The “Rural Face” of War and Peace in Colombia

Campesinos as Victims in the After-Maths of the Armed Conflict

Bibliographic Data

ID17831755
AuthorsVentura Santos (0000-0003-0282-8226, Universidade Federal Fluminense, corresponding author), Victoria Monteiro da Silva Santos (Universidade Federal Fluminense), Manuela Trindade Viana (0000-0003-2243-358X, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana)
Year2026
Volume6
Issue2
Publication date2026-03-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGlobal Studies Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2634-3797 • E-ISSN: 2634-3797
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/isagsq/ksag060
OpenAlexW7154602351
LanguageEN
References cited23

Considering that the politics of who counts as a victim of an armed conflict is a starting point for both national reparation programs and truth-seeking mechanisms, this article investigates how the campesino came to be rendered by the Colombian transitional justice system as the main victim of the armed conflict. To investigate the grid of intelligibility informing the work of that system, we first trace the historical encounters between the technocratic fields of conflict resolution, development as a means to durable peace, and transitional justice, an intersection that shaped understandings of war and peace in Colombia. In the second part, we show how this genealogy is key for us to grasp the grammar through which rural spaces and populations have come to be understood as “most affected” by war. Then, we move to a discussion about the work of the Colombian Truth Commission in the context of the 2016 peace agreement implementation, aiming to capture how legibility was produced through the classification and quantification of the rural among the universe of victims of the armed conflict. We thus explore how the political practice of counting things produced campesino victims as a political subject and rearticulated broader understandings of how victimhood can, and must, be counted. In doing so, we contribute to discussions on transitional and transformative justice by analyzing knowledge practices involved in redrawing the boundaries of victimhood in peacebuilding efforts, as well as on the politics of categorization and quantification in the making of peace, development, and justice

Armed conflict · Commission · Economic Justice · Peacebuilding · Politics · Transformative learning · Transitional justice · Vetting · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Conflict, Peace, and Violence in Colombia · Law in Society and Culture

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