Introduction
Recent years have seen what some have termed a ‘vernacular turn’ in security studies, challenging the discipline to recognise and investigate the diverse ways in which security is conceptualised and practised in different places.Footnote 1 Through examining ‘security from the ground up’, proponents of this approach have argued, we can avoid the universalising claims that characterise even more progressive branches of security studies,Footnote 2 and more fully understand how (in)security is experienced and understood around the world and what practices are undertaken in efforts to achieve (or at least to work towards) such local visions of security.
Part of a wider study that sought to investigate how Colombian communities that cannot, for various reasons, rely on the state seek to protect themselves, the research presented here examines how three specific communities understand ‘security’ and what practices they have adopted in pursuit of it. In addressing these questions, we make three contributions to the vernacular security studies agenda: methodological, empirical, and conceptual.
Methodologically, we show that Participatory Action Research (PAR) can be a powerful approach to identifying and understanding vernacular forms of security, helping to mitigate against the (possibly unwitting) imposition of external views of what ‘security’ is and how it is practised. In particular, we show that PAR can enable communities themselves to play a meaningful role in conceptualising security, and documenting and analysing security practices. But more than this, PAR is not only a more inclusive way of gathering and analysing research data but also a way of contributing to community-level initiatives of self-protection. In other words, PAR contributes to both security research and action.
Empirically, we focus on the Pacific region of South-West Colombia, documenting how three ethnically distinct communities conceptualise security and the practices they pursue in an attempt to achieve it. To date, vernacular security studies has engaged with Latin America only to a very limited extent and (to our knowledge) not at all with Colombia. This is regrettable given the country’s struggles with a wide range of forms of insecurity. The Pacific region is particularly interesting and revealing for vernacular security studies–inspired investigation for a variety of reasons. Communities in this region are subject to a wide range of interlocking forms of insecurity, from both armed and structural violence. These include the activities of illegal armed groups, the effective absence of state presence, high levels of poverty, poor infrastructure, and much more. At the same time, the region’s ethnic and cultural diversity (it is home to a variety of indigenous groups, as well as large Afro-Colombian and mestizo populations) brings rich and varied histories of community-level organising, action and resistance – as well as a multiplicity of cosmologies and ontologies that have implications for how security is conceptualised and practised.
This feeds through into our conceptual contribution, in which our co-produced analysis reveals understandings of, and approaches to, security that are very different from those that have dominated (Western) security studies and policy. First, we find a referent object of security centred on territorio – by which is meant not only a particular piece of land but a much more complex set of social–ecological and spiritual relations. This represents a radical alternative to Western notions such as Human Security which, in practice, if not necessarily in theory, have often tended to be individualistic and anthropocentric in their focus on the protection of human life and well-being. Second, the emphasis on territorio as the key thing to be secured has implications for how security is pursued within these communities. Here another concept becomes relevant – that of minga, an idea originally derived from indigenous traditions which emphasises community self-reliance and resistance rather than trust in external sources of support. Third, we find that the terminology used in these communities to discuss issues of (in)security diverges from the language used within both mainstream and critical approaches to security: indeed, we find that the very term ‘security’ is problematic. Importantly, these conceptual findings are rooted in indigenous, mestizo, and Afro-Colombian cultures, histories, and epistemologies, even though in some respects they show similarities with other vernacular concepts and practices of security that researchers have identified in other parts of the world.
The article’s methodological, empirical, and conceptual contributions are, therefore, important for vernacular security studies’ ongoing attempts to reconstruct ‘security’ from the ground up, having implications for how such things can be researched in ways that avoid reproducing a Western gaze, where we should look, how we can recognise vernacular conceptualisations of security when we see them, and how research relates to action. At the same time, our findings have implications for those seeking to promote community-level security in Colombia, shedding important light on the visions of security that communities in the Pacific region are trying to achieve – insights that can help better inform efforts (both domestic and international) to support them.
We begin by briefly introducing the key elements and developments in the vernacular security studies literature before moving on to provide an overview of the security issues that have beset Colombia in general, and our three study communities in particular. We then explain the PAR-based approach on which the article draws, examining the mechanisms through which these have enabled us to more fully work with community members to understand and support their concepts and practices of security. The subsequent sections of the article are structured around two questions: ‘How do communities in this region understand (in)security?’ and ‘What are the strategies and practices they implement in pursuit of (greater) security?’ In the final section, we draw out the implications of these findings for the study of vernacular security, in particular pointing to the importance of PAR as an approach able to help identify concepts and practices of security that more traditional methods might miss, while simultaneously contributing to communities’ own practices of self-protection and care.
Vernacular security
In examining the development of the vernacular security agenda over the previous 20 years, since Nils Bubandt’s original coining of the term in 2005,Footnote 3 Jarvis, Lister, and Oyawale noted that one of the key contributions of this work has been to encourage ‘new attentiveness to the plurality of security discourses and experiences, especially amongst individuals, groups and communities traditionally overlooked within security analysis’.Footnote 4 In contrast to more mainstream approaches to security studies, which have historically been Western-dominated in terms of both the theories and concepts used and the backgrounds of the most high-profile scholars, vernacular security seeks to open up the space for recognising a wider variety of different approaches to security thinking and practice. It is no surprise, then, that a major focus has been on investigating vernacular forms of security in the Global South, especially in Africa and Asia.Footnote 5 It is surprising, however, that relatively little attention has yet been paid to Latin America as a region, and even less to Colombia. As this article makes clear, Colombia is a fascinating and important setting for investigating these issues given its long and complex experiences of a variety of forms of insecurity, and its diverse and rich traditions and cultures of community-level organising and resistance.
