The Colombian government recently concluded a decades-long civil war by signing a peace agreement with the largest of its opposing guerrilla armies: Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC). It has also been involved in negotiations with the other major rebel group, Ejército Nacional de Liberación (National Liberation Army, or ELN). Both groups have been fighting the Colombian government since the early 1960s. Divisions in Colombian society over how to end the war with the FARC that bedeviled the protracted peace negotiations in Havana, Cuba, and led to the Colombian people’s initial rejection of the peace agreement are enduring challenges to a sustainable peace. These divisions are likely to reappear as the rebels demobilize, surrender their role in narcotics trafficking, and re-enter Colombian society and politics.

Colombia has embarked on one of the most complex and multifaceted efforts at building peace and delivering justice the world has ever seen. The sheer size and scope of the Colombian government’s agreement with the FARC guerrillas ensure the path will be neither easy nor short. In fact, there is more than one available path to peace and justice; those destinations may be accessed through a variety of new and novel trails, as well as well-worn roads. Some paths are narrow and difficult, while others “promise” a straight and wide transit to a brighter future. In this world of possibilities, the Colombian peace process offers no guarantees. The journeys are as diverse and difficult to traverse as Colombia’s geography. In this conclusion, we review the progress we have made in understanding how this journey will unfold, what challenges and opportunities may be waiting up ahead, and when and how the scholarly community can best explain how the future might look. More often than not, we must be content with posing the questions that we ought to pursue in the hope of finding these answers.

This chapter seeks to trace the trajectories of two emblematic peacebuilding initiatives at the local level in order to investigate the similarities and differences in their hybridization logics. The initiatives are the Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó [Peace Community of San José de Apartadó] and the Asamblea Constituyente de Tarso [Constituent Municipal Assembly of Tarsus]. The analysis of the trajectories of both these initiatives is based on the perspective of conflict transformation from knowledge of local circumstances in order to examine to what extent the concept of peace infrastructure is applicable to these two experiences. As long as the concept of “Infrastructures for Peace” refers to the networks of peacebuilding, it allows the analysis of the interactions between the local peacebuilding experiences and other actors and processes at different scales, from the very local to the international.