Peace territories: the construction of the local state in Colombia
This book offers diagnoses and proposals surrounding one key challenge of peace building: carrying out out a large national state-building project on the periphery of the country.
With the signing of the “Final Agreement for Ending Conflict and Building a Stable and Lasting Peace,” Colombia enters a new phase. If the agreement between the national government and the FARC puts an end to a 52-year war and closes the negotiation stage, we will face the – even more complex – challenges of peacebuilding.
Through the Ideas for Peacebuilding collection, Dejusticia seeks to contribute to this task through thematic documents that offer diagnoses and proposals on some of the central institutional challenges of this new stage. One of them is to carry out a large national state-building project on the periphery of the country.
In this book we argue that such a project must fulfil at least two conditions: 1) to start from a judicious study of the different types of municipalities and the social and political realities that exist there, and 2) to propose an adequate balance between order imposition and popular participation. This is not an easy task. After all, bringing the state to the periphery has been an unfulfilled promise for over more than two centuries of history.
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