Chocolate, Politics and Peace-Building. An Ethnography of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, Colombia

S an Jos de Apartad, Antioquia declared itself a "neutral" peace community in 1997, during the Colombian armed conflict between guerrillas, paramilitaries, and security forces, raging in the Urab region. For more than 30 years, the Community has managed to survive as the longest enduring peace community in Colombia, gaining domestic and international recognition. Based on five years of fieldwork in the 2010s (first, as a Peace Brigades International observer and, then, as a researcher and film producer and co-director), Gwen Burnyeat wrote Chocolate, Cacao, and Peace-building. Her goal is to understand the construction of the Community's collective identity through two key interpretive frameworks, the radical and the organic narratives. These narratives reflect the Community's rocky, tense relationship with the Colombian state as well as the environmentally sustainable cacao and chocolate production that supports the community economically. Together, they undergird the Community members' perceptions of the world and their collective identity as an alternative community

Art · Ethnography · Humanities · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Anthropology · Conflict, Peace, and Violence in Colombia · History and Politics in Latin America · Law