Research, part of a special feature on The Nature of Peace: Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and its Implications for Environment and Livelihoods

INTRODUCTION

The Putumayo is an Andean-Amazonic territory in southwestern Colombia. It spans from the Andean Highlands and páramos and descends eastward into the Amazon along the border with Ecuador and Perú (see Fig. 1). The peoples of the Putumayo consider themselves Andean-Amazonic too (Lyons 2020, Samper and Krause 2024). However, the territory has also been the victim of a protracted armed conflict that, far from ending, keeps reconfiguring, as peacebuilding efforts have materialized in different kinds of accords. Although the latest was signed in 2016, the inhabitants of the Putumayo continue to endure a conflict that manifests itself through the ebbs and flows of multiple forms of violence. The Peace Accords of 2016 may have ended the military confrontation between the FARC-EP (now a political party called Comunes) and the Colombian government but did not end the armed conflict nor was it able to address its root causes satisfactorily (Echavarría Alvarez et al. 2024). During this post-agreement period, environmental degradation is notorious too. This context was perfectly captured by E., an activist whose quote we use in the title: “everyone decided to declare war on the forest.”

The Colombian armed conflict has had territorialized differences, as recognized in the preamble of the 2016 Peace Accords (OACP 2016). The reconfiguration of the conflict since 2016 has its own particularities too, like the unleashing of several wars on the forest. Scientifically, the territories of the Putumayo are usually described as Andean-Amazonic rainforest, although indigenous and local inhabitants of the Putumayo often construct their territory as Andean-Amazonic selva. We provide evidence of three “wars on the forest” that are ongoing and affect the Andean-Amazon, with material and discursive specificities. Deforestation in the Andean-Amazon during the post-agreement period, the first war, has been rampant (Clerici et al. 2020, Murillo-Sandoval et al. 2020, 2021, 2022, Prem et al. 2020, González-González et al. 2021). Paradoxically, a parallel war on deforestation unravels through military and police operations conducted by the state and non-state armed forces (Olarte-Olarte 2019, Corredor-Garcia and López Vega 2024). Environmental protection efforts are largely developed on the premise of fighting deforestation, considered by these actors as a security issue in Colombia and the Amazon more broadly, rather than that of defending territories with particular socio-spatial configurations (Hänggli et al. 2023, West et al. 2023). A third war on the forest and in defense of the selva completes the set of wars we describe here. We focus on the concept of territorial peace as a peacebuilding project that arose from the 2016 Peace Accords because it allows us to analyze these wars and discuss peacebuilding’s ambivalence toward violence by simultaneously legitimizing violent wars on the forest and opening avenues for the defense of the selva.

We draw on a rich mix of empirical material collected through several field visits in Putumayo, Colombia aimed at understanding and analyzing territorial conflict during the aftermath of the 2016 agreement. Doing so, we contribute a novel analysis on some of the connections between war, peace, violence, and territory in the context of the Colombian post-peace agreement period. This period is characterized by Colombia’s infamous position as one of the deadliest countries in the world for people who defend human rights and the environment (Amnesty International 2020, Global Witness 2021, Human Rights Watch 2021, Vargas Reina et al. 2021). Located at the intersection of the Andes Mountains and the Amazon plain, the Putumayo’s territory is ecologically significant and at the same time vulnerable to deforestation pressures (Mendez Garzón and Valánszki 2019). Moreover, the Putumayo is the deadliest region in Colombia when accounting for total population (see Table 1). The defense of the environment in this territory is meaningful for peace studies because environmental and human rights defenders in the Putumayo claim that they are defending their territories and that such defense is inextricably related to protecting the environment (Samper and Krause 2024).

The first author has conducted five field excursions between 2021 and 2024 as part of ethnographic research about territorial relations and resistance in the Andean-Amazon. The second author has collected empirical data through a variety of methods as a part of two research projects on commodity value chains and environmental peacebuilding. The third author has collected empirical data of the driving forces of deforestation in the Colombian Andean-Amazon. Altogether, we have held dozens of conversations and interviews with social leaders and political authorities from different ethnic and rural communities in the Putumayo, members of social movements and collectives who are active in the defense of territories, academic experts, and state officials (both publicly elected and appointed) at the municipal, departmental, and national levels. These conversations and interviews were conducted in Spanish and the quotes in this article are translations made by us. The data we present is based on the analysis of those conversations and interviews, as well as the first author’s field notes. All the names of interviewees and research participants are anonymized as a safety measure. All ethical approvals were obtained and, prior to any data collection, informed consent was sought and obtained from the research participants.

PEACE AND TERRITORY IN THE PUTUMAYO: A BRIEF HISTORICAL OVERVIEW 1996–2023

The Colombian armed conflict did not end with the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP guerrilla. Nonetheless, it was a major milestone in the Colombian peacebuilding process. It meant the disarmament, demobilization, and transition into a political party of the biggest and oldest insurgent guerrilla movement in Latin America. By the mid-1990s the FARC-EP had reached a broad presence throughout the Colombian territory, including the Putumayo department. In parallel, a wave of social mobilization, whose effects are still felt in present territorial politics in the Putumayo, emerged in 1996 with the coca growers’ marches demanding political participation (MEROS 2017). However, by the turn of the millennium the armed conflict between the FARC-EP, the paramilitaries, and the state’s armed forces escalated dramatically. The Putumayo became the stage of the counter-insurgent war on drugs that was largely sponsored by the U.S. sanctioned Plan Colombia (CNMH 2015). Similar to many other regions, a mode of war penetrated the social fabric of the Putumayo as its peoples were caught between the guerrillas and the state (para)military forces. They were stigmatized by the latter as communist insurgents and by the former as reactionary counter-insurgents, and therefore gained little else than continuous exposure to violence, dispossession, and death (Ramírez, 2001, Comisión de la Verdad 2022).

