Peace from Below: Ten Years after the 2016 Peace Agreement in Colombia

This piece appeared in the Fall 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!

Leer este artículo en español / Read this article in Spanish.

Ten years after the signing of the agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) and the Colombian government, peace remains elusive.

The agreement promised to bring an end to over 50 years of war with Latin America’s oldest guerrilla insurgency and to address some of the underlying causes of the violence through reforms. Yet, violence endures. Nearly 500 former FARC-EP combatants who signed the agreement and more than 1,700 activists have been murdered, and—as dire as those statistics may be—they do not come close to capturing the residual and accumulating effects of the war.

Since 2016, no issue has been more divisive in Colombian politics. From the Juan Manuel Santos administration’s aspirational slogan of “United for Peace” to Iván Duque’s revanchist “Peace with Legality,” Petro’s more expansive vision of “Total Peace,” and now President Abelardo de la Espriella’s open embrace of militarization, the country’s political and peace pendulum has swung between support for the Agreement and reactionary backlash with each successive administration. Yet despite their significant differences, all have expressed support for something called “peace.”

These distinct approaches, which could collectively be understood as forms of “peace from above,” privilege a form of peacebuilding based on institutional reform through the exercise of state power. The contours of this model were succinctly expressed early in the negotiations by former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Santos, who declared: “The economic and political model is not up for debate with the FARC.” This model—which we have elsewhere described as “colonial capitalist” or as an expression of the “modern-colonial matrix of domination”—is rooted in oppressive violence tied to capitalist development.

Much of the commentary and analysis surrounding the tenth anniversary of the agreement has privileged the voices of journalists, academics, and policy experts writing about Colombia’s post-agreement conjuncture, often reproducing this perspective from above. This special issue, by contrast, foregrounds knowledge produced by collective processes in territories struggling to build what we call “peace from below.”

Rather than defining peace from below through a shared ideological commitment or tactical repertoire, we understand it as a generative concept for identifying a form of praxis grounded in self-determination. Peace from below does not hinge on permission from authorities, although it may work through institutional mechanisms created by the 2016 Agreement or reject them altogether. Indeed, many of the contributions to this issue advance sharply different—and at times contradictory—political perspectives. Reflecting critically on these differences is essential to sharpening our analysis of the present conjuncture. As such, peace from below exceeds narrow conceptions of peacebuilding that treat armed actors—the military, police, guerrillas, or paramilitaries—as the primary protagonists.

Peace from below emanates from struggles concerned with building the conditions for liberation here and now. It manifests in collective actions like the minga hacia dentro (internal minga) featured on the issue’s cover. In the photograph by the collective Entrelazando, a Nasa Indigenous woman from Sa’th Tama Kiwe in Cauca removes an uprooted coca bush from a cornfield shortly after the murder of Sandra Liliana Peña Chocué in 2021. Peña Chocué, the former governor of her resguardo (reservation), was assassinated for carrying out her community’s mandate to expel drug traffickers by eradicating their coca crops and destroying their seedbeds. Despite the imminent threats of violence that have materialized time and again, the community defiantly continues its struggle.

Mapping Peace from Below

To mark the 10th anniversary of the Peace Agreement, this special issue was designed to foster a dialogue on peace from below, drawing on the many differences that shape Colombia. As editors, we sought to include voices reflecting the country’s geographic diversity—from the Amazon, Orinoquía, Cauca, the Caribbean, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Bogotá, Medellín, the coffee region, and the Pacific—as well as the diversity of actors engaged in peacebuilding: Peace Agreement signatories, victims’ organizations, campesinxs, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, women’s organizations, neighborhood groups, LGBTIQ+ organizations, and organic intellectuals, among others.

While not all the voices that influence peacebuilding from below are represented here, this issue brings together some of those who have been essential to struggling for peace as a means of ensuring life, dignity, and justice. From an organization of former FARC-EP combatants searching for disappeared members of the guerrilla to queer struggles for dignified life in Medellín, the contributors explore how people navigate the complexities of the post-agreement conjuncture while continuing to organize under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

These diverse voices have built and defended forms of peace rooted in struggles that long predate the 2016 Peace Agreement and other transitional justice efforts. The articles reveal how their struggles align —or do not—with official peacebuilding frameworks. While some are in dialogue with transitional justice mechanisms, their aspirations extend beyond the liberal underpinnings that have shaped the Colombian state’s approach to peace.

