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

INTRODUCTION

Worldwide, environmental human rights defenders (EHRD) face a continuous increase in threats, violence, and assassinations and Colombia in particular has been repeatedly ranked the most dangerous country for EHRD in the world (Le Billon and Lujala 2020, Menton and Le Billon 2021, GW 2022, 2023). Almost eight years into the Colombian peace agreement, the country has re-entered a new phase of conflict that plays out in varying constellations between different pre-existing and new armed groups, criminal gangs, and the state. As a result, local and indigenous communities, land defenders, peasants, social leaders, and human and indigenous rights activists as well as the natural environment are suffering a resurgence of violence and destruction (Ganzenmüller et al. 2022, Salazar et al. 2022, Murillo-Sandoval et al. 2023). Some regions in Colombia stand out in particular. For instance in the departments of Putumayo, Nariño, Chocó, Antioquia, Norte de Santander, Arauca, Caquetá, and Cauca conflicts have intensified in the past years and violence and attacks against EHRD are commonplace (Indepaz 2023; see Figs. 1 and 2).

Fighting in defense of nature, territories, and human rights, EHRD play a crucial role in connecting social and environmental injustices. Thus, they are an integral part of environmental peacebuilding processes that seek to integrate “natural resource management and environmental protection in conflict resolution and recovery strategies to prevent conflict relapse and to lay the foundations for sustainable peace and development” (Dam-de Jong and Sjöstedt 2023:6). Moreover, EHRD mend the relationship between people and the natural environment, and they are crucial in environmental peacebuilding activities that aim to promote environmental cooperation, resilience, and sustainable development as essential elements for achieving peace (Ide et al. 2021). In Colombia’s post peace agreement setting, EHRD are often the last line of protection for ecosystems, biodiversity, and the cultural survival of local and indigenous communities as well as campesino (peasants) groups who have a deep-rooted connection to land and their territories. Because EHRD are the central actors for environmental protection and social justice, not just in the context of Colombia, the threats, challenges, and struggles EHRD face around the world affect us all (GW 2020, Menton and Le Billon 2021, FLD 2023).

On 7 August 2022, Colombia’s first politically left-leaning government took office. The outcome of the election was in part a reflection of the turmoil and uncertainty about the country’s future, six years into the Colombian peace agreement signed in October 2016 with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People’s Army (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia - Ejército del Pueblo, FARC-EP; OACP 2016, Krause et al. 2022). The peace agreement officially ended one of the world’s longest internal armed conflicts and the country’s largest guerilla group, the FARC-EP, laid down their weapons. At the same time the political arm of the FARC-EP formed a party that was guaranteed a minimum number of seats in the congress and senate for the 2018 and 2022 elections (OACP 2016). However, the expiration of this guarantee for the upcoming elections in early 2026, as well as their timid performance in the local elections of 2023 both in terms of elected candidates and coalition performance, shows that the future of their political incorporation is unclear in the mid to long term (MOE 2024).

The peace agreement brought widespread hope for a more prosperous future and a reconciliation of the deep social and geographical rifts that characterize Colombia. The FARC-EP strongholds in Colombia’s peripheries and rural areas coincided with Afro-Colombian, Indigenous, and peasant communities who were disproportionately affected by the armed conflict (Berry 2017, Comisión de la Verdad 2020, Gordon et al. 2020, Nilsson and González Marín 2020, Meger and Sachseder 2020, Salazar et al. 2022, Van Dexter and Ingalls 2022). Nonetheless, the disarmament of the FARC-EP had profound impacts on the areas they controlled and on the social lives and land use of millions of people (Betancur-Alarcón and Krause 2020, Clerici et al. 2020, Murillo Sandoval et al. 2020).

There are different and often not mutually exclusive ways of categorizing and defining EHRD. We use a broad definition that includes environmental and land defenders as “people who take peaceful action to protect environmental or land rights, whether in their own personal capacity or professionally” (UN 2016, GW 2017a:43) and indigenous rights leaders, community leaders, and social leaders who often incorporate environmental considerations and aims into their work.

In this article, our main objective is to analyze this counter-intuitive development; we ask, how is the implementation of the peace process related to the increase in injustice and violence against EHRD? We investigate this paradox through Nancy Fraser’s theory of social justice. We select Fraser’s approach because its multi-dimensional perspective on justice is akin to the comprehensive concept of sustainable peace, and thus can help identify mechanisms and obstacles that currently stand in the way of reaching such lasting peace. Fraser stresses the need for balanced priorities among different types of justice like integrated measures that address economic, political, and cultural injustices in parallel (Fraser 1998, 2001).

We argue that the situation of EHRD in Colombia empirically illustrates the dead-ends that block peacebuilding. Sustainable peace must move beyond apolitical and instrumental views on natural resource management that is often a critique directed at environmental peacebuilding, and instead needs to integrate social justice as a key component of peacebuilding. Thus, we contribute to unlocking the critique to environmental peacebuilding by showing the pathways in which maldistribution hinders possibilities not only for justice but also for sustainable peace (Johnson et al. 2021).

We introduce our analytical framework with Fraser’s tenets in further detail, followed by an overview of the main methods we applied in our study. We present results from our empirical research, starting with a systematic description of the deteriorating security situation of EHRD in Colombia since the 2016 peace agreement. Our ensuing analysis is to understand this situation through Fraser’s theory and its contribution to environmental peacebuilding. The analysis is divided according to the two major presidencies that mark these periods and their key peace and justice narratives: the conservative administration of Iván Duque (2018–2022) with its focus on “peace through legality,” and the “total peace” approach of Gustavo Petro’s left-leaning government (since August 2022). We show that, particularly during the Duque presidency, the fate of EHRD was indeed marked by a considerable imbalance in justice priorities.

