Introduction

The present chapter proposes a characterization of the adaptive peacebuilding approach based on the experiences of institutions and local communities in Colombia, through different peace processes. The research for this chapter found evidence of adaptive peacebuilding practices in the country’s National Reincorporation Policy and particularly in the Final Agreement for Ending the Conflict and Building a Stable and Lasting Peace, signed with the FARC-EP in 2016, with significant evolutions and improvements if compared with former agreements signed from 1990. As result, the chapter focuses on this retroactive experience of adaptiveness to achieve the 2016 Peace Agreement and not on evaluating its implementation, although some examples are mentioned. The study looks mainly at the achievement of Colombia’s 2016 comprehensive peace agreement to contribute to the structural analysis proposed by the book’s editors regarding recent peacebuilding initiatives after the launching of the UN Sustaining Peace Agenda. In addition, it considers the evolution of the peace talks in Colombia, the National Implementation Policy, and recent trends in the conflicts that challenge the implementation of a sustainable peace.

The evolution experiences and practices in this framework were analyzed from the perspective and core characteristics of adaptive peacebuilding as a pragmatic and problem-solving approach. Previous studies have stressed that the concept of peacebuilding is commonly associated with sustaining economies, justice, absence of violence, and resilience. A significant effort is then required to understand the local dynamics between community leaders, government institutions, cooperation agencies, and the Catholic Church working toward peacebuilding in Colombia. Thus, the information gathered during fieldwork allowed us to identify three main contexts of within the adaptive peacebuilding approach: a retroactive experience gathered in the Agency for Reincorporation and Normalization (ARN—Agencia para la Reincorporación y la Normalización); a new and genuine experience on adaptiveness within the Development Programs with Territorial Focus (PDET—Programas de Desarrollo con Enfoque Territorial), and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP—Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz).

The chapter was written in the middle of the first pandemic of the twenty-first century. However, through remote and on-the-ground fieldwork in Colombia, 41 meetings were carried out, including 7 videoconferencesFootnote 1 and 8 full working days with peacebuildersFootnote 2 to see the operationalization of sustaining peace largely from the perspective of a long-term comprehensive vision of development and inclusive peacebuilding activities (see Chap. 2). The method of research was focused on semi-structured interviews. Thus, a set of questions was prepared for the head of each team at the ARN and for former combatants. In addition, insights from live and online interviews, literature review, process tracing of actions engaged by peacebuilders, and comparative analysis were used to study peacebuilding interactions and extract context-specific peacebuilding approaches.Footnote 3

The writing ended by September 2021, reviewing the information inputs gathered in Colombia in early 2020, just before the COVID outbreak. In that sense, significant aspects related to the actions of the groundbreaking Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), and the recognition of responsibility in the three first macro-cases within the public audiences,Footnote 4 are not mentioned as they began in April 2022. This also applies to the Colombian Truth Commission’s final report released on June 28, 2022.

Several questions were raised to elaborate on the analytical framework: To what extent does Colombia’s implementation process of the 2016 peace agreement correspond to an adaptative peacebuilding approach? Can adaptive peacebuilding practices contribute to the reconstruction of social linkages in scenarios of mistrust, institutional weakness associated with corruption, and protracted conflicts? Finally, can peacebuilders contribute to stabilization under a “conflict order” that nonconventional actors within the international humanitarian law (IHL) had created? The Colombian case indicates that although competitive authoritarianism had gained ground by using violence as a means of social control in some local territories, the National Implementation Policy has effectively adapted its orientations in some cases to boost effective peacebuilding outcomes in some of the territories.

Characterizing Peacebuilding in Colombia: Sixty Years of War Ended by the 2016 Peace Agreement

In 2016, the Colombian government signed a historic peace agreement with the Revolutionary armed forces of Colombia FARC-EP (EP for “people’s army,” Spanish acronym for Ejército Popular). Under the supervision of the international community, the oldest Latin-American guerrilla campaign ended after a sixty-year conflict. As expected, the rate of violence decreased, but inflexible domestic political tension continued in the country. The signing of the peace agreement led to complex institutional architecture. This section explains the characteristics and impact of selected context-specific peacebuilding interventions in this case study, presenting national and local actors interacting in a complex conflict situation.

Scholars have made significant efforts to explain the root causes of the armed conflict in Colombia. However, one can say that the Colombian case is overdiagnosed but has no findings leading to concrete solutions to stop violence and political confrontation. Notwithstanding this, the way armed conflict, violence, political confrontation, and drugs have been determinants in the incessant search for peace in Colombia makes this case study a compelling reference for peacebuilders. The singularity of the Colombian experience contributes to many variables that play a determinant role in how the state, the institutions, the armed groups, and the societies interact when seeking to sustain peace.