Adopting the term ‘vernacular’ to describe these often-overlooked discourses and experiences of security is apt in a variety of ways. Jarvis, Lister, and Oyawale note that, as with architecture, a focus on ‘the vernacular’ necessitates a recognition of ‘rootedness’ in a particular time, space, and culture; a certain informality (in the sense of lacking ‘explicit or official codification of authoritative sources’); an element of ‘authenticity’; and some degree of ‘disruptive potential’.Footnote 6 As Jarvis has noted elsewhere,Footnote 7 this creates points of connection with a range of existing streams of (critical) security studies theorising, including Human Security, Critical Security Studies, and Feminist Security Studies. A common feature of such approaches is that they seek to challenge dominant formulations of the ‘referent object’ by looking not only at threats to the state but also to individuals (and in some cases communities). These approaches also broaden the range of things that might be understood as causes of insecurity, including not only armed violence but also structural violences associated with poverty, inequality, and much more. Finally, they call into question who is responsible for providing security – not least in situations where the state, far from being the guarantor of security, can actually be a threat.
Yet there remains something distinct about the vernacular approach that seeks not only to unsettle the traditional building blocks of security thinking but to actually understand how security is conceptualised, and how it is pursued, by those facing insecurity: people whose voices have generally been absent from security studies theorising. In so doing, vernacular security research has been able to shed important new light on conceptualisations of security in a wide range of different settings, and on the ways in which such understandings of (in)security are seen, experienced, and utilised (or resisted) by those subject to a variety of forms of marginalisation, not least those relating to gender, race, and sexuality.Footnote 8
This raises profound methodological questions about how we can access and document these ‘rooted’, ‘informal’, ‘authentic’, and ‘disruptive’ versions of security: in particular, how outsiders to the communities in which these vernacular versions of security exist can study them without (even if unwittingly) imposing our own knowledge, experiences, and ‘disciplinary baggage’ on what we find. Jarvis, Lister, and Oyawale’s review of the vernacular security field highlights that there has been a particular focus on linguistic approaches that lend themselves to understanding how often-marginalised voices speak about and understand (in)security. They rightly note that focus group-based methodologies have been a popular way of capturing such perspectives,Footnote 9 as have other relatively traditional social science methods such as discourse analysisFootnote 10 (including social media analysisFootnote 11), surveys,Footnote 12 and in-depth interviews.Footnote 13 But they also point out that more recent work has seen a dramatic expansion in the range of methods being deployed. These have included ethnographic methods,Footnote 14 photo elicitation,Footnote 15 digital storytelling,Footnote 16 ‘appnography’,Footnote 17 participatory workshops,Footnote 18 and more.
Hannah Owens’ critique of the linguistic focus of much vernacular security research is of particular importance for our work. Even where more creative methods have been used, Owens argues, the focus on security language creates a number of issues, especially ‘pre-structuring the conversation around security registers’, and risks overlooking the field’s ‘foundational commitment to observe ‘the conditions of (in)security they [people] experience, encounter or construct in everyday life’.Footnote 19 While fully concurring with Owens’ critique, in the context of our research, ‘security’ language posed an additional problem: using the word ‘security’ (seguridad) was not only pre-structuring but was actually problematic for the communities in which we were working, bringing to mind militarised state interventions that have often caused them harm, rather than ideas of safety or well-being. Thus, while previous efforts at using participatory methods, such as Perkowski’s use of participatory workshops on the theme of ‘a secure city for all’Footnote 20 have helped nudge vernacular security studies in a more participatory direction, they would not have met with success in the communities in which we were working.
Our approach in the projects on which this article draws sought to address this in two respects: one linguistic and one related to the duration and nature of our engagement. Linguistically, we deliberately avoided the term ‘security’, instead using other concepts such as ‘protection’ (protección) and care (cuidado) that were suggested by local researchers and social leaders as better encompassing communities’ sense of safety and well-being. In terms of our approach, as we describe in the ‘Methodology’ section, we sought to go far beyond the limited use of participatory methods as a means of data collection to engage in a much more ambitious and longer-running programme of PAR in which the vast majority of the research was conducted by local people from the communities. This entailed extensive processes of community-level training and capacity development through which we sought to provide the tools for ‘self-research’ that would allow for the discussion, documentation, and analysis of communities’ security practices (i.e. the things they do to pursue greater security) as well as to understand security as a nuanced concept in its local, vernacular form. As we explain in the ‘Conclusion’ section, this enabled the participatory work to serve not only as a means of data collection but to actually contribute to strengthening communities’ security practices. The process for achieving this will be described in greater detail below, after briefly introducing the security challenges faced by Colombia in general, and by our three partner communities in particular.