We draw on data from secondary sources, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and an analysis of policies and laws. We find that, notwithstanding the increasing advocacy of international organizations and regional legal agreements to protect EHRD, new forms of maldistribution have emerged and solidified in the country. These are the continuity of historical injustices, and include a re-emergence of land grabbing and the displacement of local populations. Moreover, resource extraction and illicit economies abound once more, and are strongly related to the growing influx of foreign drug cartels. These forms of maldistribution create dead-ends that limit the possibilities for environmental peacebuilding. EHRD have thus been caught in precarious roles between certain improvements in terms of cultural recognition and political representation on the one hand and further economic abandonment on the other. Finally, based on our theoretical discussion and empirical analysis, we call attention to the challenges of effective protection of EHRD in the presence of global drivers and root causes of environmental degradation and conflicts. As long as efforts to address these different types of (in)justice are not balanced and integrated further, the implementation of the peace agreement will remain sluggish at best. The lack of a holistic program that connects domestic and global structures of violence and exploitation (of people and nature) will continuously make it impossible for Colombia to achieve “total peace” and shows that pathways for environmental peacebuilding (Ide et al. 2021) must be expanded to the three elements of justice: redistribution, recognition, and representation.

ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK

Our conceptual starting point is the broad and teleological understanding of peace as “sustainable peace,” as advanced by various scholars working on the environment-peace nexus (Lederach 1998, Krampe 2017). Teleological, in the sense of reasoning back from an ideal goal, asks researchers and observers to put particular emphasis on the “long-term interplay of social, political, and ecological processes” and how these processes may affect the potential for long-term peace (Krampe 2017:2).

With its encompassing perspective on different processes and their interplay, the sustainable peace concept goes beyond a mere problem-solving approach to conflict resolution; instead, it understands both peace and peacebuilding as process-based, non-linear, and multi-dimensional (Lederach 1998). By the same token, the concept transcends liberal approaches to (environmental) peacebuilding because it does not understand peace interventions in terms of a liberal project or global consensus thereof (Selby 2013). Instead, sustainable peace implies a critical perspective toward peacebuilding processes that identifies possible shortcomings in connecting social, political, and ecological processes and objectives in the peace-environment nexus (Ide 2020).

We suggest that Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice provides such an encompassing and critical angle and, through coupling notions of justice with the goal of lasting peace, can make a fruitful contribution to analyses of peace processes and their shortcomings. Similar to the critical and multi-dimensional stance that the notion of sustainable peace takes toward liberal peacebuilding, Fraser has advanced a comprehensive approach that goes beyond established liberal theories of justice that have focused on the quest for redistribution of goods and resources that are essential to achieve basic freedoms (Rawls 1971). Fraser calls for an integrated analysis that takes into account different types of (in)justices, not only in terms of economic redistribution, but also with regard to cultural recognition and political representation (Fraser 1998, 2001). She argues that a prioritization of some forms of justice over others will ultimately harm chances for social justice in a society. A dominant focus on correcting cultural misrecognition and political underrepresentation of vulnerable groups may, paradoxically, mask or even facilitate further injustices, if that focus is not matched by sufficient efforts to address economic maldistribution (Fraser 1998, 2001).

Instead, different types of injustices should be analyzed, and ultimately addressed, in an integrated manner, with respective reforms in economic, political, and cultural contexts reinforcing each other (Fraser 1998, 2009). For instance, Fraser holds that economic redistribution can be a remedy for historical injustices, such as land ownership in Colombia, while cultural recognition and political representation focus on acknowledging particular cultural connections and identities connected to material resources and land (Fraser 2001). Put differently, certain policy reforms that aim to address cultural misrecognition, such as laws and norms that support recognition or hinder exclusion, may address underlying factors of injustice that cannot be addressed only with redistribution, and vice versa (Lovell 2007). Putting this argument in a multi-level perspective, an analysis of justice should also be combined with a global understanding of how economic exploitation, cultural imperialism, and global political marginalization influences the possibilities of social justice and, ultimately, sustainable peace in a country like Colombia.

We hold that, based on these core tenets, Fraser’s theory helps to better understand critical issues for sustainable peace because both critically go beyond liberal approaches and integrate social, political, and cultural aspects. Importantly, we add ecological aspects to these, in line with the above definition of sustainable peace. Connecting justice to peace, we also follow established insights from peace and conflict studies that highlight deeper and integrative social justice approaches as a prerequisite for lasting peace in post-conflict societies (Loyle and Appel 2017, Cox 2020). Putting this into context, we here assume that a more demanding idea of multi-dimensional social justice in terms of redistribution, recognition, and representation (i.e., beyond liberal notions of retribution and restoration) is a necessary condition for sustainable and multi-dimensional peace.

How then can we apply Fraser’s holistic view on different types of justice at different geographical and societal levels to analyze the various policies and political discourses for peace in Colombia and their implications for environmental human rights defenders? On the one hand, we study steps to achieve justice by recognition, which requires looking into norms, laws, and processes that support cultural and political acknowledgement of EHRD and their social and ecological goals. For our application of Fraser’s framework, we thus largely focus on questions of legal, political, and cultural recognition rather than on political representation, for which a comprehensive identification of actors and networks across local and national levels was beyond the scope of our analysis. Our focus on recognition provides critical insights on social justice in the peace process because recognition of EHRD and their cause has remained a fundamental challenge, despite overall improvements in political-electoral representation of inter alia indigenous communities since the early 1990s (Laurent 2023). More than an issue of representation, the situation of EHRD in Colombia has been repeatedly described as one of cultural and political abandonment or lack of understanding (Cousins and Schmitz 2020, Robayo-Serrano 2023) in a context where EHRD become the target of violence from armed groups and criminal gangs, but also from the states’ own armed forces directly and indirectly through a lack of recognition.

On the other hand, the peace process in Colombia must in parallel be analyzed in terms of redistribution or lack thereof. Such a focus on economic injustices is also supported by results from a global analysis by Le Billon and Lujala (2020) of the risk factors and drivers behind the surging violence against EHRD. They show that conflicts around land, specifically tied to mineral and biomass extraction, are the most common cause of different types of violence toward EHRDs. Moreover, indigenous peoples and traditional communities as particular social groups are most at risk because their lands and territories have until now often been spared by large-scale extraction, but are represented as “empty lands” and therefore seen as frontier for the new expansion of infrastructure construction, mining, agricultural expansion, and illegal land grabbing (GW 2017b, Lynch et al. 2018, GW 2019, GW 2022, GW 2023). In this regard, using the lenses of justice to understand the situation of EHRD in Colombia contributes to the environmental peacebuilding literature about the pathways or dead-ends that connect nature resource management and peace (Ide et al. 2021). In the case of Colombia, the increased violence experienced by EHRD is an empirical sign of the crucial role that environmental and social conflicts play in the peacebuilding process.