In 2012, as the peace negotiations between FARC-EP and the Colombian government advanced, there was “a time of hope” in the Putumayo, as many people are quick to affirm. This context allowed for the resurgence of social mobilization like the Puerto Vega-Teteyé strike in 2014 that was sparked by 58 rural and ethnic communities of Puerto Asís, Putumayo. These communities mobilized against the expansion of an oil extraction site and military operations to forcefully eradicate crops for illicit use that were seen as a source of confinement, disappearances, assassinations, and extrajudicial executions (MEROS 2015).

In January 2016, the national government agreed to finance, through the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, a territorial development plan coordinated by the MEROS (Spanish acronym for The Roundtable of Social Organizations of the Putumayo, the Baja Bota Caucana and Cofanía Jardines de Sucumbíos). The PLADIA, as this Andean-Amazonic integral development plan became known, was finished in 2017. It presented a 20-year strategy for territorially focused alternative development for the Putumayo (Cantor Sandoval 2017). A few months before though, at the end of 2016, the Peace Agreement was finally signed and with it came a tsunami of state-led programs to be implemented such as the territorially focused development plans (PDET) and the substitution programs for crops of illicit use (PNIS). The PLADIA’s communitarian strategy was abandoned as different social bases attempted to be included into the new peace agreement programs. Despite the programs and plans that resulted from the accords, there is a common and shared feeling across the Putumayo that the armed conflict reconfigured and territorial tensions re-emerged since 2016. Moreover, the disillusionment that is concomitant to the broken promises of peace, development, and other grand schemes of human progress is growing in the hearts and minds of the local populations (Vega Pineda 2017, Nilsson and González Marín 2020, Kroc Institute 2021, Murillo-Sandoval et al. 2021, Krause et al. 2022).

Although the 2016 agreement does not mention the concept of territorial peace, this concept was already part of the vocabulary that key actors in the peace negotiations used. For instance, the Colombian government’s High Commissioner for Peace at the time defined territorial peace as recognizing that some territories have been more affected by the armed conflict than others and acknowledging the importance of mobilizing the population of these territories toward peace (Salas-Salazar 2016). Moreover, the territorial focus of the peace agreement responds to a larger historical context. Colombia has undergone a process of decentralization and territorialization since the 1970s that crystallized in the 1991 Constitution but that has been far from a panacea (Eaton 2021). The Constitution alone did not and could not reduce direct and structural violence nor deep inequalities such as a heavily concentrated land tenure. However, territorial dependency on the national state increased (Ríos and Gago 2018, Cairo and Ríos 2019, Ahumada 2021, Diaz et al. 2021, Ríos and González 2021).

Our focus on territory reveals that violence, direct, slow, or structural, is incompatible with peace but not with pacification and that peace and pacification efforts can coexist within the same space under the discursive guise of territorially focused peacebuilding. Further, it shows that peace requires the absence of violence but cannot be defined as the absence of violence alone for such an understanding cannot distinguish a peaceful context’s territorial relations from those of a pacified context. Why identify traces of this ambivalent context in the Putumayo? The coexistence of stark deforestation and military combat against it, and the experiences of social leaders and human rights activists in the Andean-Amazon who defend life and territory in the Putumayo suggests that peace and pacification here are intricately intertwined. Thus, the remaining of this article is dedicated to describe three different wars on the forest and to distinguish them in terms of those who aim for territorial peace from those who allow for territorial pacification. We argue that this difference is crucial with regard to the long-term effects that peacebuilding efforts have on territorial relations.

THE FOREST AND THE SELVA: THREE WARS ON THE FOREST

Deforestation trends

Colombia’s deforestation has consistently risen over two decades, with notable regional variances. The tree cover loss rate was 0.28% in 2001, peaked at 0.52% in 2017, and reduced to 0.32% in 2021 (Fig. 2). The 2015–2017 spike coincides with the peace agreement’s final phase, known as “the end of gun-point conservation” (Murillo-Sandoval et al. 2020). Figure 2 illustrates varying tree cover loss rates across Colombia’s Amazonian departments. The departments of Vaupés, Guainía, Amazonas, and Vichada have a much lower rate of tree cover loss than the national average and an even lower rate when compared to departments in the arc of deforestation: Putumayo, Caquetá, Guaviare, and Meta. Notably, and slightly under an alarming 1% of tree cover loss in 2021, the Putumayo exhibits one of the highest loss rates in the Colombian Amazon.

Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world and particularly the territories in the Andean-Amazonic transition zone harbor exceptional levels of biological diversity (Negret et al. 2021). The transition zone, where deforestation is more prevalent, significantly impacts ecosystems’ future integrity (Murad and Pearse 2018). Tropical tree cover loss and forest degradation has a range of social and political drivers stretching from the local to global levels (Watson et al. 2018). It contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, negatively affects local and even regional hydrological patterns leading to a reduction in rainfall, causes the loss of biodiversity, and ultimately affects people’s ability to live from forests and its products, such as non-timber forest products, hunting and fishing (Barlow et al. 2016, Shackleton et al. 2018, Ingram et al. 2021, Boulton et al. 2022, Krause and Tilker 2022, Smith et al. 2023). Furthermore, the loss of tropical forests also has implications for the cultural survival of many ethnic groups and local communities who have more profound and intricate relationships with the territory and its environment (Aswani et al. 2018).

