From Territorial Peace to Territorial Pacification: Anti-Riot Police Powers and Socio-Environmental Dissent in the Implementation of Colombia’s Peace Agreement

• Main Author: María Carolina Olarte-Olarte
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad de los Andes 2019-01-01
• Series: Revista de Estudios Sociales
• Subjects: Author: antiriot police; rural protest; socio-environmental dissent; transitional justice
• Online Access: https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/doi/full/10.7440/res67.2019.03

During the negotiation and implementation of the Havana Peace Agreements in Colombia, a twofold mechanism used to deal with the increasing number of socio-environmental conflicts has remained constant: the strengthening of the anti-riot police forces and certain institutional spatial assumptions underlying the promotion of a particular form of postconflict productivity. This article attempts to undertake a preliminary analysis of the relationship between, one the one hand, the enactment and threat of police power in socio-environmental protests and, on the other, the enforcement and reproduction of a sense of the territory as an object whose elements can be neatly fragmented. In contrast, socio-environmental processes put forward a deeply relational, fluid and interdependent sense of their territories. Increased police intervention in these processes, we will argue, are not only framing socio-environmental conflicts arising from or linked to the continuity of conflict related inequalities as security issues, but also reframing so-called “territorial peace” into a territorial pacification.