METHODS

To identify changes in the cultural and political recognition of EHRD since the signing of the peace agreement in 2016 we reviewed official documents published by the government of Colombia, international and national organizations (e.g., United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, Global Witness, the Institute for the study of Development and Peace [Indepaz], and Somos Defensores), as well as peer reviewed literature and case study research on EHRD in Colombia (Anderson 2017, Menton and Le Billon 2021, Stark 2022, UNHCHR 2022a, Van Dexter and Ingalls 2022, Samper and Krause 2024). We also conducted policy and document analysis of the National Development Plans of the current and the previous governments and respective peacebuilding policy initiatives (DNP 2014, 2018, 2023). This involved reviewing critical legal instruments for the advancement of the peace agreement, particularly Law 418 of 1997 (known as the Public Order Law) and Law 2272 of 2022, which modified the Public Order Law to include the current government’s initiative of Total Peace (Congreso de Colombia 2016, 2022a). These sources also helped us in our systematic account of the security situation of EHRD in Colombia, which we present below.

In addition, we include interview data collected during several research stays in Colombia between 2019 and 2023, with a focus on the Putumayo department. These direct contacts provided us with insights not only on aspects of political and cultural justice, but also on questions of ongoing economic maldistribution. The data we present draws on these in-depth interviews and dialogues with EHRD and elected public officials at the municipal, regional, and national levels. When referring to particular interview quotes, we use anonymized names. We also used participant observation of the preparation and installation of the Putumayo regional roundtable of guarantees for social leaders and human rights defenders, which is part of the national process of guarantees agreed on point 3.4 of the Peace Agreement (OACP 2016), and public accountability hearings with the Territorial Renovation Agency in the Putumayo, which is the government office in charge of facilitating the territorial focus of the peace agreement.

THE DETERIORATING SITUATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS IN COLOMBIA

Environmental human rights defenders increasingly face violence and are assassinated worldwide (Hecht and Cockburn 2011, UN 2016, GW 2017a, 209, 2021, 2022, Scheidel et al. 2020, Menton and Le Billon 2021, FLD 2023). In Colombia EHRD experience more threats, attacks, violence, and assassinations than in other country (see Table 1). Compiling data on assassinations of EHRD only shows the most extreme kind of violence that they face and does not grasp the full extent of the repressions and silencing they are subjected to. Although we use a broad definition of EHRD, the sources we draw on in Table 1 use different methods to track and publish threats and assassinations against social leaders, human rights activists, and land and environmental defenders. Thus, depending on the source, the numbers that are reported differ because of the sub-categories of EHRD that are counted.

Nonetheless, the trends are similar and reveal an increasing level of insecurity and assassinations since 2016. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian EHRD are the most disproportionately affected groups. Depending on the data source, up to one third of reported acts of violence, threats, and assassinations have been carried out against people belonging to one of the more than 100 indigenous groups and Afro-Colombian communities, which is particularly severe because these groups only represent approximately 11% of the Colombian population (UNHCHR 2022b, Indepaz 2023).

Land disputes are a driving force behind the killings of land and environmental defenders (GW 2021, 2023, Programa Somos Defensores 2023). Although the peace agreement acknowledges the need to address matters such as forced land displacement, unequal land tenure, and the substitution of crops for illicit use, the implementation of the peace agreement has been notoriously slow and peace is still a distant prospect for many Colombians (KROC 2021, UNHCHR 2022b, 2023a). The consequences of ongoing violence are particularly felt by vulnerable and marginalized groups, including small-scale farmers, Afro-Colombian and indigenous peoples, and communal and community leaders (see Fig. 3).

An analysis of the geographical distribution of assassinations against EHRD reveals the stark disparities across Colombia. The most affected and violent departments (Antioquia, Cauca, Norte de Santander, Nariño, Putumayo, Chocó, Arauca, Caquetá and Valle de Cauca; see Figs. 1 and 2) were former strongholds of the FARC-EP and are characterized by a comparatively high incidence of coca plantations for illicit use, existence of illegal mining, and the presence of various armed paramilitary, ELN, dissident FARC guerilla, and other criminal groups (UNHCHR 2021, 2022b, 2023a, Programa Somos Defensores 2022, 2023, UNODC 2023). In particular the department of Putumayo bordering the Ecuadorian and Peruvian border in the south of Colombia has a disproportionately high level of violence against human rights defenders when calculated as share of population, with 18.2 killings per 100,000 people over the last 7 years (see Fig. 1).

The accounts of several EHRD in Putumayo reveal the latent insecurities and risks they face. For instance, Juanita is a union leader, human rights defender, and member of a regional human rights network, who has been involved in political activism since early in her life. However, both her mother and her brother, also active advocates of human rights and the environment, were murdered. In the last years, and particularly since the peace agreement was signed, Juanita has received threats, survived several murder attempts, and spent all of 2022 in exile. “I am almost certain that I will be killed,” she said as she walked with one of the co-authors “but until then, I’m going to make their life impossible. We will expose and document all human rights violations because there is a tendency. They are occurring a lot in scenarios of defense of the territory” (Interview, Juanita, March 2023). This was echoed by Alberto, a campesino leader who also works with the human rights network. “The communities defending their territories have become the target of human rights violations. Defending human rights here means supporting all of these causes. The Andean-Amazon territories must be defended” (Interview, Alberto, March 2023). The human rights network was explicitly referred to in a pamphlet circulated by a paramilitary group that operates in the Putumayo called the Comando de la Frontera. In their pamphlet, they publicly call the human rights network a skewed collaborator of extremist armed groups like the Carolina Ramírez Front with whom they are combatting for territorial control in the Putumayo, while also calling into question the validity of the work of the human rights network. This is a discursive tactic used systematically by armed groups throughout the Colombian armed conflict to legitimize violence against the civilian population, including environmental human rights defenders, while obscuring their role and responsibility in the continuation of the armed conflict (Comisión de la Verdad de Colombia 2022). As suggested by these stories, and as critically shown in the environmental peacebuilding literature (Ide et al. 2021), claims about land use and defense of the territory are not seen by EHRD as a technicality related to natural resource management, but as a question of cultural and social-ecological identity. Thus, we argue that the role of the natural environment in the peacebuilding process is intrinsically linked to issues of social justice, in the broad understanding advanced by Fraser, that is a prerequisite to achieve peace.

