Counterinsurgency by other means? The uses (and abuses) of territorial peacebuilding in Colombia

Notwithstanding the welcome and positive newfound emphasis in bottom-up and community-led approaches in the local-turn in peacebuilding, this paradigm is not impermeable to uses and abuses that can go directly against its generally well-meaning spirit. In Colombia, territorial peace has become a dominant approach to both grassroots peace activists and government officials. Both groups articulate different understandings of what territorial peace actually is. While for the grassroots activists this approach is understood as a guarantee of their inclusion and participation in peacebuilding that provides a welcome corrective to dominant state-centric top-down approaches, state officials understanding (particularly during the 2012-2016 peace negotiations) seems to have outgrown organically from counter-insurgent ideas of territorial consolidation that dominated the Plan Colombia years during the 2000s. Although both understandings are radically different, they, however, seem to coincide in one particular point: they deflect some structural debates that occur necessarily at the national (and not the territorial) scale, which are critical to a more transformative approach to peacebuilding. Despite some of the best intentions of grassroots activists, territorial peacebuilding can guarantee that the status quo is ultimately left untouched.