The civil war in Colombia has been the object of many studies; a large and important volume of papers, books, and nonacademic literature has been published to explain the roots of the civil conflict. In this respect, the Colombian case is overdiagnosed in relation to its causes and misdiagnosed in the scope of the reintegration process for peacebuilding. This chapter does not attempt to find the roots of these conflicts (a theme strongly explored in many scholarly papers) but to show how the Colombian experiences in peacebuilding make the country a primary reference for adaptive peacebuilding within protracted conflicts.Footnote 5

A Brief Context of the Conflicts

Armed conflict, political confrontation, drugs, internal displacement, and lately migrations are at the heart of knowledge about Colombia, particularly within the second half of the twentieth century. For many scholars, La Violencia (1948-1958)—a ten-year civil war in Colombia—is seen as the starting point for armed conflicts and overwhelming violence. However, research by interdisciplinary scholars such as Jorge Orlando Melo, Eduardo Posada Carbó, David Bushnell, and Malcolm Deas identify La Violencia as a singular period with a substantial historiographic value that is considered a benchmark of the institutionalization of political confrontation.

After years of violent contestations between liberal and conservative parties—mainly occurring in the countryside—binary visions of society amid order, centralized authority and liberty, and social reforms absorbed Colombian history from 1886 to 2016, triggering several civil wars, thousands of deaths, and escalating violence. The history of Colombia during that period can be understood from a succession of civil wars between armed groups, which was followed each time by formal and informal agreements concerning peace that lasted ten to fifteen years without violence, preceding the return to civil war (Proenza 2019, 57).

The historian and philosopher Jorge Orlando Melo stresses that political confrontations throughout the nineteenth-century grasp began from a confrontation between the central government in Bogota and local governments in the regions. Notwithstanding the absence of a formal political centralized system, the state imposed centralized practices that resorted to violence and increased regional tensions in the overall national territory. On the other hand, the significant power of the Catholic Church was mingled with the traditional political confrontation between partiesFootnote 6(Proenza 2019, 58).

A comprehensive study of the first half of the twenty century calls attention to the fact that Venezuela, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia have had more periods of peace than war. On the other hand, all these countries except Colombia faced more high-intensity warfare in the same period. However, contemporary history pays particular attention to what happened from the second half of twenty century until 2016. This period can be divided into three key subperiods (Melo 2019):

  1. 1)

    From 1948 to 1958 (La Violencia), at least 100,000 deaths are registered in different reports;

  2. 2)

    From 1985 to 2002, a very violent period under the Democratic Security and Defense Policy, when 500,000 people were killed due to the civil war, which also resulted in more than 720,000 internal displaced persons (IDPs)Footnote 7(Ombudsman’s Office of Colombia 2002). In early 2021, the magistrates of the JEP reported after investigations that 6402 people were murdered and presented as casualties in combat by State agents, that is, 4154 more people compared with the initial report of Colombia’s General Attorney Office (Unidad de Víctimas. 2022);

  3. 3)

    From 2002 to 2012, the upsurge in violence was brought about by many armed actors other than guerrillas, for example, self-defense groups. This violence cannot be easily assigned to a single group and was not even related exclusively to political parties. In this third subperiod, the de-escalation of conflict was determinant in concluding the peace agreement of 2016. Secret negotiations with the FARC-EP began in 2012.

The second half of the twentieth century displayed a dynamic of increasing violence and degradation of the conflict that illustrated the relationships between society and government. Both trends took place in distinct geographical areas in which divergent armed groups gained control over different regions. The violence of the 1950s was mainly concentrated in the central regions of the country.Footnote 8 From 1985, the violence spread to departments such as La Guajira, Urabá, and the Caribbean coast (Proenza 2019, 60). This expansion was due to the dynamics resulting from drug trafficking markets. These three departments were geographically strategic in bringing out cocaine to the USA and Europe.

A political conflict that was already complex became protracted when drug trafficking was used either as a funding source or as a meaningful source of employment (Penagos forthcoming). A large diversity of actors fought each other in the field: guerrillas, self-defense groups, and traffickers within their own security structures. According to Jorge Orlando Melo, the combination of drugs and guerrillas was dreadful. Until 1970, Colombia was a democratic country compared to the rest of Latin America. Communists had a place in the Congress, but left-wing intellectuals were, however, divided. A part of them thought democracy was not developed enough in Colombia, so that armed conflict was necessary to achieve power. The other side of the debate considered that the fight should be democratic through elections. That said, left-wing parties subsequently used all forms of coercive means to achieve their objectives.Footnote 9

