(Re)claiming territory: Colombia's “territorial-peace” approach and the city

Abstract

Abstract. This article observes the Latin American debate on “territory” through the lens of the “territorial-peace” approach agreed in the peace accord between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas in 2016. It explores the different notions of territory entailed in this concept and shows that the territorial-peace approach builds on a political-programmatic understanding of territory due to its rural focus. An ethnographic analysis of the urban renewal programme PRIMED, implemented at the disputed urban periphery of Colombia's second city, Medellín, in the 1990s, demonstrates how this programme anticipated the idea of territorial peace in a conflictive urban context. The ethnography reveals the ambiguities and inconsistencies of the production of urban territory, both as state space and as the space of subaltern social groups, through territorial peacebuilding. The discussion why PRIMED challenges the political-programmatic understanding of territory in the territorial-peace debate concludes with highlighting why it makes a difference approaching territorial peace as a “political project to be achieved” or as an unpredictable process of territorialisation and why this distinction matters if the territorial-peace approach is to be extended to urban contexts.