The current process of land accumulation in the Amazon is related to a historical land tenure policy and to the Peace Agreement, as studies show that areas previously controlled by FARC-EP are experiencing high rates of deforestation since the guerrillas’ demobilization (Armenteras et al. 2019, Clerici et al. 2020, Murillo-Sandoval et al. 2020). Increased deforestation in this period does not suggest that armed conflict aids forest conservation. Rather, armed conflict often incites deforestation, predominantly at smaller scales, despite appearing to deter it at larger scales (González-González et al. 2021). Moreover, the presence of non-military state capacity attenuates deforestation in the post-peace agreement period (Prem et al. 2020). Nonetheless, the forest ecosystems situated in Colombia’s Andean-Amazon transition zone are becoming increasingly fragmented, thus threatening the ecological connectivity of the Colombian Amazon (Clerici et al. 2019, Murillo-Sandoval et al. 2022, López et al. 2024).

In their Andean-Amazon study, Murillo-Sandoval et al. (2021) observed a significant decrease in forest cover around conflict areas. After the peace agreement, they noted a substantial shift from forest to agriculture, primarily for cattle grazing and, to a lesser extent, coca crop expansion. Furthermore, this is corroborated by research undertaken by Davalos et al. (2021:74) who argue that “the most important challenge to forest conservation is neither coca nor conflict, but an insatiable appetite for land that expresses itself through pasture growth.” On a similar note, the qualitative study by Van Dexter (2022) highlights the doubling of cattle ranching between 2012 and 2018 in the Putumayo, finding cattle to be associated with secure land tenure during the aftermath of the peace agreement. A more recent analysis of the drivers of deforestation in the Andean-Amazon region by Murillo-Sandoval et al. (2023) finds that outside the agricultural frontier, the main driver of deforestation is cattle ranching, not coca. López et al. 2024 also find that the proliferation of pasture threatens ecological connectivity in the region. Publicly available data from the Colombian Agricultural Institute’s cattle census indicates that the cattle population in Putumayo increased from 197,611 in 2016 to 295,760 by 2023 (ICA 2016, 2023). For the case of the Putumayo, as with other Andean-Amazonic territories, a portion of the territory is in the agricultural frontier and a portion is in the Amazon. Therefore, the expansion of pastures, and to a lesser extent, of crops for illicit use wages a war on the Putumayo’s forest.

Fighting deforestation

The everyday experience of several informants in the Putumayo, as well as the state’s official position in the 2023 National Roundtable to Combat Deforestation in the Amazon Region is that coca crops for illicit use continue to be the main driver of deforestation there. This belief, especially at the level of the state, conveniently obscures that the causes of deforestation are complex, structural, and deeply related to issues of land tenure and territorial control with participation of multiple actors. It allows for the following discursive maneuver: state institutions and officials need not recognize the complexity of the causes of deforestation. Like Corredor-Garcia and López Vega (2024) suggest, this discursive ploy allows the Colombian government to start a green war, a war on deforestation that is nothing more than the continuation of a longstanding history of bellicose statehood, a new iteration to the previous wars on drugs and on terrorism (Palacios 2012).

Through Operation Artemisa, a green military initiative born during the post-peace agreement period, the state has recycled the old sleight of hand of constructing an internal enemy. The deforester replaces the narco-terrorist that had previously replaced the communist (Van Dexter 2022, Corredor-Garcia and López Vega 2024). State-sponsored dispossession now intertwines violence with conservation, targeting environmental preservation as if it were a matter of national security (Bocarejo and Ojeda 2016). In addition, criminalizing deforestation through the introduction of environmental crimes legitimized more than a dozen military operatives in conflict-affected Amazonic territories like the Putumayo under the Artemisa operation. Indigenous peoples and campesinos (peasant farmers) have been the main targets, rather than the actors associated with the biggest impacts on forest cover change such as members of armed groups, multinational companies, cattle ranchers, and businesspeople with ties to local political elites (Lynch et al. 2018, Menton and Le Billon 2021, Gutiérrez and Ciro 2022, Albarracín et al. 2023, Corredor-Garcia and López Vega 2024). This context indicates strongly that the state’s intention with this war on the forest is more related to historical patterns of frontier state-building through military presence and the criminalization of indigenous, campesinos, afro-descendant, and rural communities to allow large-scale capital accumulation, instead of combating deforestation, even showing its incapacity to halt it (Ungar 2017, Revelo-Rebolledo 2019, Acero and Thomson 2022, Benites 2023, Rojas Herrera and Dessein 2023).

However, the state is not the only actor conducting military operations in the name of the environment. Between 2021 and 2023, the main author collected almost two dozen pamphlets published by the armed group Comando de la Frontera. These pamphlets contain, among other things, threats to environmental defenders and social leaders. Through them, they also attempt to justify military and police interventions conducted by them in different parts of the Putumayo. They also claim to be protecting the environment and defending their territory. Yet, as several informants and the armed group itself have acknowledged, they seek recognition as politically belligerent without declaring themselves in armed conflict with the Colombian government, which makes them a paramilitary group rather than a political insurgence (Rojas 2023). They pursue this strategy to benefit from the current government’s project of “Total Peace” while chiefly being interested in securing the sale of coca paste, even if to that end they must force entire communities to cultivate crops for illicit use and dismiss crop substitution programs.