It is challenging to clearly discern the perpetrators behind the violence experienced by EHRD (see Fig. 4). Since the 2016 peace agreement and disarmament of the FARC-EP, the daily lives of rural populations have been severely affected by the changing constellation of armed groups who battle over resources and deciding over people’s routines, and order farmers to grow coca. Not following their interests and orders, or a perception and purposeful discursive representation by armed groups to resist and align with these new interests, makes people a target of intimidation, attacks and violence (Van Dexter and Ingalls 2022). In addition, because of the slow implementation of the peace agreement and the power void being filled by armed groups, a sizable number of assassinations is attributed to groups such as the ELN, paramilitary factions, and FARC-EP dissidents who abandoned the peace process. Moreover, environmental human rights defenders are also caught in the cross-fire and are experiencing violence at the hand of state authorities, for instance the police and Colombian military (see Fig. 4; Programa Somos Defensores 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023).

BETWEEN MISRECOGNITION AND MALDISTRIBUTION

We argue that increased violence toward EHRD in Colombia is partly the result of maldistribution of land and economic resources as well as misrecognition. The work of EHRD and the violence they face is a contemporary example of the historical struggles and injustices related to recognition and redistribution. These forms of injustices interact with each other and connect with global injustices that are felt by EHRD across Colombia, highlighting the challenges of sustainable peacebuilding globally. This is emphasized by one of our interviewees, Carolina, who stated that although attacks are against individuals, they have implications on larger scales, instigate fear, weaken participatory processes, and lower people’s trust in institutional developments in the long run (Interview, Carolina, March 2023).

Social organizations, social movements, and local and indigenous communities who struggled to defend their territories found in the 2016 peace accords new avenues to advance rights. These rights are included as substantial points in the peace agreement, namely, land reform, political participation, the problem of crops for illicit use, and guarantees of truth, reconciliation, and of non-repetition of the violations and violence people have experienced (OACP 2016). Nonetheless, it is important to understand the different motivations and objectives EHRD may have. Although some are fighting for recognition of collective rights and collective identities, those who have their collective rights and identities recognized, struggle to operationalize and amplify these rights (Samper and Krause 2024).

In our following analysis of the two major presidencies in the period since 2016, we show that efforts to enhance recognition justice and distributive justice in an integrated manner remain inefficient at best. Until 2022, this can be attributed largely to a lack of political will, with minor progresses or even deteriorations regarding recognition and distribution. Although there are, most recently, some progresses in cultural and political recognition of EHRD and the groups they represent, the persistence of economic injustices still undermines any hopes for breaking the spiral of violence against them, and for sustainable peace altogether.

The Duque Administration (2018–2022): “Peace with legality”?

For the period from 2018 to 2022 there is a coincidence of a lack of recognition of EHRD and their cause, in terms of insufficient protection through governmental decision making or implementation on the ground, and a continued economic maldistribution, in terms of new violence over land access and land use. Both developments and injustices mutually reinforce each other and deteriorate the security situation of EHRD in many parts of Colombia.

Recognition justice

Even before the Duque administration, Colombia had enacted various national regulations to prevent and protect human rights, including EHRD. First, decree 1581 of 2017 established the public policy for preventing violations of rights and included environmental defenders within the category of human rights defenders. Second, decree 2252 of 2017 coordinated protection measures between governors, mayors, and the President of the Republic for social leaders, communal organizations, and human rights defenders at risk. Third, decree 1066 of 2018 created and regulated the Comprehensive Security and Protection Program for Communities and Organizations in the Territories, incorporating environmental defenders.

Given ongoing problems with the implementation of these regulations, however, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and its affirmation of the responsibility of the state to protect environmental defenders, added an important layer of safety in terms of judicial mechanisms. For instance, under the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights the specialized mechanisms “Rapporteurship on Human Rights Defenders” focuses specifically on the protection and promotion of the rights of individuals who champion human rights causes. This Rapporteurship plays a crucial role in monitoring, investigating, and advocating for the rights and safety of human rights defenders throughout the Americas, including Colombia.

Against this backdrop, and upon taking office, the Duque administration introduced the overarching approach of “peace with legality,” which was characterized by a return to a paradigm of peace policy with a central focus on security, and peacebuilding as the practice of pacifying territories (Olarte-Olarte 2019, Ahumada Beltrán 2021, Diaz et al. 2021, Van Dexter and Ingalls 2022). Through an early Presidential Decree (No. 2137 of 2018), Duque created an inter-institutional commission to coordinate existing programs and resources to develop a “Timely Action Plan Commission” for the protection of human rights defenders (Presidencia 2018). However, this effort was heavily criticized by human rights organizations for focusing on punishing aggressors rather than preventing crimes against leaders and supporting their work (VerdadAbierta 2018).

Moreover, in 2019 different human rights organizations used the so-called tutela action, a simple and expedited legal action that can be used by any Colombian citizen without cost, to demand the protection of fundamental rights written in the constitution. This tutela action claimed the state has failed to protect the right to defend human rights linked to the constitutional rights of personal integrity, life, freedom of association among others. The action was judged in favor of the claimants and the judge ordered the national government to activate different mechanisms to protect EHRD. Besides institutional protection, the judge also ordered the government to promote a campaign for recognition, respect, and support for the work of human rights defenders through public and private media (Coljuristas 2020).

This disconnect between rhetorical or superficial steps on the one hand and actual shortcomings in protecting EHRD on the other characterizes the Duque administration. Duque used the platform of the 2021 UN climate summit in Glasgow to portray himself as an environmental champion and protector of forests. He promised Colombia would be carbon-neutral by 2050 and to protect 30% of Colombia’s land and waters by 2022. After he made these pledges, however, armed groups kept threatening and killing Colombian community leaders and EHRD who had tried to protect forests from mining, timber, and oil companies (Echeverry and Miller 2021). This is not the only notable case of inconsistency between international rhetoric and national action by the Duque administration on EHRD-related matters. Despite signing the regional Escazú Agreement in December of 2019 (ECLAC 2018), which inter alia obliged the government to protect EHRD, Duque did little to push for the ratification of the agreement in the national Congress. In addition, the Duque administration did not implement aspects of the treaty through effective EHRD protection measures or a systematic pursuit of their attackers and only took minor or rhetorical steps to recognize and protect EHRD and the groups they represented.

