaking beyond the state’s implementation of the peace accords. I look at the process of relationship making among the assemblage of peace practitioners that constitute peace work in Colombia. The data comes from ethnographic fieldwork during 2016- 2018. I provide three chapter-length ethnographies of spatializations of peace: Humanitarian and biodiversity zones/spaces (Buenaventura), indigenous territorial practices of peace (Cauca), and a transnational alliance between the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó (Antioquia) and a group of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Building on anthropology of the relationship state-social movements, human rights, and critical peace studies, I offer a model to understand peace work as a multi-scalar relational and affective process and practice. I explore the following questions: (1) What constitutes the multiple meanings of peace for practitioners? and (2) What are the practices and social relationships that peace practitioners consider important in their praxis? I argue that multi-scalar relationships among peace practitioners based on affective practices challenge and expand universal assumptions of peace and the marked separations between the local/global. Through multi-scalar affective relational practices practitioners create spaces for grounded participation and co-create embodied knowledges for peace. I show that peace practitioners contribute to peacemaking beyond their locality constituting a movement towards the democratization and decolonization of peacemaking theory and practice.

Keywords

Relational Peace, Social Movements, Affect, Scalar Relationships, Spatialization of peace, Peace Communities, Peace practitioners

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Anthropology

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Anthropology

First Committee Member (Chair)

Les Field

Second Committee Member

Erin Debenport

Third Committee Member

Lindsay Smith

Fourth Committee Member

Jennifer Tucker

Download

Included in

Anthropology Commons

Share

COinS