The militarization of territories, justified either by environmental protection or territorial defense, reveals the different actors that wage the second war on the forest. Marked by historical violence from both state and non-state armed forces, it reflects their continued efforts to assert military control and pacify territories. In the case of the Colombian government, this reproduces a history of territorially differentiated presence that prioritizes military sovereignty (Serje 2012). The same objective is pursued by non-state armed actors seeking to profit from narco-trafficking and organized crime. Although the former co-opts the discourses of environmental protection and climate change mitigation to conduct their part of this war, the latter co-opts the discourses of territorial defense to conduct their own part of the same war. These two wars, with seemingly opposite contrasting aspects—environmental degradation manifested through deforestation and military action against deforestation or to defend the territory—are effectively unleashing one single outcome: the destruction of the selva.

The selva: a discursive, material, and spiritual war of position

It is possible to go to the Amazon and miss the depth of the selva. One might only get a superficial, or worse, a colonial glimpse of it even whilst there. A vast green canopy, a thick understory of undistinguishable green noise, a natural world of such splendor that many an intuition cannot fathom it being but the work of the super-human even if easily imagining its inhabitants, savagely subjected to its mercilessness, as nothing else than sub-human (Taussig 1986). A place so contradictory, sanctified yet abominable, craved yet adverse, romantically idealized despite its raw and harsh conditions, a mirage of the observers deepest self while consuming their soul in a vortex.

The end of March 2023 approached at full speed, and with it, the end of the main author’s first field excursion of the year. Gathered in a maloca (ancestral long house) at the Amazonic Experimental Centre of Mocoa, the Putumayo’s capital city, a group of environmental activists, NGOs, territorial defenders, indigenous authorities, campesino leaders, and academics attended a workshop on deforestation. A male howler monkey also attended, sometimes from the veranda on the side, other times from the roof. A group of NGOs had organized the event, aiming to provide context-sensitive input for the National Development Plan’s implementation. Among other people, a representative of the Regional Environmental Authority for the Amazon spoke about their environmental conservation efforts. As her presentation advanced, her confused and slightly disturbed demeanor became more and more evident. When the howler monkey was not interrupting her, every time she spoke the word bosque (forest), the audience yelled “selva!”

A flashback to another field excursion two years before. In late March 2021, the main author met with Orlando at his farm one afternoon on the outskirts of Mocoa. On that first encounter Orlando asked a question that he has continued to ask on different occasions over the past two years: “Do you know what the Amazon is?” Silence. A stutter. Self-doubt. A shrug. And then a reply: “A rainforest? The lung of the world? Your home? A living ecosystem!” “Let’s move on,” he said with a smile that first time, as he kept showing me his farm full of Andean-Amazonic fruits and vegetables. Some of them are forbidden, according to Orlando, because of the politics of seeds. “Legal or illegal, food nourishes and medicine heals.” It was hard to follow Orlando. Like an experienced cook in their kitchen, he would point somewhere and mention a plant and its uses. On several occasions I reminded him that I couldn’t tell them apart from a distance. “Ah, yes, it takes some time to see the selva.”

Back to March 2023. Some weeks before the deforestation workshop, the peoples, social organizations, and communities of Mocoa received the Minister of Mines and Energy. The agenda, set by the Minister herself, was to elucidate the social-ecological conflict around a copper exploration project owned by Canadian multinational company Libero Copper & Gold, and to initiate a discussion about Mocoa’s alternative development. One day before the meeting, the peoples, social organizations, and communities who would send delegates met for preparation purposes. The Association of Indigenous Women of the Putumayo (ASOMI) that congregates women belonging to 5 of the 15 registered indigenous peoples of the Putumayo, hosted us. Their headquarters are one big Chagra, an ancestral mode of production that generates the Amazon’s life and diversity and, in return, is a source of food and medicine for its practitioners. Next to a section of the Chagra devoted to the healing plants, there is a communal hall. Once we were all gathered in the communal hall, a harmonization session was conducted and then work began. Six working groups were swiftly formed. After a brainstorming session focused on identifying current conflicts and sketching out proposals to address them, each working group presented their results.

The spirituality and ancestral medicine group quickly identified the conflict. “The territory is being fragmented, it alters the invisible spirits that care for and harmonize Mother Earth and deepens a profound spiritual trauma,” were the words of Jaime, an elder of the Nasa indigenous people. “The desert always begins in the human heart,” echoed Eduardo, a well-respected Catholic priest. The socio-environmental group provided a similar description. “This Amazonic territory, declared a subject of rights, is a strategic ecological corridor between the Andes and the Amazon,” affirmed Carolina, a representative of a social-ecological movement, as she presented their working group’s proposals. Orlando was part of the agriculture and food sovereignty working group. “Libero Cobre harms environmental equilibria, our social fabric, the territory (cultural and spiritual), and the environmental laws. We must steer the government and the international cooperation resources toward short-, mid-, and long-term collective processes to strengthen the selva’s economies.” The education working group, led by a local youth activist, closed the session affirming that to “guard the selva, it is key to have a contextualized education system.”

The next day the Minister came with two congressmen and the directors of relevant national agencies. The Minister received a tour of the Chagra before entering the community hall. “Before an ecological, economic, or political problem, Minister, this is a conflict of the spirit and of the territory. Extractivism already has left profound spiritual traumas as it has ravaged these territories for decades. The Amazon, this reserve of spiritualities, cannot be allowed to be further fragmented by a copper mine.” These were Eduardo’s first words to the Minister after being selected to deliver a short opening speech. The social organizations and communities handed to the Minister their proposals later on with the chief demand of cancelling Libero Copper’s mining titles and excluding the Andean-Amazon from the strategic mineral extraction sites for the energy transition. In May 2023, Congress approved Law 2294 of 2023, which contains the National Development Plan titled Colombia: A World Power of Life, and the pluriannual investment plan where the Putumayo is going to receive resources, as stated in Annex A of the Law, both as a territory of peace and special environmental protection, and as a reserve of strategic minerals (Carvajal Vargas and Samper 2024).

