Community of Peace

This is an ethnography of the Peace Community of San Josâe de Apartadâo, Colombia. Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations, as in the recent peace process between the Colombian government and FARC guerrillas. Yet, it also happens at the grassroots level where communities envision and create peace. The San Josâe de Apartadâo Peace Community of small-scale farmers has not waited for a top-down peace treaty to be imposed. Instead, they have actively resisted forced displacement and co-optation by guerrillas, army soldiers, and paramilitaries for two decades in Colombia's war-torn Urabâa region. San Josâe's peace through autonomy reflects an alternative to traditional modes of politics practiced through electoral representation and armed struggle. Courtheyn illustrates how the Peace Community's food sovereignty practices and performance of memory produce an emancipatory politics, consistent with autonomist social movements across Latin America, that unveils and counters racism to produce an anti-colonial, radical peace of ecological dignity through trans-community solidarity--