“Everyone Decided to Declare War on the Forest”: Between Territorial Peace and Pacification in the Colombian Andean-Amazon
Publisher: Ecology and Society
Author(s): Juan Antonio Samper, Torsten Krause, and Jesica López
Date: 2024
Topics: Governance, Land, Renewable Resources
Countries: Colombia
In post-peace agreement Colombia, everyone declared war on the forest. In the Putumayo region, these wars take their own particular forms. Scientifically, the Putumayo is described as an Andean-Amazonic rainforest. For the indigenous and local inhabitants of the Putumayo, it is the Andean-Amazonic selva. The authors present three wars on the forest with material and discursive specificities and critically distinguish those that inherently involve violence from the ones that do not. The authors draw on a mix of empirical material to analyze how the wars on the forest have manifested in the Andean-Amazon. We find that both deforestation and the responses to combat it are two wars on the forest with one thing in common: violence. The authors also find that the selva is a territorialized political proposal with its own discursive and material elements. Drawing on the concept of territorial peace, the authors discuss the ambivalence of peacebuilding in relation to violence because it both legitimizes the continuation of violent wars on the forest while providing openings for territorial defense projects. This approach provides analytical avenues to observe the differences between peace and pacification. The authors contend that violence is incompatible with peace but not with pacification. Further, peace and pacification efforts can coexist under the discursive guise of peacebuilding. The authors show 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.