The situation radically changed when Colombia became a producer of cocaine in the 1980s.Footnote 10 The country was deeply impacted by the violence that forced peasants to be displaced from rural areas to the big cities, but it did not endure the financial crisis as other countries in Latin America did. In this respect, David Bushnell, an American academic and Latin American historian, argues that Colombia revealed the correlation between violent regional rates, economic growth, and inequality gaps (Bushnell 2011, 358; Penagos forthcoming). Facing low prices of agricultural products in local markets, many poor farmers became single cocaine crop farmers. Subsequently, the Colombian government declared cocaine cultivation illegal, authorizing the national army to destroy cocaine crops. Coca farmers moved then to distant zones where guerrilla groups arrived shortly after, offering protection to farmers and, by doing so, building solid peasant grassroots.Footnote 11

The Colombian army could not defeat the guerrillas because the government never got control over those distant zones nor over the rest of the complex geography of the country. By contrast, the guerrillas that were born in those zones knew them well. Since 1980, revolutionary forces have stretched over more zones and expanded their activities in the cocaine traffic to buy guns. The response of different governments to guerrilla warfare has often been inadequate. Therefore, the problem was entirely managed by the national army, whose attacks suppressed the whole population where the guerrillas were found (Melo 2019, 62).

In the 1980s, the homicide rate increased due to two main reasons: criminal activities and political reasons. Forced displacement became frequent, and, consequently, complex situations emerged within cities and rural areas. The frustrations in Colombian society were not alleviated with public policies but exacerbated by the national government’s incapacity to prevent murders and criminal activities. One of the most significant upshots was the proliferation of private security services that were encouraged shortly after the formalization of self-defense groups (Bushnell 2011, 357).

Overwhelmed by drug traffickers and guerrilla groups, the Colombian justice system collapsed. The gravest crimes were not judged. A record of impunity persisted in the country, and the reasons for violence were not clearly identifiable. Every year, 30,000 homicides were registered without being directly linked with protracted conflict or drug trafficking. The heads of drug empires armed the population in the zones where they had interests or were running businesses (Melo 2019).Footnote 12 Guns replaced justice, and no government could face this unless it developed the capacity for accurate control over the monopoly of violence, justice, and taxation (Penagos forthcoming).

Guerrillas and self-defense groups multiplied, enlarging their influence over several areas within the national territory. The nexus between armed groups and international trafficking networks was also linked to the armed groups’ activities to fund war operations and prolong the civil conflict. During the presidencies of Alvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2006 and 2006-2010), homicide rates decreased from 30,000 to 20,000 yearly, but those crimes became much more political and were perpetrated by the state agents and paramilitary groups. Colombian society was polarized regarding Alvaro Uribe Vélez. One part of the population saw his figure as a sort of messiah that brought back security and trust with his “Democratic Security Policy” (mainly in the major cities), while the other part saw him as someone who led the country to a new violence breakdown in Colombian rural areas (Melo 2019).Footnote 13

A Comprehensive Peace Agreement with No Ceasefire

The presidencies of Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2014; 2014-2018), a former Minister of Defense, changed the history of Colombia regarding civil war forever. Since 2012, secret negotiations have been held in Havana, Cuba, between the government and the representatives of FARC-EP, the oldest revolutionary group still present in Latin America.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the protracted conflict has demonstrated how Colombia faced not only one single conflict but several severe conflicts with a large variety of actors and global interactions, as briefly explained in the preceding subsection. While the international attention was focused on several failed attempts in relation to the peace process with the FARC-EP, the action of guerrillas such as the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), and an important number of organized crime groups that constantly challenged the peacebuilding process escaped from the scope of media and researchers, apart from those specialized in the field.

The protracted conflict in Colombia unfolded complex interactions derived from political and socioeconomic causes that triggered brutal and unequal responses from different actors. The behavior of government and non-state armed groups kept evolving under different variables and interactions, with an impact on the intensity and severity of the conflicts in at least six dimensions (Penagos forthcoming), as follows (Fig. 4.1):

Fig. 4.1
A circle diagram has blocks reading, notion of legitimacy, political participation, the guarantee of rights of property, high levels of inequality, unemployment and poverty, and persistent corruption.

The six drivers of protracted conflicts in Colombia. Source: Author

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In this framework, the peace agreement signed in 2016 embodies a new chapter in Colombian history. While the political and ideological project of the guerrillas was discredited by many in the cities when the fight blurred the boundaries of criminality with kidnappings, terrorism, and drug trafficking, the peasant grassroots were still supportive of their ideals or were pleading for them to stop hostilities. Particularly for FARC-EP, the fact of not being defeated in confrontation kept alive the possibility of achieving political power even though no one believed in their communist project. A remnant of their ideals, however, is still very present in the form of communitarian organizations, working to attain specific projects such as diverse cultivation, entrepreneurship, or daily life, as observed during the fieldwork carried out from February to March 2020, just before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe and the Americas.

Since 1991, the Colombian government has entailed at least twelve peace negotiations with rebel groups. This experience makes the country one of the most valuable references in the field. The current mayor of Bogota, Claudia Lopez, a specialist in peace studies, suggests that there are three dimensions of stability in municipalities where these experiences of negotiation can be observed: coercion (war actions), extortion, and legitimacy.

