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
Recommended Citation
File-Muriel, Maria del Pilar. "Relational Peace in Colombia: An Ethnography of Multi-Scalar Affective Relations Among Peace Practitioners." (2022). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/anth_etds/210