Insecurity in Colombia: a view from above
Colombia has long suffered from a ‘matrix of interrelated conflicts’,Footnote 21 which have dominated national-level security policymaking and defined the state’s security priorities. A 2013 report by the National Centre for Historical Memory (NCHM) estimated that, between 1958 and 2012, 218,094 people were killed (81% of whom were civilians); 25,007 people disappeared; 1,982 massacres were officially reported; 2,119 people were killed and 8,070 seriously injured by anti-personnel mines; 5,156 people, most of them children, were illegally recruited by armed groups; and 5,712,506 people were forcibly displaced.Footnote 22 The 2022 report of Colombia’s Truth Commission found that the death toll of the armed conflict between 1985 and 2018 was in fact at least 450,000 – more than double the number reported by the NCHM.Footnote 23 These figures speak not only of the inability of the Colombian state to protect its citizens but also of its complicity in the violence – not least the collusion and active involvement of state forces, which appear to be responsible for 12% of the Truth Commission’s figures, behind paramilitary groups (45%) and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) guerrillas (21%).Footnote 24
There are conflicting interpretations of the causes of this human tragedy. One perspective sees the Colombian state as a victim of terrorist and criminal organisations that have undermined the stability of an otherwise democratic country. This view was at the core of the ‘internal enemy’ doctrine which inspired repressive security policies such as the Estatuto de Seguridad (Security Statute) (1978–1982) and, later, Seguridad Democrática (Democratic Security) (2002–2010) under which the Uribe government managed to reduce – and even eliminate – guerrilla military capacity in some strategic areas. However, it did so at huge human and social cost, with extraordinarily high levels of disappearances, forced displacement, and extrajudicial killings. An alternative perspective sees the conflict as the result of a long history of social injustice and exclusion. Governments supporting this view have aimed to address this ‘historical debt’Footnote 25 through a series of negotiated peace processes. From 1982 to the present, the Colombian government has engaged in at least 15 peace processes.Footnote 26 The most significant in recent years was the 2016 agreement between the government of President Santos (2010–2018) and the FARC. Praised as one of the most comprehensive peace processes in the world,Footnote 27 this agreement’s potential for both bringing an end to the fighting and addressing historical inequalities in conflict-affected areas was hindered by a number of factors, including a lack of implementation during the subsequent Duque administration (2018–2022) and the advance of a state-led neoliberal development model under the guise of participatory peacebuilding.Footnote 28
The Pacific South-West: abandonment and insecurity
Colombia’s Pacific region has been particularly heavily impacted by conflict over several decades and continues to experience high levels of violence as, following the 2016 peace agreement, the demobilisation of the FARC left gaping power vacuums that triggered new conflicts between (il)legal actors for territorial control.Footnote 29 A 2022 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report found that the region was at the epicentre of at least six different armed conflicts.Footnote 30 While disputes between the government and armed groups decreased in 2023, those between non-state armed actors intensified, bringing ‘continued suffering for the communities that were stuck in the middle of the confrontations’.Footnote 31
In this study, we worked with three communities in the Pacific South-West – in Lerma, Caldono, and Buenaventura – each of which has suffered (and continues to suffer) from both armed and structural violence in different ways.
Lerma was the site of Colombia’s first coca boom in the late 1970s, which had devastating consequences locally. An inflow of money, increased alcohol consumption, and the proliferation of firearms led to high levels of violence: almost a third of Lerma’s population was killed during the 1980s.Footnote 32 During these years, Lermeños recall, the community was plunged into a deep state of insecurity, conflict and mutual distrust that led many families to leave the area. Today, the illegal economy continues to hit this community and its social dynamics hard. Fundación PARES reports that, in the last 20 years, coca has generated multiple disputes between armed groups for the control of crops, laboratories, and smuggling routes.Footnote 33 The reconfigurations of the conflict that followed the 2016 Accord, whose reforms gave low priority to this area,Footnote 34 allowed a guerrilla force that had been present in the region since the 1980s to strengthen their control.Footnote 35 Fundación PARES documents how they soon monopolised the local coca industry, establishing their dominance through a strategy of strict control which included collecting illegal taxes, imposing curfews and restrictions on mobility, issuing and enforcing the carrying of identity cards, recruiting young people, and violently punishing crimes.Footnote 36
Caldono, meanwhile, is known for being the second most-attacked municipality by FARC guerrillas prior to 2016. Home to a large concentration of indigenous Nasa and some small indigenous Misak communities, between 1997 and 2014, it was the target of 248 armed incursions and more than 500 episodes of harassment.Footnote 37 The peace agreement reduced the violence for a period, but FARC demobilisation left a vacuum that other groups, interested in controlling the coca business and exploiting the municipality’s strategic position, were quick to fill. Despite efforts by indigenous cabildos (councils) in the region to replace coca with legal products, Caldono has experienced an increase in illicit crop production in recent years.Footnote 38 This has led to multiple forms of violence by armed groups including the imposition of restrictions on mobility, attacks on social and environmental leaders (including, during our fieldwork, the shooting of a local priest), assassinations of indigenous leaders, harassment of Indigenous Guards, and the recruitment of minors both for coca leaf harvesting and into the ranks of armed groups.Footnote 39
Buenaventura, finally, is a large urban area, albeit with a substantial rural hinterland. 88.7% of its 370,000 inhabitants are of Afro-Pacific descent. Of that population, over 90% lives in the urban zone. Colombia’s main seaport, and one of the most sophisticated container ports in Latin America, actors linked to drug trafficking, land grabbing, legal and illegal mining, and smuggling have converged in the area. Meanwhile, the expansion of the port and a boom in extractive industries have generated waves of forced displacement, accompanied by threats and assassinations. The arrival of the FARC in the mid-1990s, and the violent take over by paramilitary groups in the early 2000s, had serious impacts on the population who experienced regular roadblocks, extortive kidnappings, ‘social cleansing’, theft of cargo trucks, armed attacks on the police, and kidnappings of port workers, trade unionists, and merchants – a systematic approach aimed at producing what Oslender called a ‘geography of terror’.Footnote 40 Youth unemployment made Buenaventura ripe for the recruitment of young people into armed groups, training ‘a whole generation of boys and girls … in the logic of war’.Footnote 41 As paramilitarism transformed into organised criminality in the 2010s, it became the scene of armed confrontations between two powerful gangs that managed to divide the city with several ‘invisible borders’ that continue to govern the lives and movements of its inhabitants. At the time of writing, however, a fragile truce is in place as part of President Petro’s peace talks with organised crime, which has reduced the homicide rate by 80%.
