Contribution short abstract:

Commoning and solidarity practices are among the protection strategies of rural peace communities in Latin America during conflict and post-conflict periods. The paper explores the modification of these strategies in the transition process using two ethnographic examples from Colombia and Guatemala.

Contribution long abstract:

Commoning and solidarity practices - communal land use, collective food production or trade cooperatives - are among the central security and peacebuilding strategies of rural peace communities in violent conflicts of Colombia and Guatemala. During the post-conflict transformations, the socio-economic and political context in which these relatively homogeneous communities have developed their strategies changes drastically: armed groups demobilize, ex-combatants resettle, displaced people return and reclaim land, state programs and agribusiness or mining companies appear. The diversification of political actors and economic interests as well as the heterogenization of moral values and social differences in these (former) conflict regions lead to a modification of the protection strategies of these communities: Some are abandoned over time, others are adapted, new ones are added. Thus, different and contradictory developments of (un)commoning and (dis)solidarization happen simultaneously.

Drawing on multi-temporal ethnographic research in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó in Colombia and the Community of Primavera del Ixcán in Guatemala, this paper explores the (un)commoning and (dis)solidarization developments during post-conflict transformations. Given this context, in which different political and economic actors, with contradictory positions and divergent political values, encounter and interact anew, the paper addresses the following questions: Which practices and strategies, in which political and economic fields are being abandoned, continued or developed? What exactly do these changes look like, what are their causes and what consequences are evident? What do these changes reveal about the conditions and possibilities for commoning and solidarity in complex (post-)conflict contexts, beyond these ethnographic cases?