After more than sixty years of confrontation then, the signature of the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC-EP represents the onset of a reintegration process that is changing the country and will continue doing so for at least the following fifteen years. The following section presents the characteristics and impact of selected context-specific peacebuilding interventions and changes in power distribution. The peacebuilding experiences gathered decentralized processes to overcome hierarchies in regions to facilitate the bottom-up approach that marked the 2016 peace agreement. Table 4.1 summarizes the list of armed non-state groups that took part in peace processes from 1991 to 2016, the number of disarmed fighters, and their current status in the peacebuilding process.

Table 4.1 Non-State Armed Groups taking part in peace processes from 1991 to 2016
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The Single Undertaking: “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.” The Three Dimensions of Adaptative Peacebuilding

Between 1980 and 2002, three peace negotiations with the FARC-EP failed to achieve DDR objectives. The inflexibility of the actors results from their demands, the broad agendas, and the untrustworthy parties that make it difficult to achieve any successful negotiation and fit this into Colombia’s institutional context. In the secret negotiation that started in 2012, both parties agreed that Cuba, Norway, Chile, and Venezuela would serve as observers.

After almost four years of negotiations at La Habana, a comprehensive agreement gave birth to “the third major attempt in five decades to reach a negotiated solution to the conflict”(Herbolzheimer 2016). However, under the premise of the single undertaking, negotiators decide “to have nothing agreed until everything was agreed,” differentiating this attempt from the precedent ones. In that sense, the government and FARC-EP developed three different models of negotiations: talks without negotiations (1982-1997), talks with a ceasefire within a demilitarized zone (El Caguán) (1998-1999), and secret talks without a ceasefire (2012-2016).

The peace agreement of 2016 changed the country radically. It created a new institutional structure to guarantee the demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration (DDR) process based on lessons learned from former peace processes in which insurgency members were murdered shortly after signing of the peace agreement and new violence breakdowns had begun. Melo underlines that the peace agreement of 2016 reflects a change of mind of the FARC-EP more than a change in the structure of the state. That means that the former combatants had bet on a left-wing political project but in the framework of democratic rules, keeping important links with the supportive rural populations (Melo 2019, 65).

At the point of not having a win-win situation, both parties were willing to create conditions of trust and reliability to end this protracted conflict. Notwithstanding the weaknesses of the FARC-EP when facing the second-best trained army of the American continent, which achieved the strategic killings of the heads of the military staff of the guerrilla group between 2008 and 2011, Colombian government continued to seek for negotiations. Colombia’s peace process was then carefully structured: a secret agenda was fixed before the public negotiations and established six points that would become the milestone of the FARC-EP DDR process, as summarized in Fig. 4.2:

Fig. 4.2
A cycle diagram with six wedges reads, comprehensive rural reform, political participation, end of the conflict with ceasefire, solution to the problem of illicit drugs, agreement regarding the victims of the conflict of J E P, and implementation and verification mechanisms, respectively.

The six points of the 2016 Final Peace Agreement. Source: Adapted from the Final Agreement for Ending the Conflict and Building a Stable and Lasting Peace (NGC and FARC-EP 2016)

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Colombia learned from previous experiences. According to Natalia Salazar, senior advisor to the director-general of the ANR (2020), these six points gathered together the experiences of three generations of the DDR processes initiated by Frank Pearl, former High Presidential Advisor for the Social and Economical Reintegration of People and Armed Groups. Pearl, who was also a former Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development, participated actively in the DDR process of the former United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) in 2006. With a vision of long-term reintegration, housing facilities and employment opportunities were at the heart of the first generation of the DDR process. The second generation considered the more active participation of cooperation agencies (2010-2012) and strong south-south cooperation to share experiences aligned with the international standards related to DDR.

The third DDR generation process gathered all these experiences to improve the institutionalization of the reintegration process. As a key component of the implementation, this DDR process required the inclusion of local and national actors to assist with the economic reincorporation, political reincorporation, and social reincorporation (Fig. 4.3). In this framework, the ANR, as a national peacebuilding institution, accumulated meaningful adaptive actions that show how functional and effective this approach can become.

Fig. 4.3
A flow diagram has interconnected blocks of economic reincorporation, social reincorporation, and political reincorporation.

The three dimensions of the adaptive peacebuilding approach within the Colombian case. Source: Adapted from the 2016 Final Agreement for Ending the Conflict and Building a Stable and Lasting Peace (NGC and FARC-EP 2016)

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The report from the Norwegian Centre for Conflict Resolution(NOREF) points out that the parties learned from their own past failures and the lessons of the peace processes in the following terms:

“In doing so they have developed innovative frameworks and approaches, e.g., a clear procedural distinction between peace negotiations and the peace process; positioning the rights of the victims at the centre of the talks; addressing the structural problem of rural development; creating a Gender Subcommission; and planning for implementation long before the agreement is signed” (Herbolzheimer 2016).