The differences between these three communities in terms of their ethnic make-up (predominantly mestizo, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian, respectively) and their experiences with different forms of insecurity informed their selection as the three partner communities for this project.
Methodology: using PAR to explore concepts and practices of security
PAR promotes research ‘with’ communities rather than ‘in’ or ‘about’ them. It calls for collective and dialogical research processes that revolve around participants’ values, traditions, needs, and aspirations, and prioritise both the co-production of knowledge and the strengthening of community capacities to research their own realities.Footnote 42 In accordance with these principles, this article draws on a participatory process developed with researchers, communities and local organisations over a period of 4 years – far longer than is common for vernacular security research. It involved three stages of methodological engagement which, although in reality closely intertwined, we describe separately to show the development of the participatory processes underpinning our co-produced analysis of vernacular security.
The first stage was establishing a collaborative network of researchers, activists, and organisations to support local communities in the Pacific region through PAR. Amongst other things, this included creating and supporting a semillero (a research ‘seedbed’) made up of 12 young people in Buenaventura. This involved co-producing a curriculum and toolkit to train these community researchers in PAR as well as more traditional research methodologies, which we subsequently used in the other two partner communities.
The second stage was the co-design of a research agenda with researchers, organisations, and community members from Lerma, Caldono, and Buenaventura. In these extensive dialogues, concerns around the re-emergence of armed violence and the reconfiguration of territorial control by illegal armed actors after the 2016 agreement were identified as their research priority, leading us to work with them to co-develop a research project on community-based experiences, strategies, and infrastructures of protection and care. Building on the Buenaventura semillero curriculum and toolkit, young people from each of the three sites (co-authors O.A.H.B., M.I.Q.M., and C.V.R.U. amongst them) were selected and trained to lead PAR work in their respective communities.Footnote 44
The third stage involved those trainees returning to their communities and creating PAR semilleros. In each, a group of 10–15 young people was recruited, in collaboration with local authorities and organisations. Following a learning-by-doing approach, the semilleros engaged in a huge range of activities including conducting in-depth interviews with community members, bringing different groups together to produce and analyse graphic stories and cartographies of threats and risks, organising transect walks (a methodology that indigenous communities have long practised under the name of ‘caminando el territorio’ [walking the territory]), and creating participatory videos that documented their communities’ practices and initiatives of resistance, protection, and care. In addition to this, the semilleros coordinated intra- and intercommunity dialogues which allowed for collective reflection on their perceptions and experiences of (in)security, as well as for mutual sharing of lessons and the challenges they face in protecting themselves.
Through this combination of training, practice, and collective analysis, the semilleros were able to explore historical perspectives, current practices, meanings, and initiatives of security from within the communities themselves, on their own terms, and in close correspondence with their own experiences and concerns. The fact that most of the fieldwork was led by local researchers from the semilleros gave them access to the communities’ everyday life, a level of familiarity that external researchers rarely achieve. Moreover, the use of a variety of research methods enabled them to gather a range of individual and collective voices in different contexts, as well as to observe and document community interactions, which might be difficult to register through more traditional data collection techniques. Regular meetings with external researchers (including co-authors A.A.G., J.M.D.A., J.A.F.L., and S.R.) provided the local researchers with opportunities to share their experiences and learning and to access support and advice. These sessions themselves became an important part of the process, facilitating reflexivity, co-production, and the design of new research questions. Thus, the findings presented in this article are the product of a process of self-analysis by the three communities, albeit one supported by external researchers. It is this experience that leads us to one of this article’s central claims: that vernacular security can be better understood when the communities themselves participate directly in the analysis of what security means and how it is practised.
