In August 2022, Colombians elected, for the first time, a left-leaning government. Led by former guerrilla activist Gustavo Petro and his Vice President Francia Márquez, an Afro-Colombian woman and well-known advocate for human rights and environmental justice, the shift in governmental discourse was immediately striking. President Petro used his inauguration speech to promise that he would deliver Paz total (total peace), which would involve entering into talks with a wide range of armed groups to tackle the violence that has continued – indeed, in some areas has increased – in the years since the peace agreement between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia; FARC) was signed in 2016. Essential to total peace would be not only those new negotiations, but also fully implementing the terms of the 2016 agreement itself. Former President Iván Duque's (2018–22) failure to do so had caused widespread disillusionment with the peace process, and had also spurred splinter groups from the FARC to continue in arms.

Hopes for a stable and lasting peace in Colombia will depend in part on Petro's success in persuading the wide range of guerrilla, paramilitary and criminal groups still active in the country to cease the violence and lay down their weapons. But Petro was clear that total peace would also need to be a project for the whole of society:

This book is interested in how, in the years before and since the 2016 peace agreement, communities have been using dialogue as a way of participating in the building of peace, often in relatively unpromising circumstances. Seeking to understand the dynamics of community-level dialogues that aim to deal with the legacies of earlier violence and overcome ongoing conflicts, the book takes a ‘bottom-up’ look at the building of peace.

The 2016 Colombian peace agreement was lauded internationally as innovative, multi-layered and comprehensive. It went far beyond a simple commitment to lay down arms, incorporating further provisions on how to deal with various thorny legacies of the conflict, and also new challenges that would arise in response to its implementation. These included issues such as reparations for victims and the reintegration of demobilized FARC combatants, including guarantees for their political participation. Most ambitiously, the agreement sought to provide for the future economic growth of the predominantly rural areas that had been most heavily impacted by the conflict, often among the poorest in the country. In doing so, it incorporated much of the learning from previous peace processes (both those perceived as successful and those less so) that took place around the world in the post-Cold War era, while building upon multiple peacebuilding experiences and traditions developed in Colombia itself over the preceding decades. This unquestionably ambitious project of a participatory peace and geographically targeted development was, nevertheless, criticized widely from within Colombia. In the areas that were ostensibly intended to benefit from it, various social actors pointed to an implementation process that failed to address asymmetric power relations and, above all, the economic injustices that fuelled the armed conflict in the first place.

The discussion in this chapter situates the emergence of new forms of community-led participatory peacebuilding in relation to shortcomings in the peace process. Specifically, the chapter's goal is to contextualize the origins of the diálogos socio-territoriales (DSTs) discussed in Chapter Two and explored empirically in Chapters Three and Four. Particularly notable in the Colombian peace process was the government's use of social dialogue as a form of state-sponsored participatory peacebuilding, which in turn built upon previous civil society-led experiments with peace. The ambitious peace programme aspired to produce peaceful and prosperous futures for conflict-affected areas while involving the entirety of Colombian society in the process. However, it was also rather top-down in its initial composition, and various state–society interactions occurred during both the negotiation and implementation phases, which saw its very constitution and purpose becoming a site of conflict and contestation.

This book has been inspired by two central questions. First, how are communities in Colombia seizing the initiative to build peace in the wake of the historic 2016 peace agreement? And second, what can participatory research contribute to these efforts, both within and beyond Colombia?

As is the case with any project in such a complex and shifting social and political situation, the findings we present and discuss here are necessarily provisional and partial. Colombia's conflict, the changing local and national politics surrounding it and associated efforts to understand and reduce violence – efforts that include local actors, NGOs, governments, international agencies and the research community alike – continue to evolve with dizzying speed. A meaningful or comprehensive peace in Colombia is a long way from being successfully ‘built’. Yet notwithstanding the limitations of our own efforts, we are confident of the significant untapped potential for engaged, immersive and non-extractive research in ‘post-conflict’ scenarios and, however embryonic and limited they may be, it is plainly evident that many communities beyond those we have examined here are constantly engaged in the careful, gradual and difficult business of constructing their own visions of more peaceful lives and futures.

In this concluding chapter, we present a synthesis of the book's central empirical, theoretical and methodological insights. We begin by placing the key findings from the two empirical cases in dialogue with one another and in relation to the wider story of the Colombian peace process, including the ‘territorial peace’ agenda. Here we return to the book's core concept of DST and ask what potential lessons these experiences can offer for other community-based actors. In the second section, we outline our key reflections for peace scholars and practitioners, making the case that DST is not only a descriptive concept describing a particular form of dialogue practice, but also a normative one which provides an entry point for PAR-based research to play a meaningful role in partnering with and supporting communities within and beyond Colombia to overcome the conflict(s) that inhibit their ability to live with dignity. Finally, we offer a brief analysis of recent events in Colombia, specifically the election of President Petro in 2022, and the implications of his early efforts towards a lasting form of ‘total peace’.

Dialogue cannot be a panacea for all conflict challenges, nor did the social leaders and community members engaging with our project expect it to be. Their main priority was to find pragmatic ways of addressing ongoing problems and bringing improvements to their territories, often through de-escalating ongoing violent conflicts and finding strategies to avoid overt confrontation. Many participants shared concerns that latent tensions were being intensified by the failure to implement key parts of the peace agreement. Yet, we found that a broad range of social actors saw value in community-driven peacebuilding through dialogue. The main aim of this chapter is to introduce how methodological approaches and ethical sensibilities from Participatory Action Research (PAR) can open up opportunities for researchers to work alongside social actors in the co-production of such dialogues, instead of merely documenting them. We focus in particular on the format of diálogos socio-territoriales (DSTs), which the chapter also defines in more depth.