A few weeks later, in the deforestation workshop, with one hand holding the microphone and another his iconic Che Guevara cap, Orlando asked the same question to the audience. “What is the Amazon?,” he inquired rhetorically. “Well ...,” he paused. “We will be told that the Amazon is this or that. But we must insist that first and foremost, the Amazon is a specific productive system.” Later on, Eliana, an elder and healer of the Kamëntšá indigenous people continued on this train of thought. “Perhaps we do need to question ourselves about what the Amazon selva is. It is indeed a system of production, it is a source of life, food, and medicine. It has to be cherished, cared for, cultivated,” she said. There is little doubt that to its inhabitants, the selva is produced in everyday acts of care and in return it provides food, medicine, shelter, and life. The selva is a distinct system of production different to the forest. It is a different position to defend the selva than to protect a forest in that regard.

A forest, Lyons (2020) critically asserts, offers little analytical nuance between a monoculture of trees and a highly complex and biodiverse ecosystem. In the Putumayo it has become vital to tell the difference. So much so that it is worth shouting it. Some might have taken the “selva!” shouts as a far cry, a far-fetched environmental romanticism, and not a position regarding the territory as a specific system of production, as a reserve of spiritualities, and as a situated name for a place. Others may have naïvely thought what’s the difference between a forest and a selva?

There and then, though, a lot converged. The forest that the environmental authority talked about did not exist in the minds of a sector of the audience. The political ontology of the Andean-Amazon materialized clearly. The selva is not just a material entity produced through territorial relations with particular discourses, practices, and spiritualities. The selva is also a political response to the forest, to those who claim to know it in apolitical manners, and to those who have declared war against the selva, whether to plant a monoculture or explore for mineral deposits. The howler monkey produced a loud, deep howl that echoed in the maloca with undisputable majesty, lasting for several seconds that for a moment felt eternal. The howl resonated in the chest and in the mind. It was a complete train of thought. Another war on the forest is being fought here that is discursive, spiritual, and material, a war that does not manifest itself through violence but through the politics of life (Lyons 2020). The selva opposes the forest because it is cultivated and cared for through the ancestral and campesino knowledge and practices of its inhabitants. “Selva!” we yelled the next time we heard the word forest.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF TERRITORIALLY FOCUSED PEACEBUILDING IN RELATION TO VIOLENCE

Here we introduce the main analytical lens of this article, the difference between peace and pacification, to discuss the relationship between peacebuilding and violence. We begin by conceptualizing territorial peace. This notion gained relevance during the peace negotiations between the Colombian government and FARC-EP that led to the 2016 Peace Accords; as it opened channels of communication between the parties, even though they attached different meanings to it (Castillo-Garcés et al. 2021, Diaz et al. 2021). Territorial peace has also been central to the implementation of the peace agreement, particularly but not exclusively in relation to the advancement of territorially focused development plans in a selection of municipalities declared as the most affected by the armed conflict. We explore a critical differentiation made in the academic literature about territorial peace between the notions of peace and pacification in order to discuss the ambivalent implementation of territorial peace as a state-sanctioned peacebuilding program in relation to violence.

Conceptualizing territorial peace

It is worth noting, first and foremost, that several scholars acknowledge the different meanings that characterize territorial peace (Cairo et al. 2018, Cairo and Ríos 2019, Estupiñan Achury 2020, Le Billon et al. 2020, Diaz et al. 2021). We are sympathetic to this acknowledgement and suggest that a critical examination of the concept must recognize this polysemy as inherent to it and therefore that it is political (Mouffe 2005). Therefore, we begin by identifying two major definitory elements to the concept of territorial peace to us: territorial peace as an ideal and as a set of practices that in the Colombian present are inseparable from historical territorial struggles and the peace agreement’s implementation.

Lacking a definition of territorial peace in the peace agreement, we are bound to focus on relevant academic contributions. Cabello-Tijerina and Quiñones (2019) claim that territorial peace suggests that peacebuilding ought to be decentralized and participatory. Similarly, Ríos and Gago 2018 advance the notion that it is a peacebuilding process that ought to be adapted to territorial context, while Estipuñán Achury (2020) affirms that territorial peace is the fulfillment of the principle of local autonomy. Echavarría and Cremin (2019:316) further affirm that “the materiality of territory, and the ways in which justice, recognition and livelihood are intimately connected with land” is a critical component of territorial peace, echoing Cairo et al.’s (2018:465) assertion that territorial peace signifies the “multi-dimensional relations between space, politics and society.”

Several others continue to highlight the importance of bottom-up and grassroots processes as central mechanisms to achieve a territorial peace that consolidates democracy and challenges historical political decision making (Cairo and Ríos 2019, Le Billon et al. 2020, Benavides Castro and Bermeo 2023, Cabanzo Valencia and Gindele 2023). However, to other authors, territorial peace is a state-led project and planning instrument (Lemaitre Ripoll and Restrepo Saldarriaga 2019, Castillo-Garcés et al. 2021, Orozco et al. 2021, Vanelli and Ochoa Peralta 2022, Vélez-Torres et al. 2022). Finally, some scholars place additional focus on overcoming violence and suggest that territorial peace resembles Galtung’s (1969) definition of positive peace and Dietrich’s (2012) definition of many peaces (Ríos and Gago 2018, Echavarría and Cremin 2019, Castillo-Garcés et al. 2021).