At the same time, we are not naïve enough to think that this approach escaped the power dynamics that are inevitable in all forms of research – including PAR. Not only were there power dynamics between the outsider members of the team (‘professional’ university-based researchers) and the local researchers, but also between those local researchers (who were known to be collaborating with a university-led research project) and their wider communities. We mitigated these by creating long-term partnerships with widely respected local organisations, building the capacity and confidence of semillero members to challenge other team members, and by facilitating regular open, reflexive discussions amongst the team.
The data that we present in this article are drawn from the many hundreds of hours of interviews, dialogues, and other participatory activities that the semilleros conducted. The analysis of those data was carried out through weekly research team meetings and, as discussed above, required careful consideration of the terminology used by the communities when talking about the issues in question. The literature on vernacular security cautions that discourses on ‘security’ need not necessarily involve or revolve around this term: as Owens puts it, security can be identified ‘even in the absence of explicit security speak’.Footnote 45 Accordingly, although we use the term ‘security’ in this article to connect our analysis with existing literatures, the team’s discussions rarely involved the explicit use of ‘security’ or ‘insecurity’, but rather deployed ideas such as ‘community protection’. In essence, we sought to identify what these communities see as their collective life projects, what they see as threatening to those aims, and what words and concepts they use to describe those ideas.
In the next two sections of the article, we present our findings in relation to the questions ‘How do the three communities conceptualise security?’ and ‘What practices have they adopted in pursuit of (greater) security?’
Conceptualising (in)security: territorio as the referent object
As described above, the residents of Lerma, Caldono, and Buenaventura have all experienced, and continue to experience, multiple forms of insecurity. Participants in the research often, and understandably, expressed deep concerns for the lives and safety of individuals and groups within their communities who are threatened by armed actors. But equally prominent were concerns for the security of their territorios, as captured clearly in the phrase commonly heard in Buenaventura that ‘Territorio is life, and life isn’t possible without territorio’. Despite the significant differences between them, discussions in all three communities consistently revolved around the idea of securing the territorio, a concept usually translated into English as ‘territory’, although this can be misleading. Territorio here is not merely a reference to a particular geographic space, but is relational, emotional, and symbolic, embodying the historical and cultural rootedness that indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and rural communities, in particular, feel for the land they have inhabited, in many cases for hundreds of years.Footnote 46 Territorio relates to life in its multiple manifestations: the human, the land, the ecosystem, identity, spiritual relations to ancestors and nature, and the rights of those who are connected to the place.Footnote 47 What is at stake for these communities is control of the territorio and its future.Footnote 48 Their aim is not merely to remain alive and physically present on the land, but for their territorios to flourish; to be able to live in dignified conditions that allow their communities to achieve their potential.Footnote 49
The insecurity created by conflict and violence thus relates not only to the physical safety of individuals but to threats to territorios in this broad sense. The activities of armed actors have not only caused death and injury, but they have also fragmented the social fabric, eroded bonds of trust and solidarity, and undermined collective identity. This was evident in community discourses in all three sites. Displacement, for example, was understood as a form of insecurity not only because of its violent and forced nature but also because it atomises communities, breaks people’s emotional relationships with their natural environment, and destroys historical forms of occupation and meanings of space. Similarly, the ‘invisible borders’ that afflict life in Buenaventura raise concerns not only about the safety of people crossing them but also about the damage they cause to traditional solidaristic practices such as neighbourhood networks, kinship ties,Footnote 50 religious festivals,Footnote 51 funeral processions, midwifery, and traditional medicine. In Caldono, restrictions imposed by armed actors prevent indigenous communities from accessing sacred sites, breaking their spiritual links to their ancestral territories, and restricting the practice of their rituals.
The same is true of recruitment into armed groups. The insecurities resulting from this do relate to the lives and well-being of children and young people. But recruitment is also interpreted as a threat to the future of the community. People in Lerma worried that the promises of money, power, and prestige that joining an illegal group seems to bring can deter young people from contemplating life projects outside the illegal coca economy. For the people of Buenaventura, the enrolment of impoverished minors into criminal gangs was seen as destroying traditional bonds of solidarity and trust between neighbours and fellow citizens, and even within families: ‘It becomes difficult and sad for families when one son is in one gang and his sibling is in a rival group. Unity just falls apart’, mentioned one young social leader. Amongst the indigenous inhabitants of Caldono, meanwhile, community elders saw youth recruitment as a risk to the community, its traditional authorities, and even its cosmovision – all pillars of indigenous identity and social cohesion. As one local elder put it:
Guerrilla and illegal groups are not only a threat but also a temptation for our young people. We recognise that many young people do not join these groups by force, but are attracted by the pay, the weapons, and the motorbikes they are offered. The first thing they lose when they become involved in violence is their indigenous identity and the desire to vivir bien [live well]; that is, to care for life, for the community, for nature, for the territorio.Footnote 52
This conception of territorio in all its social and ecological dimensions – including community relations, situatedness in a particular place or environment, and established ways of life – as the referent object of security is deeply embedded in the Pacific region’s traditional indigenous and Afro-Colombian cultures and histories. At the same time, it has echoes of concepts identified through vernacular security research in other settings, including velomanpò in Madagascar,Footnote 53 and the desire of communities in Uganda to secure the relationships of individuals and communities with spiritual forces.Footnote 54 These conceptual connections both endorse the efforts of vernacular security studies to move beyond dominant Western-centric understandings of what the referent object of security might be and highlight the need to understand the particularities of how (in)security is understood in particular times and places, and how it translates into particular locally relevant forms of security practice. As we discuss further below, participatory approaches can help avoid the unwitting imposition of Western assumptions and provide opportunities to more fully understand communities’ own perspectives on what needs to be protected.