As highlighted by Kristian Herbolzheimer, the Colombian case shows that the adaptive actions within a complex peacebuilding framework were based on an innovative agenda with a specific goal: to end the protracted armed conflict. Former agendas between the government and the FARC-EP were focused on broad discussions on the country’s all-embracing political and economic system. On the other hand, national actors and, afterward, international actors adapted to attain the specific goal of ending the armed conflict. Before and during the talks, the government and the FARC-EP were positioned differently regarding their visions for society. In the precedent negotiations, each party was seen as a single representative of a branch of society, whereas in the 2012 negotiations, the government and the FARC-EP understood the need for public participation and democratic decision-making (Herbolzheimer 2016).

Though previous actions illustrated different results of these adaptations, the more significant actions showing the importance of the adaptive actions were focused on the role of communities, victims, and civil society that could take part in the construction of a common agenda. In addition, the creation of a gender subcommission was an unprecedented mechanism established to recognize violence based on gender within the armed conflict (Nylander et al. 2018). The former process considered the participation of civil society and victims in a symbolic way, as well as the parties which identified themselves as representative of the whole society, as described above.

Therefore, in the 2012-2016 negotiations, public participation was fundamental, and it was deployed through several formats of direct and indirect participation (Herbolzheimer 2016).Footnote 14 The presence of the victims at the negotiation talks had no precedent in Colombia. Despite the tensions related to the presence of representatives of more than six million victims (including women for the first time), this was undeniable progress for all peace processes worldwide (Santos Calderón 2019, 139). Thus, the sub-special commission of gender set a milestone in peace talks, both in Colombia and the world.

President Juan Manuel Santos led the peace process into a national agreement through the democratic mechanism of a referendum. The Final Agreement for Ending the Conflict and Building a Stable and Lasting Peace was submitted for ratification by the Colombian people in October 2016. However, the referendum was unsuccessful in the context of the peace process: 50.2% of people voted against the ratification, and only 49.8% voted in favor. This fact marked the beginning of a very polarized society regarding the terms and conditions agreed upon at La Havana, a polarization that spilled over to the implementation of the DDR process and remains alive until today. Nevertheless, the Colombian government and the FARC-EP presented a revised version of the Final Agreement in November 2016 that the Congress ratified.

Despite the suspicions of the opponents to the agreement, important adaptive actions can be identified in the national implementation policy. The following section discusses how peacebuilders worked within a bottom-up and adaptive approach based on the three dimensions of the reintegration policy for national reconciliation: the recovery of social trust and the guaranties for justice for new social linkages, the non-recurrence of war event, and the reparation of victims.

The National Implementation Policy: Pathways of Adaptive Peacebuilding Within the National Strategy of Stabilization

This section focuses on how the interactions between external and local actors facilitated peacebuilding outcomes and how emerging context-specific peacebuilding approaches were helpful at the end of a protracted conflict. To achieve this, three main actors will be introduced: the ARN, the PDET, and the JEP.

The former director of the Transitions to Peace program (Colombia and Philippines), Kristian Herbolzheimer,Footnote 15 points out that the Colombian Final Agreement has “a radically different approach that balances the power asymmetry between the negotiating table and other deliberation and decision-making processes: the conceptual differentiation between conflict termination (by the warring factions) and conflict transformation (by society at large) suggests that there are multiple paths to peace, of which the negotiations are only one”(Herbolzheimer 2016). It is essential that civil society contributes widely to proposing and implementing actions aimed at building peace. The implication of civil society at large is key to addressing adaptive peacebuilding actions.

The empirical evidence gathered during the fieldwork showed that adaptive actions were necessary to achieve the Peace Agreement agenda and were also required to implement and evaluate the related steps. It means that the sustainability of the peacebuilding is settled within the implementation policy.

The Agency for Reincorporation and Normalization (ARN)

Former DDR experiences in Colombia have given birth to a robust model of reintegration for sustaining peace. The case of the Antioquian Department is particularly emblematic in the field. With 11,470 former combatants from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), it has the most significant number of reintegrated people. The long-term 2006 reintegration process was considered a roadmap that was improved within the National Implementation Policy after 2016 by boosting partnerships with the private sector, associations, and the National Service of Education (SENA), as expressed by the ARN local unit of Antioquia (Chavez Gutierrez 2020).

