Governing after FARC: environmental peacebuilding in Caquetá, Colombia

We examine the environment as a mechanism for building substantial integration in Colombia. In environmental peacebuilding, substantial integration is a positive peace dimension characterized by trans-societal links that foster social cohesion. Employing data from the Amazonian Department of Caquetá, we argue that the Government of Colombia is pursuing a peacebuilding approach that impedes opportunities to forge an inclusive social order. Instead, it has forcibly integrated frontier communities to advance an extractive peace that perpetuates longstanding patterns of resource violence. This generates a negative peace or “antagonistic integration” wherein peacebuilding creates trans-societal links without reducing violent conflict or increasing social cohesion.