Vernacular security practices: collective defence of the territorio
The state, whose presence in these areas has historically been weak, does not often appear in the discourse of these communities as a provider of security. It is generally seen as distant, disconnected from local realities, and incapable of, or unwilling to, protect their rights. State security forces are even perceived as an additional risk factor, bringing the threat of more armed violence in which community members can be the targets, or get caught in the crossfire.Footnote 55 Communities have thus developed their own approaches to protecting their territorios. In this section, we set out three common approaches that recurred in the participatory work across all three communities: (i) individual and collective adaptive strategies; (ii) negotiations with armed actors; and (iii) the adoption of collective strategies to confront and transform insecurity. Importantly, these collective strategies build on locally resonant traditions of community organising. Reflecting this, as we discuss at the end of this section, the indigenous concept of minga has become central to the way in which many people in the region conceptualise and speak about such initiatives of collective defence of their territorios.
Adaptation
The inhabitants of Lerma, Caldono, and Buenaventura have, in their different ways, demonstrated a great capacity to adapt to their violent contexts. In Caldono, for example, people living in the urban centre learned to protect themselves from armed harassment by confining themselves to their homes and avoiding public spaces as much as possible. ‘Before, you left school at two o’clock and went straight home because you didn’t know when the bomb was going to go off, so you had to lock yourself in […] People didn’t even go out in the afternoons to eat an ice cream’, recalled one young girl. In other cases, families had sent their children to live with relatives in the larger cities in the region to prevent them from being recruited by illegal actors, or tried not to pass through particular areas to avoid contact with armed groups.
The inhabitants of Lerma sought to protect themselves by abiding by the rules of the armed actor, accepting impositions such as ‘carnetización’, curfews, or strict timetables for entering and leaving the territory – not only to avoid repercussions but, in some cases, because they saw these as having some value in delivering social order.Footnote 56 In Buenaventura, meanwhile, people in areas controlled by criminal gangs avoid going out on the streets during certain hours or frequenting potentially dangerous places. ‘I try not to leave home after 5pm, and when I walk, I try not to draw attention to myself’, mentioned a young woman in a focus group. They also generally choose to move within the ‘invisible borders’ imposed by criminal gangs. Another woman mentioned that, when visiting a different neighbourhood that entails crossing those borders is necessary, people commonly request the company of a known local who ‘grants them access’ and chaperones them to their destination.
People have also designed their own security protocols, for example, the use of WhatsApp groups to share up-to-the-minute information to enable safer movement through areas affected by violence. Their self-protection measures sometimes include adopting the same practices that are used by the armed groups that control the territory, for example, being suspicious of neighbours, abiding by a code of silence, and communicating in codes with friends and family to avoid saying things that could put them at risk. As one social leader in Buenaventura explained, people would not say ‘there is a confrontation between rival gangs right now’. Instead, they would simply say ‘the boys are partying’. Others agreed that referring to gangs as ‘the boys’, ‘those guys’, or ‘you know who’ is a common way of ‘staying out of trouble’. In short, people are in a constant state of alert; ‘living as if one did not live on one’s own land’.Footnote 57
Negotiation
Beyond simply adapting to their violent environments, the inhabitants of the three territorios have also chosen to challenge armed actors and, in some cases, have succeeded in negotiating more-or-less stable agreements with them.
In Lerma, the community has established agreements with the armed group to mitigate violence and social conflict, including negotiating regulations on alcohol consumption and the opening hours of local bars. Such arrangements have usually emerged from community decision-making processes and are often managed by civic organisations such as community action boards. Through such collective processes, the community, for better or worse, has managed to turn the conditions of the authoritarian social order imposed by the armed actor ‘in their favour’. The fact that in recent years there has been no significant change in the dominant illegal group in their area has given these negotiations and agreements a certain degree of stability and predictability.
The inhabitants of Caldono have also found ways to reach agreements with the locally dominant armed actors. Traditional ethnic authorities and the Indigenous Guard have played important roles in this, including negotiating and maintaining boundaries for the cultivation of illicit crops to keep them at a ‘safe’ distance from more populated areas. The Indigenous Guard has also played (and continues to play) an essential part in the negotiation of demilitarised zones or corridors and the release of hostages.Footnote 58 These arrangements, however, have lost strength in recent years due to the arrival of new illegal actors unwilling to negotiate with the inhabitants and reluctant to respect previous agreements.Footnote 59 Indeed, these changes have turned indigenous authorities and Guards into targets. In 2023 alone, at least 60 leaders were killed, and in the first 23 days of 2024, 8 more were killed.