Setting the conditions, benefits, strategies, methodologies, and actions defined by the ARN demands high levels of concertation. In addition, flexibility and adaptiveness within peacebuilding actors will enable them to achieve a comprehensive reincorporation policy that offers former combatants adapted options for education, instruction in civil rights, opportunities for productivity through entrepreneurship projects, and social services that include the families of former combatants.Footnote 16

Local ARN units of different departments such as La Guajira, Tolima, Cauca, Valle del Cauca, and Bolivar drew attention to the importance of the Annual Action Plan that involves local and regional committees, where government representatives, former FARC-EP representatives, the private sector, and UN agencies participated at different stages. The coordination process between actors allowed to identify adaptive strategies by local communities before being proposed for implementation at the national level.Footnote 17

The end of the protracted conflict in Colombia entails peacebuilding outcomes through these important regional committees. This participative process takes place in the national territory at large with a very special focus on the former Territorial Training and Reincorporation Space (ETCR).Footnote 18 They represent an innovative project where government institutions, local populations, and international cooperation actors have converged to support individual or collective productive projects to generate incomes, promote social cohesion, and avoid new ways of violence.Footnote 19

A remarkable implementation experience was held in the ETCR, where ARN agents informed the community about the action guidelines expected in five areas: productivity (sectorial agenda), education, communities, co-responsibility, and gender. Although ARN agents are experienced public officials, the decisions on addressing each action line belong entirely to the community, as explained at the ETCR of Icononzo, Monterredondo, El Oso y Agua Bonita. This experience involves a very complex decision-making process that empowers leadership and women’s participation in collective actions.

The Development Programs with Territorial Focus (PDET): A Brand-New Direction on the Role of International Cooperation

At the highest level of the National Implementation Policy, the High Commissioner for Reintegration in Colombia, Emilio Archila, was in charge of one of the most innovative public policy projects. The Programs with Territorial Focus (PDETs) were implemented in 170 municipalities, the most affected by violence and poverty. Archila describes the PDETs as the aftermath of a major participative process all over the world with more than 32,000 initiatives proposed by local communities and organized in three main steps: identification of necessities to achieve sustaining peace with legality, developing a roadmap for implementation,Footnote 20 and strengthening networks with local governments to join the PDETs.Footnote 21

Today, the country is classified into 16 PDET areas, and all international cooperation programs must now take the territorial focus into consideration. The National Development Plan (2018-2022) includes funds to carry out the programs established within the PDETs. Also, international funds for peacebuilding in Colombia are engaged around PDET actions. In this framework, 95% of former combatants have bank accounts, and 85% have access to the national social security system.Footnote 22 Archila pointed out the importance of this coverage that was made in record time if compared with other implementation processes that do not even have banking and social security services as milestones of the reintegration process.

International and multilateral institutions such as the Interamerican Bank for Development (BID), the UN Multi-Donor Trust Fund, and the European Union (EU) Trust Fund boosted actions with a territorial focus to improve institutional capacities and territorial development. In that sense, the international community prioritized actions around PDET zones, as confirmed by Maria Iraizoz (2020), project manager of the EU Trust Fund for Colombia (European Delegation).

Colombia succeeded in making the PDET strategy an inevitable international reference for sustaining peace. Furthermore, the PDET is also the pillar of a brand-new direction on the role of international cooperation. The former experiences of cooperation were based on the usual actions of cooperation agencies and UN representations. However, after creating and implementing the PDETs, international cooperation is aligned with the necessities expressed by the communities in the framework of their local plans.

As expressed in a personal interview by an officer of the UN Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCR) in Colombia, the beginning of the implementation of PDETs was challenging. It demanded reorganizing the cooperation between the parties. The needs expressed in the plans by the Colombian government were different from the methodological considerations applied by the UNHCR in each municipality. The UN agency works under frameworks focused on human rights, whereas the PDETs were mostly focused on economic and social reintegration, mainly through productivity. There was an increasing demand for technical cooperation to develop effective projects within ETCRs and PDET zones, and so the UN agency had to adapt its actions to cooperate in this new and atypical national context.

International Cooperation Agencies based in Colombia, such as JICA and TIKA,Footnote 23 offer important technical cooperation based on education exchanges and medical equipment to contribute to capacity-building. The actions of JICA were importantly deployed by former Japanese ambassador Kazuo Watanabe who reinforced educational cooperation in the framework of the national policy on early childhood (2017). JICA has vast experience in Colombia of supporting productive projects and offering technical cooperation. In the framework of the PDETs, JICA’s expertise is highly valuable while articulated with the ARN, as this last one gathers information on specific requirements for productive projects as well as environmental initiatives. In addition, the community homes’ provision of cultural programs such as dance, arts, and robotics (for kids and teenagers) is an interesting pathway to explore. Also, projects with a gender equity focus and scientific knowledge are part of the possibilities.