We must begin by recognizing that territorially rooted, dialogue-based modes of participation were not, for the most part, created de novo after 2016. Such efforts have been part of communities’ repertoires of ‘peacebuilding from below’ for decades (Jaramillo Marín et al, 2018). Community-based organizations have frequently created and convened participatory spaces when state actors have proved unresponsive or unable to interpret their claims (Archila, 2019). Yet, these dialogues have not been adequately recognized either by the literature on peacebuilding, or by the national peace agreement's promises of citizen involvement in the construction of ‘territorial peace’. In many cases, the invented spaces of dialogue that communities have sustained in the ‘post-conflict’ period have been a continuation of, or have built upon the foundations of, those previous efforts. They have also continued to adapt to changing (post-)conflict circumstances, in doing so producing innovations that have opened up further avenues for participation, the construction of peace and pursuit of life with dignity.

This chapter consists of four sections. The first outlines the Improbable Dialogues project from which this book emerges, situating it in the context of receding violence and increasing political optimism that at first followed the signing of the peace agreement. The second section briefly outlines the project's roots in the Latin American tradition of PAR as developed in the pioneering work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, and explains how we applied these principles critically in our approach to community engagement.

In January 2021, a group of human rights defenders in Buenaventura received death threats and harassment by armed men who followed them as they went to and from their homes and workplaces. While typical of the threats faced by community leaders across Colombia since the 2016 peace agreement, in Buenaventura this also reflected the continuation of local struggles over the San Antonio Estuary. A project to dredge the estuary, led by the Instituto Nacional de Vías (National Roads Institute) and a consortium of private interests, had generated intense opposition from local residents. Although the public and private investors proposing the plan argued that dredging would allow for the expansion of commercial shipping operations, they had failed to persuade community leaders to drop their legal action to prevent the work. One representative of the local administration who was in support of the dredging called his opponents “enemies of the development of Buenaventura”.

For those community leaders, however, opposition to the dredging was not only environmental: they also cited reliable evidence that the estuary was an acuafosa, or watery grave, containing the remains of hundreds of victims of forced disappearance (Avila and Parada, 2021). The dredging project, they argued, threatened families’ hopes of ever recovering the remains of their loved ones; a serious abuse of the rights of victims’ relatives. They demanded a detailed investigation of the area and, in February 2021, a request for protection of the Estuary was submitted to the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (Special Jurisdiction for Peace; JEP), who ordered the suspension of the dredging project. In April of that year, the Pact for the Search of the Disappeared in Buenaventura was signed, a commitment from the Public Prosecutor's Office's Disappeared Persons Unit and the Mayor's office to conduct the first ever search for the disappeared in a maritime zone. At the time of writing, that search is about to begin.

This incident perfectly encapsulates many of the issues that residents and social leaders in Buenaventura face: powerful commercial and economic interests pursuing forms of development that conflict with the wishes of local communities, an ongoing struggle to deal with the legacies of the city's turbulent history of violence and continuing threats of violence against those who try to defend the interests of the community and address the city's problems.

On the morning of 10 June 2013, a group of around 300 campesinos blocked the road connecting Tibú, the largest town in Catatumbo, to Cúcuta, the departmental capital of Norte de Santander. Central to the protestors’ concerns was the excessive use of force in the government's illicit crop eradication programme, along with unequal access to land and a lack of support for transitioning to alternative livelihoods. The blockade sparked what would become the Catatumbo agrarian strike, lasting 53 days and including around 10,000 people in an unprecedented region-wide mobilization ( Jiménez Martín et al, 2019).

During the Improbable Dialogues project's participatory scoping phase, the strike was repeatedly cited as a watershed moment for envisioning and realizing a community-led peace. The transport blockages had soon affected palm oil production, access to the Colombian Oil Company (Ecopetrol) and other commercial sectors in the region. The results included food shortages and clashes between campesinos and security forces. Although the protesters eventually obtained a response from the Colombian government, issues emerged over the extent to which the protestors were representative of the region's diverse groups, including the Motilón-Barí indigenous people. Few of the promised state concessions came to fruition and, even though the PDET programme which stemmed from the 2016 peace agreement prioritized the development of the region, it did little to change the situation on the ground. It is no overstatement to suggest that communities like those in Catatumbo have been some of the biggest losers of the conflict: as Ballvé (2013b: 238) suggests, for four decades ‘the conflation of political violence and the cocaine boom have devastated rural Colombia, fueling the displacement of some 4 million campesinos – mainly by paramilitary groups’. Yet, even after the agreement with the FARC had been reached, the people of Catatumbo continued to be plagued by a combination of illegal economies, armed violence from guerrilla and paramilitary groups, state repression and unequal access to land and natural resources.

While the contentious politics that animated the agrarian strike continue to this day, and residents acknowledge the challenges and slow pace of change stemming from the peace agreement, innovative and community-based efforts to create and sustain peace are gaining visibility and traction. Our local partners, especially the faith-based organization Pastoral Social who have long been active in the territory, introduced us to multiple initiatives, including in remote, poorly-connected parts of the region.