Finally, in Buenaventura, civil society initiatives have been developed over the last decade to challenge the armed actors and achieve the cessation, or at least temporary interruption, of violence, allowing the reclamation of previously ‘vetoed’ public spaces. For example, the fútbol por la paz initiative, organised by an inter-institutional committee, facilitates young people’s use of football pitches located in areas previously off-limits to the majority. Urban spaces have also been recovered for memorialisation and cultural activities. A recent initiative enabled the reopening of farmers’ markets free of extortion by criminal gangs, the result of a compromise between the gangs and the city’s small traders.Footnote 60 However, as in Caldono, the reconfiguration of armed groups has hindered the scope and sustainability of these negotiations. Threats to social leaders, activists and managers of humanitarian spaces, coupled with hypervigilance and the co-optation of meeting places by violent actors, undermine the results and impact of such efforts.Footnote 61
Collective action
Beyond the protection resulting from adaptation or negotiation with violent actors, there are strategies in all three communities that seek to defend their territorios through the transformation of their realities, the creation of safe spaces, and the re-establishment of social and ecological bonds. Compared to the adaptation and negotiation practices described above, these initiatives represent a stronger form of resistance that aims to move towards the creation of conditions designed by and for the communities themselves. Thus they include not only engagement with, or avoidance of, armed actors but a wide range of collective practices including popular culture and art, community pedagogy, documenting and sharing local and ancestral knowledge, and performing traditional social practices. All of these can be understood not as something separate from communities’ security practices, but as activities intended to further autonomous organisation and generate positive social change on their own terms. It is here that the participatory approach was particularly valuable in enabling us to understand these initiatives as vernacular security practices, an insight which may well have been missed by a shorter-term engagement with the communities or by the use of more traditional and narrowly focused research methods, such as interviews and focus groups, which are inevitably limited by the things that researchers think to ask.
Lerma offers two notable examples of strategies of protection through social transformation, both of which were brought up repeatedly by participants. The first is the Alejandro Gómez Muñoz Agricultural School, the first secondary school in the village. Founded in 1988, the school was financed, built, and managed by the community itself, which saw it as a way to confront and transform, in the long term, the serious problem of violence it was suffering at that time. Its aim, as some of its graduates recalled, was to ‘change the mentality of young people’ and to ‘form new generations with other values and principles’, distancing them from weapons and offering them alternatives to the coca economy. To this end, the school designed a curriculum centred on popular music, the culture of peace, and traditional productive projects. These efforts paid off. ‘It was an institution that trained people for life, because here life had no value’, noted one of its former students. Another described it as ‘the salvation of the new generations’. Lermeños often attribute to the school a central role in the transformation of Lerma into a safer place and see it as a determining factor in the notable decrease in violence that they experienced during much of the 1990s. The second example from Lerma is the agro-environmental school El Arraigo (Rootedness), founded in 2006 by a small group of farming families, whose purpose is to popularise and educate people on alternative and ancestral uses of coca leaf, redefining it as a traditional, legal crop and breaking the dependence of local coca growers on illicit economies.Footnote 62 El Arraigo’s projects include the production and commercialisation of coca-based fertilisers, ointments, biscuits, cakes, and flour through which it offers options for local farmers to work outside the violent logic of drug production and trafficking. Its aims are thus not only about reclaiming legal forms of production but also about the livelihoods and future prospects of the people of Lerma. Several of its members noted that belonging to El Arraigo has provided them ‘peace of mind in the territorio’, has earned them visibility and recognition as local leaders, and has freed them from pressures and threats from the armed actors.
Caldono offers several examples of collective vernacular security practices promoted by youth organisations, combining political activism and the assertion of indigenous cultural identity with the transformation of spaces taken away by the conflict. One example is ‘Pinta Caldono’, a programme that calls on community members to replace the graffiti and murals of armed groups with new ones representing their ethnic identity. Another is the ‘community territorial walks’, which seek to recover the right to free movement through the territory and to retake sacred spaces that were previously off-limits. However, perhaps the most notable example is the ‘Fridays in the Park’ initiative. These events began in 2020, created by a group of young people who wanted to reclaim the space and revitalise public life in the municipality. Years of violence and fear had turned it into a ‘ghost town’, in the words of a local youth leader. They invited people to participate in open-air activities such as live music and dancing, promoted and financed by local youth organisations. In addition, they sought to create a space for discussion and reflection on the impacts of the illegal coca economy on the community. The aim was to ‘make visible what was really happening with young people’, recalls one of its promoters. ‘Many were leaving to scratch [pick coca leaf]. And every Friday or Saturday there were one or two young people dead […]. It wasn’t right that every weekend a young person arrived in a coffin’. Currently, the fortnightly ‘Fridays’ bring together more than 300 people and have spread to several villages in the region, attracting an increasing number of young people who are committed to art and culture as alternatives to the coca economy. Even though they have, on occasion, been the target of threats and intimidation, the organisers feel protected by the power of large numbers. It is clear to both sides that inhabiting the streets en masse is a way of recovering them as safe spaces. ‘[The armed actor] would not dare open fire on so many people. It would be a massacre’, concluded one of the organisers.