The government’s lack of recognition of EHRD devalued their work and struggles, made their claims invisible to state security actors who instead of protecting their rights were accomplices and sometimes also perpetrators of violence against them. This considerable passivity on EHRD protection was further mirrored in the de facto abandonment of the Peace Accord throughout Duque’s presidential term. This goes in particular for his neglect of the National Commission for Security Guarantees under chapter 3.4 of the Accord, a commission that also provided mechanisms and instruments for EHRD protection (ABColombia 2020). Instead, Duque’s own major anti-deforestation instrument, military-based Operation Artemisa, was frequently accused by major national indigenous rights associations of targeting indigenous EHRD and communities (Tarazona and Parra de Moya 2022).

Duque’s public statements reveal that these various developments were not mishaps in political planning, a lack of enforcement capacities, corruption, or complicity of state forces on the ground. Rather, they reflect the political views and agenda of the Duque administration on questions concerning the protection of EHRD. For instance, after Operation Artemisa had captured and imprisoned an indigenous governor, Duque blamed him to be the biggest deforester in the San Vicente del Caguán municipality in the Caquetá Department (Tarazona 2022). When a series of protests against tax increases, corruption, and health care reform emerged in the country from late April 2021, 228 people, mostly students, who took part in the protests were eventually charged with serious offenses like terrorism and conspiracy to commit crimes. Various UN special rapporteurs on human rights issues condemned the violence during these social protests, the detainment of peaceful protesters, warned against the use of the “internal enemy” rhetoric to deal with social mobilization, and, most notably, the stigmatization and judicial harassment of social leaders and human rights defenders in this context (UNHCHR 2023b).

Apart from direct accusations and actions, it is striking to what extent the Duque government either avoided raising human rights violations against EHRD or publicly criticized those who did so. In his speech in front of the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September 2020, Duque paid explicit tribute to the work of social leaders in his country, but did not mention in any way the threats and assassinations of said leaders that had made Colombia the world’s most dangerous country for EHRD (Restrepo 2020). One year earlier, in March 2019, Duque called it a lack of respect and an illegitimate intervention when the Representative of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the country, Alberto Brunori, voiced his support for the JEP’s statutory law on the victims of assassinations and other human rights violations. Likewise, Duque sharply criticized Brunori’s report on human rights in Colombia in February 2020. The president called the investigation clumsy or reckless and again spoke of an inappropriate intervention into Colombia’s national sovereignty (Semana 2020).

By the same token, Duque’s administration never extended an official invitation to Michel Forst, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, who had been tasked to investigate the situation of human rights defenders in Colombia, thus ignoring Forst’s repeated requests to visit Colombia in 2019. When Forst finally presented his report to the UN Human Rights Council in March of the following year, various members of Duque’s government, including Minister of the Interior Alicia Arango, played down the figures of EHRD assassinations in the report and doubted the accuracy of its content (Restrepo 2020). Altogether, the acts of the Duque administration went beyond lack of recognition to outright misrecognition and stigmatization that directly and indirectly generated violence against EHRD.

Distributive justice

The insufficient support, outright neglect, or even active obstruction of cultural and political recognition is largely mirrored by a continuation or deterioration of economic injustices toward EHRD and their communities since the 2016 Peace Agreement, and particularly during the Duque administration. This is exemplified by the low access to and the unequal distribution of land, which had been one of the main reasons for Colombia’s armed conflict. Land re-distribution has subsequently become a key point of the peace negotiations (as part of the Integral Rural Reform) and an integral part of various governmental policies for building peace across the rural areas of the country (OACP 2016, Guereña 2017, McKay 2018, Faguet et al. 2020, DNP 2023).

The Multipurpose Cadastre is a post peace agreement initiative for land re-distribution based on an information system that registers updated land data based on formal and informal properties, including the specification on rights, restrictions, interests on the properties, and use. However, the system operates very slowly and data gaps continue to be a substantial hurdle. In 2016, 79% of the 187 municipalities most affected by the armed conflict lacked cadastral information regarding land ownership (Escobar and Cárdenas 2018). A recent analysis by Faguet et al. (2020) highlights that in municipalities where land was concentrated in the hands of a rural elite, redistributed land was diverted to bigger farms. This resulted in a decrease in smaller and instead an increase in larger farms, greater plot size dispersion, and lower levels of development in the respective municipality, ultimately contributing to an even more unequal distribution of land in Colombia (Faguet et al. 2020). To what extent the Multipurpose Cadastre has a positive effect on the clarification of land rights and to what extent it can be used to address injustices regarding the access and sustainable use of lands remains an open question to further investigate (Cuesta and Pico 2022) and is particularly interesting for the pathways by which environmental peacebuilding may operate (Krampe et al. 2021).

The lack of state control and the lack of progress in implementing the peace agreement across the country has allowed different armed groups to extend their presence over large areas once again (Clerici et al. 2020, Gordon et al. 2020, Murillo-Sandoval et al. 2020, 2021, 2023). When the FARC-EP signed the peace agreement in 2016, most fighters laid down their weapons and moved into re-integration camps, making many areas that were previously controlled by the group attractive for new armed actors who seized the new void of power (Murillo-Sandoval et al. 2021, 2023, Ganzenmüller et al. 2022, Salazar et al. 2022, Agudelo-Hz et al. 2023). The outcomes of this reconfiguration of control over land, resources, and people led to a resurgence of violence, ecosystem degradation, deforestation, and a range of illegal activities, such as gold and coltan mining, and the expansions of coca plantations for the global drug business (Gordon et al. 2020, Rettberg et al. 2020, UNODC 2023).