Previous experience in Colombia, such as JICA’s participation in the de-mining process, gave valuable results in terms of cooperation. JICA is a reference for cooperation with the prosthesis and medical equipment for disabled victims of the conflict in the current process. There are ongoing interesting projects in universities in Cali and Medellin with which it would be interesting to articulate for further cooperation as expressed by ARN and APC officials. In the case of TIKA, the cooperation is in full growth by providing medical equipment and training to medical practitioners. Also, technical cooperation for productive projects addressed peasants in PDET zones, mostly in Cauca and Catatumbo, where indigenous populations are present.

The Territorial Focused Development Plans represent a key adaptive action within the comprehensive rural reform for transforming violent and poor territories. The strategic bottom-up approach was agreed upon at La Havana for the implementation of the 2016 peace agreement that stands:

“In order to fulfill the objectives of the territory-based development programs, an action plan for regional transformation will be prepared for each prioritized zone, which will include all levels of territorial planning and will be prepared in collaboration with the local authorities and communities. The plans will address the following:

  • The territory-based approach to rural communities takes into account the socio-historical, cultural, environmental, and productive characteristics of the territories and their inhabitants; also their unique needs, which will vary owing to their membership of vulnerable groups and depending on the suitability of the land, so that sufficient public investment resources can be deployed in harmony with the nation’s tangible and intangible assets;

  • An objective diagnostic assessment carried out with the participation of the various communities—both men and women—which, using the aforementioned territory-based approach, will take account of the needs in a territory and the steps necessary to coordinate the various aspects, with clear, precise targets that will allow for the structural transformation of living and production conditions;

  • The National Development Plan will encompass the priorities and goals of the territory-based development programs” (NGC and FARC-EP 2016).

Development programs with a territorial focus gave birth to a significant number of adaptive projects carried out by local experts with national and international technical cooperation. This is the case of the former NGO Fundación Reconciliación Colombia, which was focused on developing programs based on territorial capacities to enhance trust. Their projects were based on the potentiality of the territories and analysis of conflict trends. Local leaders, the private sector, young people, and academia participated in a large number of projects across vast areas of the national territory. Peacebuilders such as Fundación Reconciliación Colombia and the Jesuit Refugee Service developed a bottom-up approach to peacebuilding issues and a large presence in the country. Both actors have applied scientific research methods for fieldwork and produced different support materials such as books, videos, papers, and scholarly literature that point out the significative social linkages renovated under their practices, as expressed in the interviews by both, Oscar Chaparro (project manager at Fundación Reconciliación Colombia) and Oscar Calderón (director for Andean region at the Jesuit Refugee Service).

For Professor Miguel Angel Martinez Meucci (2020) (Austral University, Chile), the implementation process in Colombia may improve the people’s quality of life as it is currently facing the consequences of the protected conflict. The abundant information about the process and the continuous involvement of peacebuilders prove the maturity of the Colombian society in both the analysis and comprehensive vision in relation to armed conflicts. However, he warns about the missing policy to integrate Venezuelan migrants that are currently part of a new way of violence linked with illegal trafficking. In that sense, Professor Stephen Launay (2021) (Université Gustave Eiffel, France) considers that the implementation of the peace agreement and all national policies confirm that Colombia has strong institutions that adapt their operations when needed.

The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP)

The transitional court system or JEP is one of the most controversial actors of the national implementation policy. The opponents of the peace process implementation (who won the Referendum in 2016) denounced many times the inconvenience of a special jurisdiction addressing the former combatants of the FARC-EP. The Colombian President Ivan Duque voted against the Referendum and organized his campaign to run for the presidency based on introducing changes in the implementation of the Peace Agreement.Footnote 24

However, the robust system of the Colombian institutions allowed the society to create and maintain the JEP. This Special Jurisdiction encompasses clearly what Professor Launay (2021) underlined about the institutional system in Colombia: “institutions meet the basic criteria of separation of powers, sometimes better than their French counterparts. Despite the protracted conflict, its justice system works rather well.”

The JEP will operate for up to twenty years.Footnote 25 Its mandate is to “investigate, elucidate, judge, and punish serious human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed in the context of the armed conflict up to December 1, 2016. It is obliged to investigate and adjudicate cases involving ex-combatants of the FARC and members of the Public Forces who have been prosecuted or linked to crimes related to the armed conflict.Footnote 26 It also investigates and adjudicates cases involving other non-military State agents and third-party civilians who appear voluntarily” (The Truth Commission, JEP, and UBPD 2019).

The JEP belongs to the Comprehensive System of Truth, Justice, Reparation, and Non-Repetition mechanism (SIVJRNR is the Spanish acronym). It has its own regulatory framework and sets actions to “guarantee the rights of victims to truth, justice, reparation, and non-recurrence, as stipulated in the Agreement for the Termination of the Conflict and the Construction of a Stable and Lasting Peace. It is integrated by the Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition Commission, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), and the Unit for the Search for Persons Presumed Disappeared (UBPD); as well as comprehensive reparation measures for peacebuilding” (The Truth Commission, JEP, and UBPD 2019).

