Everyday Peacebuilding through Tourism amid Violent Post-war Geographies in Colombia

Keywords: Peacebuilding, structural violence, agency, tourism spaces, Colombia
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 6

Abstract

Although the decades of overt political violence are over, Colombia has become the stage for
less bloody but no less destructive mechanisms of dispossession of local communities, especially rural ones. Certainly, the ‘pacification’ of a countryside ravaged by the armed conflict has been seen as an opportunity to make investments in favour of economic elites, aggravating the already uneven development of rural areas.

Amid this backdrop of structural violence, marginalized groups have found ways to contest the neoliberal approach that lie behind the so-called post-conflict period. This presentation discusses the case of Montes de Maria, a region where empowered small farmers are resignifying violent landscapes and converting them into tourism spaces as a means to defend local visions of peace.

Our findings suggest that tourism has been instrumental in bringing peasants’ agency to the spotlight, supporting their recognition as political actors and their demands to stay and have a decent living on a land that is strongly anchored with peasant identity. Hence, tourism spaces serve as a platform where marginalized peasants become visible and can contest the socio-spatial inequalities and power imbalances that are still inscribed onto the territory.

We conclude that these spaces are inextricably embedded in a broader emancipatory struggle of small farmers to reaffirm ownership over the territory and disrupt the imaginative geographies of post-war regions as terra nullius, as empty spaces simply waiting to be saved from backwardness.