The rise in deforestation and land-use change has been associated with the reconfiguration of who controls the rural areas and access to resources and control of lucrative trafficking routes, coca plantations, and profitable mineral deposits. In the process, lands belonging to or traditionally used by local peasant and indigenous communities and protected areas are the target of land grabbing by armed groups, transnational mining corporations, petrol exploitation, and the expansion of agroindustries, which in turn are often backed by state authorities and operate with the support of local governments (McNeish 2017, Semana 2017, 2019, DNP 2018, Diaz et al. 2021, Scheidel et al. 2023). In this complex situation, indigenous and local communities who saw their lands and rights being threatened started to organize themselves and community leaders began to claim and fight for local rights to land, resources, and livelihoods (Samper and Krause 2024).

The department of Putumayo exemplifies the fight of EHRD who see a clear connection between the historical struggles for identity, political participation, land distribution, and income substitution for families dependent on cultivating crops for illicit use and the advancement of the peace agreement’s programs regarding territorially focused development (PDET) and crop substitution (PNIS). The latter, in particular, has been a notorious source of risks to safety. Perhaps the most infamous case behind this notoriety was the assassination of Marco Rivadeneira in 2020, a campesino leader with decades of leadership experience dating back to the mid-1990s campesino mobilizations. Marco Rivadeneira’s assassination was a result of his direct involvement in advancing the PNIS program (Florez 2023). Many social leaders and human rights defenders, like Juanita and Alberto, have been involved in these struggles since before the peace agreement programs begun their implementation in the Putumayo, for instance through the mobilizations that led to a grassroots Andean-Amazonic Integral Development Plan (PLADIA 2035), which was disrupted and stopped due to the peace agreement.

In addition to factors around land-use and access within Colombia, threats against EHRD have a strong transboundary dimension. A recent report by the UN further reveals the global link between crime cartels and narcotraffickers operating across the Amazon region of Colombia, Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia to supply global drug markets and the high incidence of homicides and killings of environmental human rights defenders in areas with a prevalence of crops for illicit use (UNODC 2023). Drug production and trafficking are exacerbating an array of other criminal economies in the Amazon Basin that have a detrimental impact on the environment and on communities. This regards first and foremost international investment and commerce that are linked to mineral extraction, coca plantations, and cattle-ranching in remote resource-rich regions in Colombia. In its 2022 World Report, Human Rights Watch estimates that two-thirds of the forest destruction in the Colombian Amazon go back to cattle ranching or practices of FARC dissident groups who push for the planting of coca crops and who threaten EHRD that speak up for substitution programs (HRW 2022). It is increasingly evident that the drug policies of the past did not have the effect on the extent of coca plantations in Colombia (and elsewhere) that proliferated in the past years and are driven by globally operating drug cartels (see Fig. 5; Mora 2021, ONDCP 2022, Murillo-Sandoval et al. 2023). The interview with Carolina underlined that even if the government is able to pursue and implement the total peace approach, it cannot solve the transnational problem of the global drug trade, which will keep driving violence across the country (Interview, Carolina, March 2023).

However, according to testimony from EHRD, threats do not only come from dissident groups in illegal contexts. Different governmental security forces have been accused of intimidation and abuse of EHRD in order to defend business interests (USAID 2017). One case in point are the 2021 protests of the Misak and Nasa indigenous peoples and campesino communities in Colombia’s Cauca department against Smurfit-Kappa, Europe’s leading corrugated packaging company. In response to their activities, leaders of the protesting groups have repeatedly received death threats. These EHRD asserted their right to reclaim land from the company in accordance with Article 28 in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the ILO Convention (ILO 1989, UN 2008). They further invoked land reform provisions in the 2016 Peace Agreement to address negative environmental and human rights implications of Smurfit-Kappa’s intensive pine and eucalyptus plantations (UNHCHR 2022a). In our interview with Juanita, she referred to the profoundly structural challenges where governmental representatives from local to national levels and state security forces are accomplices and benefit from insecurity and the lack of territorial integrity in order to oppress resistance and territorial defense to maintain the status quo (Interview, Juanita, March 2023).

In conclusion, the policies and political discourses implemented in the years (2016–2022) after the peace agreement in Colombia, and especially during the Duque administration, illustrate how a justice approach that missed to address issues of recognition and redistribution has created conditions for increased violence for EHRD and has ultimately stood in the way of sustainable, in the sense of lasting and multi-dimensional, peace.

The Petro Administration: Toward “total peace”?

In August 2022 the new government under President Gustavo Petro started a series of initiatives toward a stronger cultural and political acknowledgement of EHRD and their concerns. In many regards, the Petro administration increased the political representation of EHRD and took a steps toward redistribution and more recognition justice. For instance, Francia Márquez who was a human-rights and environmental activist and lawyer, became Colombia’s first female and Afro-Colombian vice president. Nonetheless, the legacies of economic maldistributions continue to have implications for the security of Colombian EHRD under the current government and prolong recognition injustices on the ground.

Recognition justice

In clear contrast to the recurring misrecognition or downplay of the fate of Colombian EHRD in Duque’s speeches and statements, the inauguration of the Petro administration in August 2022 marked a clear change in rhetoric. Major representatives of human rights and indigenous organizations noted an immediate shift in discursive focus and attitude, toward emphasizing and condemning assassinations and other human rights violations, and toward making the safety of vulnerable groups, protecting the environment, and reducing deforestation in the Amazon region a governmental priority (Lombo 2022, DNP 2023).

In his own speech before the UN General Assembly, only one month after taking office, Petro contrasted in detail the environmental beauty of his country with what he termed as ongoing violence, horror, and terror, all of which he attributed to a globalized addiction to cocaine, oil, and coal (Petro 2022). Notably though, while not being silent about assassinations like his predecessor, Petro did not name victim groups explicitly in this first major international address as president and words like defender, social leader, human rights, or indigenous were absent in his speech.

However, the new president and his government have been using such terminology repeatedly in national contexts ever since assuming office. This began with a 29-point “Emergency plan for the protection of social leaders, human rights defenders and peace signatories” in seven sub-regions and 65 municipalities, drafted by civil society organizations and adopted by the president right after his inauguration in August 2022. The plan’s various measures and instruments fall into six overarching objectives: institutional confidence-building and prevention of stigmatization; measures of justice and against impunity; on-site preventative and strategic action by military and police forces; territorial presence of the state; risk management and humanitarian action; and administrative measures to protect territorial security (UNP 2022). The plan was supposed to be implemented in two phases, within the first 100 days of the new government, and in the consecutive 12 months (Hernández Bonilla 2022).