Some authors have also placed the spotlight on the peace process itself to provide conceptualizations of territorial peace that originate from the parties of the peace agreement. Diaz et al. (2021:108) suggest that the value of this approach lies in that territorial peace initially served as a crucial term that allowed the establishment of “communication channels that both parties could trust.” Notwithstanding, the government’s interpretation of territorial peace differed from the FARC-EP’s. For the government, territorial peace was key to expand state consolidation through a combination of institutional strengthening and security measures, as well as economic development and growth in the territories. For the FARC-EP, however, territorial peace signified advancing a historical agrarian agenda, opposing the official discourse about the root causes of conflict that to them obscures the state’s responsibility in causing the conflict, as well as opposing state-sponsored projects and (para)military territorialities of violence (Castillo-Garcés et al. 2021, Diaz et al. 2021). These interpretations, however, stand in contrast to those held by local grassroots organizations and communities that view territorial peace with a hope for change, to advance peaceful and territorialized alternatives to development (Diaz et al. 2021).

Apart from the contributions focused on defining the idea of territorial peace, there is a growing body of literature that has approached territorial peace differently. For instance, scholars have also described it in terms of its outcomes on the ground. We find that since 2020, almost five years after the peace accords were signed, material definitions of territorial peace started to appear in the reviewed literature. A common justification to focus on the outcomes of territorial peace is that by not doing so one might risk abstracting the state’s agrarian policies that have continued to favor land concentration and excluding or further stigmatizing rural and ethnic communities (Ahumada 2021).

Territorial peace has, to some scholars, acquired a statist and normative version that is unable to overcome the logic of pacification, which we discuss further on (Le Billon et al. 2020, Álvarez-Giraldo and Pimienta Betancur 2021). At this stage, we highlight that some begin to see territorial peace as interventions that are intended to pacify territories in order to secure capital investments in these areas, consistent with the historical economic development model of the state (Van Dexter and Ingalls 2022). The participatory and territorial foci, therefore, have been mostly a fiction of democracy, unable to destabilize, much less to transform, the neoliberal hegemonic model of the Colombian state (Vélez-Torres et al. 2022). Several scholars seem to agree that the implementation of territorial peace, particularly between 2018 and 2022, underwent a massive change as a result of President Iván Duque’s government’s political project of “peace with legality,” in which peacebuilding was turned, again, into a security issue (Olarte-Olarte 2019, Vélez-Torres et al. 2022). We find that most material definitions of territorial peace have focused entirely, or at least almost exclusively, on the government’s actions. This is likely because the Colombian government is mainly responsible for the implementation of the peace agreement, although not solely. For example, territorial peace has also been a matter of concern for the judiciary. Particularly, for the Special Peace Jurisdiction’s recognition that territories, like the Awa people’s Katsa Su, have been declared victims of conflict shows that some state institutions are understanding and even applying notions of territorial peace that do not fully accommodate the statist version described above, though not without limitations in terms of scope (Dejusticia 2022, Lyons 2023).

Some scholars argue territorial peace has, against its ideal intentions, served to further centralize the state, based on critical agencies being located in the center of the country and the irony of not including territorial governments in a territorially focused peace process (Estupiñan Achury 2020, Eaton 2021). Others have also provided critical analyses of territorial peace on grounds of it creating boundaries around geographies of conflict that exclude peacebuilding initiatives in territories outside said geographies (Ríos and Gago 2018, Quiñones et al. 2020). On a similar note, some other authors have contributed with analyses on how territorial peace produces competing territorialities that may be outright incompatible with each other, raising the importance of the relationship between territorial peace and notions of territory (Cairo et al. 2018, Olarte-Olarte 2019, Álvarez-Giraldo and Pimienta Betancur 2021, Diaz et al. 2021, Benavides Castro and Bermeo 2023). We also find that several authors have used the concept of territorial peace to analyze the limitations of its implementation, in particular by highlighting how during the post-peace agreement there have been strong continuities in the uneven geographies of violence when compared to the time prior to the signing of the accords (Ríos and González 2021, Georgi 2022, Ríos 2022). The resurgence of violence in areas that experienced most of the horrors of the armed conflict, such as the Putumayo, is indeed evidence of the profound limitations of the territorially focused peacebuilding program as it has been implemented.

Although most material conceptualizations of territorial peace point toward it taking a specific shape, the less contentious and far from transformative agenda of neoliberal peacebuilding for securing nationally determined development goals, the definitions that could be deemed to be more symbolically focused, show a more explicit contention regarding the meanings of territorial peace. Some emphasize its inherently bottom-up, territorialized approach to peacebuilding as a way to advance agrarian agendas that seek to address the root causes of armed conflict, whereas others highlight its state-led nature and the necessity for it to involve the advancement of the penetration of welfare focused state institutions into territories where authority has been historically militaristic. The means for peacebuilding that either vision may emphasize is the focus of our discussion around peace and pacification as differentiated phenomena that follows.

Peace and pacification

Here we show how peace and pacification are distinct and why this distinction matters to peacebuilding studies and efforts. In the Andean-Amazon and other parts of Colombia, territorial peace looks rather like territorial pacification (Rincón Florez 2022). For example, the growing intervention of armed forces leads to a framing of social-ecological conflicts as security issues (Olarte-Olarte 2019). Moreover, the emphasis on territorial peace as bringing economic development and foreign investment to the territories equated peacebuilding with legal security measures for large-scale internationally owned agro-industrial and extractivist projects (Ahumada 2021). Similarly, the implementation of territorial peace resembles projects of liberal peace associated with capitalist interests that silence the voices and interests of victims, who were ironically considered central in the peace agreement (Lederach 2017, Le Billon et al. 2020, Diaz et al. 2021, Vélez-Torres et al. 2022). As a result, scholars who have studied territorial peace in the Colombian post-agreement period seem to agree that it has been implemented in several instances through violence (Georgi 2022). It has involved the armed occupation and transformation of territories into large plantations, pastures, and sites for mineral and fossil fuel exploration and extraction, risking the perpetuation of poverty, environmental degradation, and associated forms of (para)statal violence (Le Billon et al. 2020, Van Dexter and Ingalls 2022, Vélez-Torres et al. 2022).

Yet, territorial peace has also resonated to marginalized communities and social organizations and movements in defense of their territories (Le Billon et al. 2020). It has avenues for political struggles in defense of life and for alternative, communitarian, collective territories that challenge the hegemonic ideal of neoliberal economic development (Cairo et al. 2018). Indigenous peoples, for instance, have been found to successfully build strategies for territorial peace such as the Nasa people’s creation of Permanent Assembly Sites, Life Plans, and the Indigenous Guard (Acosta Oidor et al. 2019). Social organizations and movements in defense of territories that have been victims of conflict have mobilized territorial peace to question and even oppose the developmental kit agreed upon by the government and FARC-EP and its ontological occupation of territories (Olarte-Olarte 2019, Diaz et al. 2021).

A key factor in the differentiation between peace and pacification is the violent character of the latter. And the analytical value of making such a differentiation lies in that it allows to observe the historical ambivalence of peacebuilding in relation to violence and, in the context of territorially focused peacebuilding, the differentiated political, geographic, and ontological consequences that violence produces. Violence, here, is understood as a multi-faceted means to impose specific kinds of territorial relations and that can be direct, as in the criminalization or assassination of environmental defenders, slow, like the attritional and almost imperceptible advancement of toxicity in different bodies (human and more-than-human) due to environmental pollution, or structural, as in the absence or diminished presence of non-military state institutions in some territories (Galtung 1969, Nixon 2011, Serje 2012). The increasing militarization and policing by state and non-state forces in Colombia disguised under the discursive maneuver of securing peace while configuring territories into fragmented sites for large-scale agribusiness (licit or not), extractivist development enclaves, and fortress conservation during the post-conflict inherently involved violence in almost all of its forms (Olarte-Olarte 2019, Diaz et al. 2021).

Peace, however, requires the absence of violence, but negative definitions of peace are insufficient. Peace, we daresay, requires the cultivation and nourishment of the political as a constitutive element of human societies too. Territorial peace, therefore, highlights the geographical variabilities of how peace may surface in terms of territorial relations (Diaz et al. 2021). The imposition of spatial configurations and relations based on neoliberal productivity rationales through armed means that (1) fragments territories into sites of extractivism and conservation, and (2) silence, criminalize, and, ultimately, extinguish any dissent that seeks to defend the territorial relations of a given place is not peace but territorial pacification (Olarte-Olarte 2019, Álvarez-Giraldo and Pimienta Betancur 2021, Diaz et al. 2021).

TERRITORIAL PEACE AND PACIFICATION IN THE ANDEAN-AMAZON

We found that armed groups, both state and non-state ones, rely on a combination of forms of violence to deploy what we distinguish as two wars on the forest. These violent wars on the forest occur not only in the context of the post-peace agreement period but also under the guise of peacebuilding. In the case of the state, the territorially focused peace programs are accompanied by an environmental security narrative that militarizes protected areas while disproportionally policing the weakest links associated with deforestation without having to even recognize the complexity of the political and economic determinants of deforestation. In the case of non-state armed forces, on the other hand, there is a discursive cooptation of popular struggles such as that of defending the territory that disguises military and police actions that silence communities and harm civilians and are inextricably related to their role in at least securing the sale of cocaine paste. These two wars exemplify what we mean by territorial pacification precisely because they cannot be waged but by armed actors using direct, slow, and structural violence. This territorial pacification has specific political, geographical, and ontological consequences. Spatial relations are transformed by silencing specific kinds of territorial struggles; space is fragmented into sites of neoliberal development or conservation fortresses that, ultimately, ontologically occupy them to the point that other territorial realities are annihilated (Escobar 2020, Diaz et al. 2021, Georgi 2022, Vélez-Torres et al. 2022, Samper and Krause 2024).

It was a late afternoon in Bogotá when the first author met E. at a university café at the end of June 2022. He was a small-scale gold miner but the state turned him and his coworkers into illegal miners by granting a license to a multinational mining company on the site where they mined for gold, while stalling a permit application that they filed before the multinational company filed its own. In his words they “turned into environmentalists to stop large-scale mining in the Amazon.” The afternoon quickly gave way to the evening as we talked about illegal mining and deforestation. It is hard to avoid coming back to E.’s words, those that are also the title of this article. They have a kind of depth that is not simple to grasp. Everyone may have declared war on the forest, yes, but for different reasons and different kinds of wars. All of them, however, are closely related to territory, peace, and pacification. In this contribution we highlight the inability of violent actors to build territorial peace. Rather, they pacify territories.

