Event Description
Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations, as in the 2016 agreement between the Colombian government and FARC guerrillas. But the San José de Apartadó Peace Community of small-scale farmers did not wait for a top-down peace treaty. Instead, the Peace Community has actively resisted forced displacement and co-optation by guerrillas, army soldiers, and paramilitaries for more than two decades in Colombia’s war-torn Urabá region. In his book Community of Peace: Performing Geographies of Ecological Dignity in Colombia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), Christopher Courtheyn shows how the San José de Apartadó Peace Community has envisioned and created peace on their own in Colombia’s countryside.
In this presentation, Christopher will trace the community’s understandings of peace and territorial practices against ongoing assassinations and displacement, interrogate the relationship between race, memory, and ecology in Colombia’s war, and discuss San José’s rupture from the logics of capitalism and colonialism through the construction of political solidarity and communal peace amid the current scenario of slow and uneven implementation of Colombia's peace accord.
Speakers
Christopher Courtheyn is an assistant professor in the School of Public Service at Boise State University. A Latin American Studies graduate from UC Berkeley, he earned his Ph.D. in geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His main areas of research include geographies of peace and conflict, globalization and development, race and ethnicity, performance, and social movements. His work has appeared in journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Peasant Studies, and Progress in Human Geography.
Jesús Alejandro García is a third-year Ph.D. Student in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. His Ph.D. project uses a political ecology lens to analyze how multi-scaled state territorial practices of water management shape and are shaped by riverine populations' struggles for environmental justice in the Upper Magdalena River Basin, Colombia. His work combines elements from the humanities and social sciences to engage in conversation with academic fields such as critical agrarian studies, social studies of infrastructure, political ecologies of extractivism, and terraqueous geographies.
Cosponsors
Organized by the Latin American and Caribbean Socio-Natures Working Group, with funding from the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies.