Largely on their own: Dealing with the rural legacies of conflict through local participatory peacebuilding

Rural participatory peacebuilding was central to the peace agreement signed between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). Although rural reform included several elements dealing with the agrarian legacies of the war, none of them were implemented before the participatory process took place. We spend several months in three municipalities during the first year of implementation as the local participatory process unfolded. We find that structural obstacles with significant agrarian roots were affecting local participatory peacebuilding. Specifically, by comparing cases of how these legacies produced a persistent lack of trust of the state, fatally debilitated the organizational capacity of communities and drastically hindered the social reintegration of ex‐combatants, we show that local participation cannot replace structural agendas of rural reconstruction. Participatory democracy should be welcomed as peacebuilding strategy in rural contexts. In practice, however, when this promotion of local participation fails to be nested within a wider political pact addressing the deep agrarian dimension of the conflict, the net result is to displace responsibility from the national political class towards local communities who are asked to confront the legacies of war largely on their own.