Anthony Dest’s Dissident Peace is a study of political possibilities in Colombia in a period that begins with the signing of the 2016 Peace Accords between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the government, and ends with the protest movement that erupted in the spring of 2021. The promise of peace as the end to violence was shattered immediately, as the book demonstrates with its opening account of the 2017 El Tandil massacre. Moreover, the reform programs that were a part of the Peace Accords, such as the Reforma Rural Integral, were minimal concessions on the part of the government and have not adequately addressed the structural causes of the violence. The model for post-conflict development has been based on extraction, export, and foreign direct investment that has further incorporated Colombia into the global economy, deepening rather than transforming capitalist relations.
When viewed this way, peace is not the absence of violence, but rather, as Dest argues, the imposition of “a framework of thinking and acting politically that shapes social relations” that forms a larger process of capitalist colonial state formation. To underscore this point, Dest notes that in 1573 King Felipe II ordered that the term “pacification” be used in place of “conquest” when referring to the Spanish imperial project, which continued to be just as brutal after the rebrand. The word would take on renewed significance during the Cold War as latter-day colonial powers waged counterinsurgency campaigns under the banner of pacification in an attempt to snuff out revolution across the Third World. The 2016 Peace Accords, shaped by the logic of what Dest calls “colonial capitalism,” thus form a part of this violent history rather than a break from it.
Against this “state-centric peace,” Dest counterposes “dissident forms of peace that emerge from their rejection of the status quo and potential of their struggles for autonomy from it.” While the word peace is in the main title of the book, it is the concept of autonomy that animates the study. Dest writes that it was the solidarity work in Cauca which he began in 2010 with the group Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN) that oriented him toward autonomy as both an “organizing principle and emancipatory horizon.”
Over the course of four chapters, Dissident Peace explores how indigenous and Afro-Colombian struggles for autonomy intersect with the FARC, coca cultivation and eradication, and peasant movements.
Over the course of four chapters, Dissident Peace explores how indigenous and Afro-Colombian struggles for autonomy intersect with the FARC, coca cultivation and eradication, and peasant movements. The book is based on Dest’s years of work with PCN, his experience with the Ethnic Commission in Havana in 2016, conversations with ex-guerrillas and activists, and his interactions with participants in institutions ranging from indigenous cabildos and Afro-Colombian community councils to coca-growers associations and peasant organizations. Dissident Peace is both an account of the myriad ways that communities have sought a life outside of the intolerable present state of affairs, and also the tensions and contradictions inherent in this pursuit.
A paradox emerges wherein marginalized groups make claims to their autonomy through the very mechanisms that oppress them. For example, the 1991 Constitution guaranteed Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities the right to collective land titles and prior consultation. What seemed like a progressive victory ultimately did little to open up the field of political participation or alter the fundamental structure of the economy. Instead, this form of multiculturalism, combined with the contemporaneous neoliberal reforms, turned into an interethnic competition in which groups appealed to the state for recognition and resources, the same state that had abandoned them and was destroying their way of life through capitalist development. As Dest’s exploration of the organizational dynamics in the town of Chaux demonstrates, campesino identity was refashioned and harnessed to make political claims based on ethnicity, which created rivalries between communities and undermined critiques of the systemic roots of poverty and violence.
The book ends with a particularly interesting chapter about the 2021 uprising in Cali, a city that has one of the largest Afro-descendant populations in Latin America. Protests erupted across Colombia in the spring of 2021 in response to the proposed tax reforms of right-wing President Ivan Duque (2018-2022). Instead of occupying a square or government buildings, as had been the pattern in mass protests around the globe in the previous decade, protesters in Cali established “resistance points” in poor neighborhoods, along with mutual aid networks to sustain them. Participants, according to Dest, “rejected politics of representation expressed by organizations, leaders, and social movements that claimed to speak for them,” and “lacked demands that were legislatively coherent through a liberal, rights-based framework.”
For observers, particularly members of the traditional left, these were signs that the participants in the protests were members of the lumpenproletariat. This Marxist term reemerged in the discourse to dismiss the tactics and ambitions of many of the protestors on the front lines as politically unsophisticated and dangerous. It was true that many of the participants were not “workers” in the traditional sense, nor were they members of organized social movements or political parties. They were the disenfranchised, those doubly dispossessed by violence and neoliberalism, often displaced from the countryside and relegated to precarious work in the informal sector. While they were not the ideal political subject of intellectuals or NGOs, they were protagonists of this historical moment.
The Peace Accords, however incomplete they are, opened a new period of protest and political struggle that culminated in the election of Gustavo Petro as the leader of Colombia’s first ever left-wing government in 2022.
In Dest’s reading, the protestors’ rejection of representation and demands in fact heralded the “potential for self-determination beyond the strictures of the state and capital.” He also acknowledges the contradictions and limits of the uprisings, writing that “the impediments to liberation did not magically disappear because of the insurgent energy budding in the uprising.” Nevertheless, they represented “openness to the possibility of liberation through prefigurative politics.” These alternatives took shape in the “spaces of encounter” and “situations” on the frontline, and in the new forms of social relations generated by mutual aid efforts.
In the first chapter of the book, a former FARC guerrilla interviewed by Dest discusses what he calls the “minority trap” in which autonomy is confined to local institutions, literal reservations, or as in the case of the protests, ephemeral “situations.” This problem of the enclosure of autonomy itself is the question at the core of the book. To counter the delimitation, Dest proposes that we expand our understanding of autonomy and approach it as a life practice of “re-existing” through “an embodied praxis…rooted in a primordial connection with the earth, our ancestors, and future generations.” This is the doing of liberation, rather than the doing of work under capitalism, to paraphrase John Holloway whose work is one of Dest’s theoretical touchstones.
The 2016 Peace Accords, however incomplete they may be, opened a new period of protest and political struggle that culminated in the election of Gustavo Petro as the leader of Colombia’s first ever left-wing government in 2022. Petro’s rule, which has at times prioritized consultation with affected communities and brought into the political process previously under-consulted actors, has left a few key questions unanswered. If the government itself is constrained in its efforts to take the necessary steps to better the living conditions of its inhabitants by its dependent place in a globalized order—steps like regulating capital, guaranteeing the rights of local communities in the face of rapacious multinationals, assuring the dignity of its citizens abroad—how exactly are the autonomous social movements and civil society actors centered by Dest to do so? Are there intermediate forms of collaboration between the state and these organizations—somewhere between outright rejection or cooptation—that would better advance the interests of these local communities? And how would one ensure that a focus on local autonomy does not rebound to the benefit of Colombia’s potent right-wing forces who, thanks in large part to these groups’ very participation in larger political processes like the 2022 presidential campaign, have finally had to fear an attack on their entrenched power and privilege.
Abigail Kret is an artist and writer whose work focuses on the history of left-wing movements in the late 20th century.