The recurrence of violent conflict has risen indicating that peace agreements and settlements have been difficult to maintain or implement, leading to instability (Human Security Report, 2012) and signaling the need for closer attention to the “post- conflict” environment. How do people create a new relationship with the state, develop a sense of agency and the capacity to generate safety in their communities? How can new relationships within and between communities emerge? Questions such as these are often framed as “transitional justice” issues, and the associated processes, formal and informal, have varying degrees of success. Efforts to redress violence fail to support the emergence of peace on the ground, and peacebuilding is all too often treated only as relational rather than as institutional processes (Nadler et al, 2008).
People’s understandings and stories of violence “are based upon a range of social, cultural and political discourses that affect how individuals interpret and give meaning to the world around them (Hume, 2005, p. 50).” In the movement from violence to peace, the stories of the past must be told, and yet, in the telling, existing fractures in the community and the state apparatus must be addressed, redressed and transformed such that new stories, at the local level, can emerge. This cannot be done through legislation alone but is a dynamical process that can be constituted through the circulation of narratives and their intersections with powerful political discourses about justice and the recovery from violence.
This research will explore the relational dynamics and trace the development and emergence of narratives as communities engage in reparations processes in Colombia. This case is one that illuminates many of the tensions that arise through engagement with these processes as the people struggle to make sense of decades of violence and the associated forms of justice being articulated in relationship to the state.