But what about the other war on the forest? There is an onto-epistemological difference between forest and selva. This has to do with the way the Andean-Amazon is constructed by those who claim to know it. The rainforests of science are at times the same and at times different to the selva that is inhabited. Yet, this territory’s history tells a story of an ontological occupation and an axiom with specific epistemological implications. This knowable object can only be known by those who deploy methodologies considered valuable in the production of knowledge. In this context, the construction of the Andean-Amazon as a rainforest has predominated in research. Constructed as such, most political programs and interventions for its conservation have been prescribed. This is how, as Lyons (2020) has pointed out in her study about soils in the Putumayo, ironies come about. She argues that the soils of the selva are considered as poor in nutrients by soil scientists, as if they were oblivious to the selva’s outburst of life. This irony reveals that the disciplinary uses and constructions of a territory like the Andean-Amazon are indeed affected by and also affect desires. The Amazon soils are only poor in nutrients, it turns out, to the mind that desires a large-scale agro-industrial complex or a plantation on this territory. Lyons shows that the selva’s soils, far from being poor in nutrients, have an agency of their own in which cycles of life and death, composition and decomposition, play a crucial part. The selva allows for specific uses or forms of production. Or, it takes its political stance, forfeiting its own life-generating qualities. The selva’s life politics involves resisting the forest too.

The reproduction of the Andean-amazon itself, as an informant to Van Dexter and Ingalls (2022) put it, is tightly related to universal objectives such as peace and freedom. These authors have shown that seeds are another site of struggle in the politics for the selva. The cultivation of the selva, they point out, as well as the cultivation of peace, relies on complex (agrobio)diversity. However, such diversity of the Amazon is threatened from multiple fronts. The law limits the diversity of seeds while favoring patented and even genetically modified varieties. Rural farmers and campesinos are oriented toward agro-industrial production schemes. With time, they argue, knowledge about what belongs to the selva diminishes and with it, ancestral understandings of the Amazon’s seasonality, and are replaced by an agriculture of death that interrupts the life generating processes that belong to the selva. Those who cultivate the Amazon, those who reproduce it by securing this life-generating ability of the selva, the authors conclude, are sowing territorial peace.

The forest and the selva seem, at times, discursively similar. Moreover, the scientific understandings and representations of the Andean-Amazonic forest can make visible the material threats to ecological corridors. However, the selva appears in a much less visible way. The fragmentation of a territory whose integrity is paramount for that which the eye cannot see is a profound concern that, at its base, implies the connection of the selva with those who (re)produce it and inhabit it. The selva is politically relevant in this case because it offers a not-only scientific or excessive perspective beyond the trees (de la Cadena 2015, Lyons 2020). The historical struggles for political participation in territorial decision making have found new iterations with the ongoing historical marginalization of the Putumayo’s inhabitants in these matters. In the post-peace agreement context, it has cast doubts about how seriously the territorial focus of the peace agreement is taken by actors interested in armed territorial control. The struggles for the diversity of the selva and for the understanding of the life politics of the selva’s soils have another, less explored, less tangible component, though not less onto-epistemologically relevant, that has to do with the spiritual dimension of the selva.

Grounding territorial peace in the context of the Putumayo during the post-peace agreement reveals that the selva is a territory with its own territorial relations that are being claimed by a wide range of peoples, communities, and social organizations as valid. A vision that not only pays attention to local constructions and relations to this territory, but that, on emphasizing the particularities of selvatic modes of production and reproduction, promotes a configuration of this territory that opposes powerful ones. In this case, constructions of the Putumayo as a mining district, as a Jurassic belt full of copper that might build a green state and save the planet, or as a forest reservation fall short. Territorial peace in the selva, therefore, obtains a specific connotation. It involves advancing the objectives of the peace agreement such as rural reform, political participation, territorially focused development within the realm of possibilities allowed by the selva. Extractivist endeavors to create “green” material welfare, interrupt the life generating cycles of the selva to such an extent that leaves no place for them in building territorial peace in the Putumayo. On a planetary scale they also undermine the truly “green” transition, one which cannot be built on further extractivism that literally undermines the very biophysical basis for life.

CONCLUSION

Our analysis of three wars on the forest under the lens of the distinction between peace and pacification complements a growing body of academic literature focused on deforestation in the Colombian Andean-Amazon during the post-peace agreement. The wars on the forest that we describe and analyze are substantially different. Although violence characterized the first two, the third war is a euphemism for the reclamation of historical political struggles for a space that ought not to be constructed as forest. They are happening simultaneously and because of this we highlight how critical it is to acknowledge them for a grounded analysis of territorial peace that can only come about when it is distinguished from territorial pacification. Halting deforestation on its own will not lead to territorial peace because it continues to contest the territoriality connected to the selva.

Grounding territorial peace in the Andean-Amazonic territory of Putumayo involves what Lyons (2020) calls Amazonization processes that cultivate the life politics of the selva. The other side of the coin of defending territories against the violent wars on the forest is advancing the selva as a territorial positivity for life and peace in the Andean-Amazon. There is, indeed, a depth to E.’s insight that everyone declared war on the forest. Although some have done so to convert the Amazon into pasture, vast monocultures, or green mines, others have done so as the continuation of a long-standing emancipatory project that constructs the Amazon as the Selva Amazónica. The latter, we argue, is a territorial construction that pays attention to the economic, cultural, and social needs of the Putumayo, in the sense intended by the peace agreement’s territorial focus. It is also a very promising avenue for further research on the connections between territory and peace in Colombia.

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