Moreover, two key mechanisms for the implementation of the peace agreement signed in 2016 were re-launched: the “Commission for the follow-up, promotion and verification of the implementation of the final agreement” and the “National commission on security guarantees.” The Petro government further decided to implement the Decree 660 of 2018 signed by then President Santos (2010–2018) approaching the protection of EHRD as collectives and not individuals, focusing on the promotion of acts of recognition and legitimization of the work of defenders. Nonetheless, despite good intentions it is still not clear how the new approach is to be operationalized under the complex circumstances and given the precarious security situation characterizing many rural areas in Colombia.

Another major step was the adoption of Law 181 and approval of law 2272 in November 2022, which established a government mandate to negotiate peace with all relevant groups, frequently referred to as “Total Peace Law” (Congreso de Colombia 2022a, 2022b). In the same month, the new Minister of Defense, Iván Velásquez, met with various human rights organizations and specifically named the protection of human rights defenders as part of the governmental strategy, which was eventually included in the most recent national development plan (Cablenoticias 2022, DNP 2023). The government is thereby allowed to conduct two kinds of processes to advance its total peace project. The first is to undertake negotiations with illegal armed groups with political recognition, aimed at achieving a peace agreement. The second is engagement and dialogue with armed structures considered of “high criminal impact” aimed at their dismantling and submission to justice.

In contrast to his predecessor’s “peace with legality,” Petro’s “total peace” policy is rhetorically linked to the ideal of sustainable and multi-dimensional peace, inasmuch as Petro asserts that the achievement of peace in Colombia requires actions by multiple actors and across different local, national, and global levels, connecting the violence in Colombia to global problems, such as the war on drugs, the push for oil exploitation, and environmental degradation (Presidencia 2022). Acknowledging the telecoupling of the drivers of violence that EHRD are experiencing is an important step toward addressing the systemic problem of social-ecological degradation and violence beyond national borders (Boillat et al. 2018, Krause et al. 2022).

Various domestic human rights organizations welcomed these early initiatives by the Petro administration, while stressing that it will take time before any effectiveness of the emergency plan and other measures can be assessed. Moreover, for various activists, these first steps are by far not specific enough. One month after the adoption of the emergency plan, Camilo González Posso, President of Indepaz (Institute of Studies for Development and Peace), a major Colombian human rights organization, stated that the change so far was mostly one of attitude and rhetoric. Although he acknowledged the overarching programmatic shifts initiated by both the emergency plan and the total peace law, he missed the development of a detailed and elaborate public political infrastructure to flank these initiatives, with specific agencies and steps that guarantee their implementation toward a sustainable protection of human rights leaders (Lombo 2022).

Although it is certainly too early for an assessment of these measures, it can already be said that they have not come without their own kind of problems. In particular, some armed groups, such as the Comando de la Frontera who operate in the Putumayo, and Los Costeños, who operate in the north of Colombia, have attempted to obtain political recognition to participate in the total peace program. The Comando de la Frontera is an armed structure composed of former FARC combatants, paramilitaries, and soldiers, whose leader has been both a FARC insurgent and paramilitary counter-insurgent. Their willingness to be interviewed by a big national newspaper shows an attempt to be seen as a politically belligerent group though their contradictory admittance that they are not in armed conflict with the state exposed them as a paramilitary army with unclear political belligerence (Parada Lugo 2023).

In addition to its various and early domestic initiatives, the Petro administration also furthered the recognition and protection of EHRD in several international law contexts. On 11 October 2022, Congress approved the ratification of the Escazú Agreement (ECLAC 2018), which seeks, among other things, to strengthen environmental democracy and enhance the protection of environmental rights defenders in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Escazú Agreement recognizes the rights of EHRDs and civil society to access information, participate in decision-making processes, and contribute to environmental policies and projects that affect their communities and thereby aiming to promote transparency in environmental decision making. It calls upon states to recognize, protect, and promote all the rights of EHRD, including their ability to exercise those rights. Article 9 of the Agreement holds special importance concerning human rights defenders involved in environmental issues. It explicitly acknowledges the need for states to guarantee a safe and enabling environment for ERD, ensuring that they can carry out their activities without facing threats, violence, intimidation, or reprisals.

Under the Agreement, a committee to support implementation and compliance will be established, consisting of experts from the ratifying states who have a consultative status and not be able to issue legally binding decisions upon the state parties. Despite the lack of legal powers attached to the committee, it was the reason why Colombia under the Duque government did not ratify the Agreement after signing it. This however changed after the new government was established under Petro (Collins and Diaz Rangel 2022). Nonetheless, the Law ratifying the agreement is in the Constitutional Court under review.

The ratification of the Escazú Agreement in combination with the aforementioned Inter-American Court on Human Rights may have synergy effects that will strengthen the protection of EHRD. Regarding the main objectives of the Agreement, it is evident that the right of access to environmental information has been widely recognized in Colombian regulations and jurisprudence. In this sense, the obligations of access, generation, and dissemination of environmental information enshrined in the Escazú Agreement will complement the actions and mechanisms that are put in place under the Petro administration.

Distributive justice

Despite the change in governmental discourse, especially on questions of recognition justice, the first year of the Petro government was marked by an unaltered level of violence against human rights defenders, exemplified by the 188 killings during 2023, a number equally high as 2022 (Indepaz 2023). As of 6 May 2024, Indepaz counted 51 killings for the ongoing year (Indepaz 2024).

This unceasingly negative trend cannot only be explained by the major enforcement challenges that the new government’s ambitions are facing on the ground. On a more fundamental level, the challenges of access to and distribution of land persevered, and are exacerbated by the strong grip of mining corporations, agroindustry, or illicit actors (Murillo Sandoval et al. 2020, González-González et al. 2021, Jaramillo and Carmona 2022, Krause et al. 2022). Although it may be too early to expect such visible changes, the persistent mismatch between recognition justice initiatives and continued distributive injustice keep impeding a lasting improvement of the situation of EHRD in the country. A case in point is the Libero Copper mining project by a Canadian mining company of the same name, to extract one of the largest copper sources in Colombia and one of the world’s largest undeveloped molybdenum deposits in the Andean Piemonte of Putumayo. The mining concession was granted almost 20 years ago and overlaps with a forest reserve, a strategic water protection zone, and several legally recognized indigenous reserves. The company started to actively pursue exploration work in 2018 and since then has been involved in legal battles and is confronted with local resistance. However, despite a law at the municipal level prohibiting mining in the area (Concejo Municipal 2018) and a sanction by the regional environmental authority (Corpoamazonia 2022), Libero Copper engages in widespread legal and political campaigning to pursue extraction and extending their mining license titles. Anecdotal evidence from our research stays in Putumayo indicates that the tensions between EHRD who resist the mining project and defend the local environment, the forests, rivers, and legally recognized indigenous territories from the mining project are growing and with little intervention from the national government to mediate the rising tensions.