Within the comprehensive system of Truth Justice, all victims of armed conflict can participate to ensure accountability for what occurred. In this respect, the Truth National CommissionFootnote 27 and the Centre for Historical MemoryFootnote 28 play a key role in bottom-up adaptive actions to promote peace through recognition of the responsibilities of actors involved in the protracted conflict and reconciliation. Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian senator kidnapped by the FARC-EP between 2002 and 2008, highlighted the importance of the Truth National Commission and the commitment of Francisco de Roux to building the collective truth of years of civil war in Colombia.Footnote 29

Concluding Ideas: Challenges for Adaptive Peacebuilding Actions and Conflict Trends in Colombia

In the long path to a sustainable peace, Colombia gathered shareable experiences in at least three dimensions: adaptive actions, comprehensive implementation of peace processes, and reintegration policies for reestablishment of social linkages. The cases of adaptive actions presented in this chapter are evidence that sustaining peace is a delicate and long-term process that requires the permanent participation of local communities.

This participation is not only a matter of the actors directly impacted by the protracted conflict that ended in 2016. It has to do with all Colombian citizens with the aim to achieve the best possible implementation. Unfortunately, in some cases, the suspicions against the implementation process made it difficult to develop the agenda established for the ARN and the PDETs policies in sensitive areas such as Cauca and Catatumbo. For instance, in some cities, the atmosphere of mistrust was deeply nourished by fake news with impacts on some communities. However, as Carlos Duran (2021) pointed out, the experiences gathered on capacity building and attention to displaced populations deserved to be observed in other regions of the world with protracted conflicts.

In January 2021, an unprecedented action within the Comprehensive System of Truth Justice, Reparation, and Non-Repetition mechanism took place: the JEP indicted eight former high-level members of the FARC-EP chiefs of staff of kidnapping crimes under the accusation of “hostage-taking and other serious deprivations of liberty”(Navarro 2021). The decision was made four years after the signing of the peace agreement—an unprecedented record if compared with other peace processes in the world.Footnote 30 This decision, as well as the public auditions of victims,Footnote 31 reinforced the trust and legitimacy of the institutions created in the framework of the peace agreement.

Within the territories, local communities and the Catholic Church work together to contribute to the regional strategies for reconciliation and new social linkages. On the other hand, insightful tools have been created to contribute to national reconciliation and give voice to victims. The Podcast proposed by the JEPFootnote 32 is only one example: “a radio broadcast in different accents, voices, and stories in which the victims are the protagonists shows the work of the JEP administering transitional justice, investigating, judging, and punishing the most serious and representative crimes that occurred during the armed conflict”(JEP 2022). Also, the report released by the Truth National Commission offers interactive and pedagogical information organized in sections with the gender and ethnic equity approach (Comisión de la Verdad 2022).Footnote 33

Despite these efforts, profound pedagogical labor to socialize the guidelines of the national implementation policy is required to engage the broad participation of communities in the oversight of processes and peacebuilding budgets. Notwithstanding this, the oldest civil war in the American continent may reoccur, and therefore complex armed conflicts in Colombia may be far from over. The 2022 report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) stressed that in the country at least six ongoing armed conflicts explain the increase of violence in different zones(ICRC 2022):

  • The Colombian State vs. National Liberation Army (ELN);

  • The Colombian State vs. Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AGC);

  • The Colombian State vs. Former FARC-EP currently not covered by the Peace Agreement;

  • Former FARC-EP currently not covered by the Peace Agreement vs. Second Marquetalia;

  • Former FARC-EP currently not covered by the Peace Agreement vs. Border Commandos-EB.

In 2021, the three main complexities identified in the ICRC report were 1) enforced disappearance, 2) massive internal displacement of population and enforced lockdowns imposed by illegal groups, and 3) attacks against health infrastructure, particularly in rural areas (ICRC 2022).

Thus, the Colombian experience shows two ongoing trends: 1) an active engagement in reincorporation through productive projects, training in civil rights, and political participation of communities, and 2) a shift in national conflict trends from political confrontation to violence linked with illegal groups and underground economies triggered by corruption, and the international dynamic of drug trafficking, arms trafficking, illegal exploitation of mines, and irregular migrations (Penagos forthcoming).

The challenges of peace in Colombia can be addressed at local levels through continuous efforts toward adaptive peacebuilding. This means that the participation of former combatants in the political arena, their integration into civil life through productive projects, and the involvement of victims in a comprehensive justice system are, however, unavoidable. Therefore, adaptiveness is required to cope with complexity, reinforce institutions, and strengthen democracy. And this is a condition that cannot be overlooked in societies that need to overcome war while working to ensure sustainable peacebuilding.