Decolonizing the understanding of peace and gender in local peacebuilding processes in Colombia

Concerned about the almost null female participation in the Peace Negotiations between the Government and the FARC guerrillas in 2016, a group of around 500 women representing diverse political and ethnic sectors in Colombia constructed a document with 810 proposals to send to the Peace Table. This organized initiative was an attempt to draw the negotiators' attention to the importance of including the gender approach in what was being agreed upon, thus avoiding a patriarchal and hegemonic idea of peace based on militarist masculinities (Jauhola, 2020) that ignore crimes committed against women in the frame of the armed conflict. With the firm understanding that racialized women represent an embodied place for creating emancipatory knowledge, this paper aims to explore the decolonial understanding of gender and peace in the agency of Colombian women, as concepts that make sense in light of a feminized resistance that challenges masculinist ideas of peacebuilding and social transformation (Motta, 2019). The disruption with the epistemological, patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial values implies giving epistemic privilege to the dark wisdom of the ancestors as the result of multiple forms of oppression and exclusion and fostering critical thinking as transformative praxis (Motta, 2021). Women activists in Colombia usually describe themselves as "life-givers" and therefore protectors of life and dignity. No matter who is threatening their lives, they are defending life and non-violent means of solving conflict throughout values such as love and solidarity as relevant for peace making processes (Abreu, 2022). Recognizing their agency, empowerment, and flexible solidarity (Hill Collins, 2019) privileges the local epistemologies that challenges the patriarchal and colonial understanding of peace and conflict studies. Unfortunately, black women, victims of violence are ignored as knowing beings, since they are considered "incapable of reason and self-government and therefore of political freedom" (Motta, 2021, p. 128). Under these logics of dehumanization, women are responding with ideas of feminized resistance through practices of love to survive and flourish (Motta, 2013; Motta, 2021). Their analysis, agency, as well as their previous processes of self-recognition are the main epistemological source that gives a special value to the interpretation of their lived experiences and suffering as oppressed (Vásquez, 2012), as a way to promote peace. Theoretical approaches such as Feminist Peace Research, Decolonial Feminism, Intersectionality and Everyday Peace are included in this paper as a way to encourage and value the knowledge produced by historically oppressed vulnerable sectors. Additionally, "Cuerpo-Territorio" (Body-Territory) is used as a decolonial feminist method, which allows us to advance in the methodological and conceptual understanding of the relations between bodies, emotions, space, and place, as a try to decolonize Anglophone feminist geography (Zaragocin, et al., 2021).