Despite enhanced cultural and political recognition on the one hand and largely unabated maldistribution during the almost two years of the Petro government on the other hand echo one of Fraser’s main points. To reach sustainable peace, peacebuilding efforts need to address the root causes of violence, not just its symptoms. No amount of recognized rights will end violence that has an unresolved material element like land distribution. The Petro government has started an agrarian reform, titling lands and buying privately owned unproductive lands with the goal to redistribute it to landless families and peasants (DNP 2023). In this advancement of land redistribution the recognition of EHRD, heterogeneous as the social category may be, is crucial as previous studies have shown (Samper and Krause 2024). Their recognition implies the broader recognition of different historical collective struggles that continue to this day because the root causes of violence have not been discontinued. Thus, the violence against EHRD and their silencing is a symptom of a continuing lack of capabilities and accountability mechanism that challenge the progress toward sustainable peace in Colombia.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The case of Colombia illustrates how a lack of justice as experienced by EHRD during the post-agreement peacebuilding period is intrinsically related to recognition, political representation, and redistribution. During the Duque administration a negative reinforcement of misrecognition and maldistribution undermined the peacebuilding activities. The new Petro administration has made important steps toward cultural and political recognition of EHRD and their vulnerability, while distributive injustice in many rural areas, terms of land grabbing and the growing influx of global industrial and illicit actors, has continued. Because access to land is a major cornerstone of the peace agreement, the Petro administration has started to take up the challenging task of redistribution of land to peasant farmers. Time, and further research, will tell us whether the changes instigated by the Petro government will be able to take more holistic efforts that flank recognition with redistribution, in order to provide EHRD in Colombia with safer legal, political, and economic conditions for sustainable peace.

This said, protection of EHRD is a multi-level challenge. The various transboundary causes behind the threats and violence against EHRD call for stronger efforts from national governments and international institutions alike. This begins with a more accurate evaluation of human rights conditions for international aid. For instance, in July 2021, the U.S. State Department wrongly justified its unchanged aid policy toward Colombia by claiming that effective methods to prevent attacks against human rights defenders were in place in the country (Stark 2022). Moreover, governments need to do more to monitor, prevent, and address violence against EHRD that are linked to companies and investors headquartered in their countries, e.g., the Irish government in the case of Smurfit-Kappa (UNHCHR 2022a), or the Canadian Libero Copper mining company.

Likewise, international institutions need to scale up their efforts to support the integrity of EHRD and directly or indirectly enhance their safety. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has repeatedly advocated a stronger integration of a rights-based approach into the various instruments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC; UNHCHR [date unknown]). By the same token, both the UNFCCC’s Adaptation Fund and new Loss and Damage Fund not only need more pledges from member states; in addition, the legal set up and the operations of these funds ought to ensure effective compensation and protection of EHRD and their communities.

The armed conflict has shaped the life of Colombia’s countryside for many decades, and despite the peace agreement between the government and the FARC-EP, peace remains out of reach in many regions of Colombia (Krause et al. 2022, Salazar et al. 2022, Programa Somos Defensores 2023, UNHCHR 2023a). Although people in some areas have been able to enjoy a relative stable period of tranquility compared to the time of the civil war, some parts of the country (for instance along the Ecuadorian border region in the south, the pacific coastal areas, and the Catatumbo region bordering Venezuela) have seen a resurgence of violence, driven by a growing number of criminal groups battling over access to resources and land for growing and trading illicit products and minerals (Clerici et al. 2020, UNHCHR 2022b, UNHCHR 2023a, UNODC 2023).

Apart from the violence, the massacres and forced displacement of rural populations, foremost indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups who face the brunt of this development, deforestation has soared because of illegal land grabbing for cattle ranching and the expansion of coca plantations (Mora 2021, Ganzenmüller et al. 2022, Vanegas-Cubillos et al. 2022, Murillo-Sandoval et al. 2023). Moreover, pollution from illegal mining operations and the indirect effects of coca plantations degrade ecosystems and rivers, and are a serious threat to the health of local populations (Webster 2012, Nuñez-Avellaneda et al. 2014, Alvarez-Berríos and Aide 2015, Guevara et al. 2016, González-González et al. 2021, UNODC 2023).

In this panorama, environmental human rights defenders are one of the last bastions of resistance in regions where the absence of state authority, or their implicit involvement in illegal activities, relentlessly forces people into illicit economies or to leave their homes and communities. The role and fate of EHRD can provide important insights into peacebuilding and avenues to resolve the multi-dimensional injustices that are the root causes of armed conflict.

EHRD often not only fight for social justice, the right to land and territories, the right to recognition and support from the state, but they also protect ecosystems. The actions of EHRD provide empirical examples of the paths to successful environmental peacebuilding, i.e., achieving sustainable peace from below. Without their struggles, every day peacebuilding would not be possible (Anderson 2017, Daniels 2018). However, while threats and attacks target individual EHRD, they have implications on a larger scale and affect participatory processes and institutional development at the local and regional level, further impeding peacebuilding and the implementation of the peace agreement.

Despite the deteriorating situation of EHRD in Colombia, communities continue to assemble behind and walk with EHRD in order to amplify their voice, make their fight more visible, and further legitimize not only the individual EHRD, but also their entire struggle. Fundamentally, they also serve as a mirror for the outside world to the injustices that occur through globalized trade, both in legal and illegal products. Their struggles are evidence of the globally connected drivers of systemic violence. The possibility to achieve sustainable peace also requires addressing global injustices and tackling the questions of redistribution, representation, and recognition simultaneously.

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