This is evident in their critical assessment of the Peace Agreement and its implementation. Their critiques range from the slow pace of implementation and budget cuts under governments such as Duque’s to corruption, dependence on international aid, excessive bureaucracy, a lack of interagency coordination, fragmented government action, and the inability to address structural problems. This latter point, which is a persistent limitation of liberal approaches to peacebuilding, continues to shape fundamental issues, including the problem of illicit economies, victims’ rights, the economic autonomy of signatories, the territorial implementation of the Agreement, and how to address continuing violence.

The special issue also offers important insights into why violence persists in Colombia. The paramilitary demobilization process of the 2000s failed to dismantle paramilitary violence, and the territories vacated by the FARC-EP were quickly taken over by other armed groups engaged in both licit and illicit activities. This situation is further compounded by Colombia’s geostrategic importance. It is no coincidence that the territories represented in this issue—as described by their inhabitants—are also home to strategic corridors, coastlines, biodiversity, gold, illicit crops, and rare earth minerals now coveted by big capital. Many people continue to face violence precisely because they are struggling to build peace from below through various forms of resistance.

Despite the Petro administration’s efforts to expand the scope of the Agreement, its “Total Peace” proposal ultimately failed to dismantle this war machine. Collectively, the articles demonstrate how people—and particularly youth—continue to be recruited, killed, disappeared, and criminalized; how extreme violence has become normalized; how capitalist development and (neo)extractivism continue to undermine peoples’ livelihoods; how racism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity are reproduced through multiple forms of violence; how armed groups—sometimes in alliance with state actors—exercise economic, social, political, and cultural control over these territories, including capital cities such as Medellín and Bogotá; and how the stigmatization of those building peace from below continues.

Despite the criticisms outlined throughout the issue—in some cases not without difficulty, given the implications of pointing out the Agreement’s shortcomings amid renewed attacks against it—peace endures as the steadfast determination of those who have suffered through the war to defend life and dignity.

Over the past 10 years, new organizational models have flourished, such as cooperatives established by Peace Agreement signatories. The search for the forcibly disappeared has gained momentum, albeit slowly, and people who were once enemies have worked together to find the disappeared, as in the cemetery in Palmira. Relationships of coexistence have been forged between victims and perpetrators of violence without imposing prescriptive notions of reconciliation and forgiveness. Progress has also been made in recognizing the violence experienced by women, the LGBTIQ+ community, Colombians in exile, and Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and Rrom peoples, as well as their distinct rights and experiences. Amid ongoing violence, strategies to protect lives and territories—such as the “Humanitarian Agreement NOW” in Yurumanguí—have taken shape, and resistance has continued with dignity.

Over the past decade, existing social movements have also reorganized. While some have weakened, faded away, or become institutionalized, others have transformed, and diverse forms of collective protagonism have emerged or been consolidated. Peace from below is woven through everyday life, art, organizing, resistance, senti-pensar (feeling-thinking), spiritual harmonization, and the production of communities’ own knowledge. The contributions gathered here are more than aspirational exercises. They are living struggles, full of contradictions, that nevertheless contain the seeds of a different future. From them emerge concrete alternatives that give substantive meaning to the word peace.

Depending on each community’s experience, peace may mean upholding the humanity of loved ones taken from us by violence, searching for the disappeared, grieving and remembering what happened, building an anti-heteropatriarchal and anti-racist society centered on care, living freely with Mother Earth, painting the world in many colors, and moving toward our own visions of collective well-being. Across these differences—including those emerging from urban struggles—all share the conviction that peace is not merely the silencing of guns. It must also embody social justice and the defense of life. Such a peace cannot be achieved without structural transformation or without recognizing the dignity of all people.

Peace from below departs from the liberal model and its emphasis on preserving capitalism, liberal democracy, and the centralized bureaucratic nation-state as the only possible ways of organizing society. The articles in this issue demonstrate that peace from above never succeeded in erasing the aspirations of those who have been oppressed by the existing order—an important reminder in the context of ascendant fascism and renewed imperial ambitions encapsulated in the slogan of “peace through strength.” Peacebuilding unfolds in an even more complex landscape than it did in 2016. Yet the struggles documented here are not unique to Colombia. They resonate with communities around the world confronting militarization, authoritarianism, extractivism, dispossession, and other existential threats. Together, they affirm a shared commitment to dignity, collective wellbeing, and the ability of all peoples to determine their own futures.

Anthony Dest is Assistant Professor and Gussenhoven Fellow of Geography and Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book Dissident Peace: Autonomous Struggles and the State in Colombia was published in 2025 and its Spanish translation was published in 2026.

Diana Gómez Correal is a decolonial feminist researcher and former Vice Minister of Women in Colombia with a master’s degree in History from the National University of Colombia and a PhD in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book De amor, sangre y vientre: politización de los sujetos victimizados y gestación de una paz transformadora was published in 2024.