Colombia

Foreword: Accord public participation

Owning the process: Public participation in peacemaking
Dec 2002
Introducing the publication, Ed Garcia stresses the importance of drawing on local capacity as an essential complement to the work of governments and intergovernmental agencies in searching for a lasting peace.

Public participation

The process for making a transition from war to peace provides an opportunity to agree new political, constitutional and economic arrangements that can deal with the roots of a conflict. However such decisions are often made solely by governments and armed groups’ representatives, who do not always represent the wider public’s interests.

Accord 13 outlines approaches developed by government and civil society that open up the process to more people.

Owning the process: Public participation in peacemaking

Dec 2002

The process for making a transition from war to peace provides an opportunity to agree new political, constitutional and economic arrangements that can deal with the roots of a conflict. However such decisions are often made solely by governments and armed groups’ representatives, who do not always represent the wider public’s interests.

Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders

Jan 2011
War does not respect political or territorial boundaries. This twenty-second Accord publication looks at how peacebuilding strategies and capacity can ‘think outside the state’: beyond it, through regional engagement, and below it, through cross-border community or trade networks. Edited by Alexander Ramsbotham and I William Zartman, Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders includes 20 case studies from Asia, Europe and the Caucasus, to East, Central and West Africa, Central America and the Middle East. Articles also explore cross-border peacebuilding from global, systems analysis and legal perspectives, and focus on themes ranging from politics, governance and security, social and community relations, and trade and natural resources.

Civil society peacebuilding on Colombia's borders

Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders
Jan 2011
Socorro Ramírez shows how the spread of violence across Colombia’s borders has tested diplomatic relations with neighbouring countries. She describes how the impact of cross-border violence is felt most keenly among local communities living in borderlands in Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. Civil society has developed links across national boundaries between all three countries to respond directly to peacebuilding priorities in borderlands and to promote better relations between capitals.

Cross-border peacebuilding

War does not respect political or territorial boundaries but forms part of regional conflict systems through dynamics that cross borders: refugee flows, nomadic armed groups like the LRA, narcotic or criminal networks, blood diamonds, or psycho-social ties.

Colombia

Colombia is the only country in the western hemisphere suffering a major internal armed conflict. In September 2012, the Colombian government announced a new effort to negotiate with left-wing insurgencies. This is the fourth attempt in 45 years to reach a negotiated settlement of the war.

While the announcement has spurred new hope, it can also lead to further frustration if people’s expectations are not met. Learning from failures in the past, the process needs new and creative thinking.

Alejo Vargas Velásquez

Alejo Vargas Velásquez is a Professor at the National University of Colombia and a member of the Civilian Facilitation Commission.

Winifred Tate

Winifred Tate has researched and written about human rights and peace issues in Colombia for the past 15 years, including three years as a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. An anthropologist trained at New York University, she is completing her dissertation on the history of Colombian human rights activism.

Fernando Sarmiento

Fernando Sarmiento Santander has done peace education work with young people and community organisations and research on civil society peace mobilisation in Colombia. He is currently a researcher at CINEP and teaches at the Javeriana University in Bogotá.

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