2021 - Peacebuilding Practices in Divided Societies

Author: Laura Valentina Ojeda (Bogotá, Colombia)

Gender has become a hot topic and a resourceful analytical tool when approaching peace and conflict studies during the past few decades (Gizelis, 2018). Within the Peacebuilding practices in divided societies summer course from the Peace Academy, there was even a complete module dedicated to the presentation and discussion of this topic. Yet, this module followed a very common and mainstream conception of the term “gender”, where the concept has been reduced or equalized to women, within a binary perspective of gender. This approach may have a lot of sense, since gender studies have been deeply related to women studies, given the unfavorable position when it comes to relational power within the sex-gender system for the feminine gender roles. Yet, understanding gender just as two faces of one coin (that is, female and male) is deeply violent. This essay aims to expose how reducing gender studies to women studies turns out marginalizing and excluding historically invisibilized populations and the potential of queerness within peace studies to address this topic.  The purpose of this essay is, therefore, to expose how a non-binary vision of gender can, from a queer perspective, feed the gender discussion and promote debates within peacebuilding theory and practice.

Author: Catalina Amador (Bogota, Colombia)

The Colombian conflict has been a 52-year conflict between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC and the government (Human Rights Watch, 2020).  It is a complex conflict with diverse actors: criminal and paramilitary groups, civilians, the state, that are tangled in a web of historical claims of rights and equality, illegal economies, and a fragmented democracy since independence. For the length and complexity of the conflict one way it can be understood is as a Protracted Conflict: "hostile interactions which extend over long periods with sporadic outbreaks of open warfare fluctuating in frequency and intensity", involving the whole society and defining the scope of national identity and social solidarity (Azar, Jureidini and McLaurin, 1978, p. 50), and as Policinski and Kuzmanovic (2019, p. 965), point out, it has progressively become normalized, with scenarios as growing-up with the sounds of explosions, displaced families and neighbors and difficulties to fulfill basic needs like water or food.

Author: Martín Fernández Cardona (Bogota, Colombia)

Abstract

In Colombia a peace process was started in 2016 with the former guerrilla FARC, this meant the need for reintegration by more than 13,000 ex-guerrilla fighters, to start this process the national government has carried out different initiatives such as training courses for entrepreneurship or innovation. These policies are based on a neoliberal approach, so their objective is to increase the competitiveness of ex-guerrillas in the labor market and to be able to be hired more easily. This does not consider the negative prejudices that exist towards ex-guerrillas, which is the main reason why they are not hired. To reduce these prejudices, positive relationship processes have to be carried out according to the Intergroup Contact Theory, there are already several relationship processes taking place without government supervision, which added to the neoliberal competition environment can cause prejudices to increase.