Several studies have explored the relationship between socially constructed neighbourhood boundaries (henceforth social boundaries) and ethnic tensions. To measure these relationships, studies have used area-level demographic data to predict the location of social boundaries and their characteristics. The most common approach uses areal wombling to locate neighbouring areas with large differences in residential characteristics. Areas with large differences (or higher boundary values) are used as a proxy for well-defined social boundaries. However, to date, the results of these predictions have never been empirically validated. This article presents results from a simple discrete choice experiment designed to test whether the areal wombling approach to boundary detection produces social boundaries that are recognisable to local residents and experts as such. We conducted a small feasibility trial with residents and experts in Rotherham, England. Our results shows that participants were more likely to recognise boundaries with higher boundary values as local community borders. We end with a discussion on the scalability of the design and suggest future improvements.

This chapter outlines the Improbable Dialogues project from which this book emerges, situating it in the context of receding violence and increasing political optimism that at first followed the signing of the peace agreement. It explains the project’s roots in the Latin American tradition of PAR as developed in the pioneering work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, and explains how these principles were applied critically in the project’s approach to community engagement. The chapter then sets out the concept of DSTs, a key analytical concept for the empirical discussions in Chapters Three and Four. Finally, the two processes of dialogue examined in detail in the book, in the Catatumbo and Buenaventura/Mid-Pacific regions, are introduced.

The first of the two empirical chapters, this chapter introduces the factors that have fuelled conflict in Catatumbo, showing how this unevenly developed region – frequently stigmatized as a lawless borderland – has been subject to multiple forms of state and para-state domination and violence, yet has also produced vibrant forms of collective action and resistance. The chapter examines the recent history of resistance, in particular the 2013 agrarian strike which sought to insert local concerns around land access, autonomy and alternative livelihood opportunities onto the national peace agenda. Describing local responses to the perceived failure of the peace process’s official participatory mechanisms, the chapter documents the emergence of locally driven dialogue processes, in particular focusing on the efforts of the riverside community of La Angalia to develop a regional environmental pact involving multiple communities across the Catatumbo River Basin, and the contribution of PAR to this process.

This chapter situates the emergence of new forms of community-led participatory peacebuilding in relation to the wider Colombian peace process. During the implementation of the peace agreement, shortcomings with the mechanisms that were designed to enable popular participation became increasingly apparent: they were top-down, their constitution and purpose was not always clear, and their outcomes often failed to live up to the hopes of those communities most affected by conflict. In response, many communities – including in the two regions examined in this book – seized the initiative, convening their own spaces for dialogue based on their own experiences, needs and aspirations.

This book reflects on what people in two different Colombian communities have achieved through participatory peacebuilding. The authors explore different forms of local agency, the prospects for non-extractive academic engagement, and practical and theoretical lessons for participating in peace in other conflict-affected settings.

This chapter explores the port city of Buenaventura as a site of experimentation for DST. The chapter looks at the multiple drivers of conflict in the city and its hinterland, including economic and racial marginalization, resource extraction and the influence of criminal actors, while also highlighting the ways in which local communities have taken action to defend their right to live in peace and with dignity. Showing how the government-sponsored post-agreement development plan was seen by communities as another iteration of planning for the reproduction of capital in the region, the chapter looks at participatory experiments for peace that emerged, drawing on indigenous and Afro-Colombian cultures and knowledges, and became powerful political forces for peace. Finally, the chapter looks at the roles played by PAR-based research in supporting and strengthening these processes.

This paper offers a space-relational extension to the local turn in peace studies. We argue that unflattening the local in research on peace and conflict has the potential to explain why multi-modal participatory peacebuilding produces tensions, disappointments, and adaptations across a volatile and fluid state-society interface. Our analysis focuses on three space-relational dimensions: contested claims to territorial representation; the scalar organisation of the state; and the dynamics of extensive uneven urbanisation in peripheral regions. Catatumbo, a conflict-affected borderland region of Colombia, constitutes the empirical focus of our study, which covers both the protracted negotiations leading to the 2016 national peace agreement and its ongoing fraught implementation. Drawing on mixed-methods research, our findings show that despite vibrant forms of pro-peace participation, a regional consensus failed to emerge amidst ongoing violence, unfulfilled state promises and new threats to the economy and environment. Yet, grassroots peacebuilding continues to be reinvented and includes innovative forms of socio-territorial dialogue. Concluding remarks reflect on opportunities to broaden space-relational analysis of socially and geographically complex peacebuilding efforts across and beyond Colombia.

Colombia's peace process prioritised conflict-torn geographies ostensibly suffering from historical state absence. We examine the origins and afterlives of this 'territorial' peace using discourse analysis, archival research and field interviews. The state-initiated agenda exceeded the objective of structuring negotiations with FARC guerrillas, pointing to the transformative potential of social dialogue. The negotiating parties co-sponsored participatory rural development forums, which attracted numerous collectives. These diverse actors' visionary proposals to address neglected claims and conflicts influenced the government's and FARC's respective discourses, ultimately informing the 2016 peace agreement. Yet, state priorities for peace centred on international legitimation and post-conflict infrastructure development to accelerate foreign investment in export-oriented mining, oil extraction, and agri-business. The beleaguered FARC challenged government's narratives while struggling to rebuild organisational legitimacy and prevent fragmentation. Subsequent disappointments with fraught territorial development plans, a new government's securitization of peace programmes, and continuing violence mar the post-agreement period. Prior contributors to participatory forums have joined contentious actions against neglectful austerity, extractivist maldevelopment and targeted assassinations. Thus, we argue that Colombia's international lessons may reside less in governmental pacification programmes - the potential of state-sponsored participatory dialogues notwithstanding - than in resilient (post-)conflict communities open to exercising their peace imagination while remaining mobilised against new-and-old violences. Furthermore, the territorial peace saga illustrates productive overlaps between critical peace geographies and socio-territorial analysis - especially the territorial restructuring induced by neoliberal economic policies, the violent multiple territorialities of differentiated state presence in geographical peripheries and pluriversal struggles against ontological occupation addressed herein.