Buenaventura similarly offers numerous examples of collective vernacular security practices. There is a long tradition of social organisation and mobilisation in the city, with a strong emphasis on building ‘alternative languages of resistance’ through art and culture, such as the landmark Marcando Territorio, a massive hip-hop gig staged amid paramilitary violence in 2010, and the community-led play Tocando la Marea, an act of collective memory.Footnote 63 The contemporary initiatives that we engaged with through our participatory work were often focused on making the social consequences of conflict visible, working for victims’ rights, and rebuilding social links fractured by insecurity. Many were led by local women and mothers. These include creating spaces for public deliberation on issues affecting the territorio, as well as ‘community pots’ during which food is shared alongside an event such as an assembly or demonstration, and recreational activities to reclaim public space and re-establish bonds of trust between neighbours. Residents have also come together to create organisations to search for missing persons and support memory processes, in the hope of preventing the repetition of victimising events. Dozens of social, political, artistic, sporting, and cultural organisations in the city work towards exposing young people to life options other than those offered by criminal gangs. Training initiatives in music, dance, photography and street art (including rap, hip-hop and graffiti) seek to rescue minors from involvement in violence, while at the same time aiming to preserve memory, reappropriate public space, and preserve traditional cultural practices.Footnote 64 People involved in these initiatives often said that they feel less exposed than if they engaged in resistance to armed gangs through other means. Explaining why they create and act collectively, they said that it was to protect the lives of artists and activists.
Minga and juntanza
A key concept for understanding the vernacular security practices discussed in this section is minga, which is usually taken to mean ‘coming together’ and resonates with indigenous practices of mutual aid such as convite or brazo partido, traditionally used for collective housing or agricultural work. Reflecting on the relevance of minga for indigenous communities, a local leader in Caldono pointed out that ‘Minga is a process’. It encapsulates something important to communities in relation to territorio: people’s determination to stay, think, and act together. Although this has grown out of communities’ attempts to protect themselves and their territorios from violence, it is also imbued with the existential need to respond to questions of identity, representing a commitment to the protection of the community both as a relational network and as an (indigenous/Afro) ethnic group. What minga offers, therefore, is both a connection with identity and heritage and a practical modality of collective security practice.
During the participatory activities, we continually encountered the use of minga in calls for social mobilisation. At the same time, we also heard concerns from some that the concept had been co-opted and had strayed too far from its original, true meaning. One focus of this unease was the use of the term to describe the nationwide protests in 2021 against the tax reforms pursued by Duque’s administration. These protests in many cases turned violent, leading to concerns amongst indigenous communities in particular that minga had been distorted by other movements. This encouraged the semillero in Caldono to explore, through a participatory video, the true meaning of minga for their own community, producing a film that has been screened in two international festivals and multistakeholder events on Unarmed Civilian Protection.Footnote 65
In recent years, a concept derived from minga has become increasingly prominent: juntanza. While minga conveys a sense of togetherness within a group or community, juntanza expresses a shared purpose and solidarity between different groups or institutions – a kind of ‘minga of organisations’. In Buenaventura, where juntanza is most prominent, one local leader pointed out that the coming together of organisations allows the community to collectively ensure the security of all, allowing ‘organisations to be more visible than individuals’. ‘Every communiqué, every action that is taken in the territorio is done in the name of and through various committees’, she explained. Together and in a coordinated manner, these civic and social networks guarantee anonymity when making complaints, maintain early warning systems for communities about potential acts of violence, and help manage protection measures for individuals at risk. Inter-organisational work also facilitates the maintenance of safe spaces, free from armed actors, for collective meetings and public dialogue. ‘Coming together’, then, empowers and supports the efforts of the community and its leaders to protect life, recovers the practices and spaces of being together, and, in general, reclaims their right to collectively inhabit their territorio outside the logics of armed control.
Vernacular security in the Pacific South-West: analysis of findings
In this section, we return to reflect further on the questions that we established in the ‘Introduction’ section – ‘How do communities in this region understand (in)security?’ and ‘What are the strategies and practices they implement in pursuit of (greater) security?’ – before moving on, in the ‘Conclusion’ section, to discuss the contributions of this article to the wider vernacular security research agenda.
Conceptualising (in)security: care, protection, and resistance
It is abundantly evident that the ways in which all three communities conceptualise (in)security are shaped by cultural traditions and practices, such as Afro-Pacific conceptions of territorio, indigenous practices of communal governance and minga, and mestizo traditions of solidarity. However, their conceptualisations are also heavily influenced by each community’s specific experiences of both direct and structural violence during decades of armed conflict, as well as their struggles for cultural and territorial rights against multiple actors: the state, paramilitary and guerrilla groups, and criminal organisations.
In all three cases, these populations conceptualise security as the ‘condition of feeling safe’Footnote 66 but in a way that is different from (and even goes against the grain of) how the state and its institutions usually understand and seek to provide ‘security’. Their vernacular conceptualisations refuse the reduction of security to ‘law and order’ or ‘public safety’ and reject the assumption that armed state presence is a way of guaranteeing safe spaces. Such versions of ‘security’, in fact, usually arouse mistrust amongst members of these communities.
At the same time, even in this relatively defined geographical region, security does not have a fixed or univocal meaning. Rather, we found subtle differences in how each community thought about security and what they saw as the threats to it. Armed violence and social conflict undoubtedly represent threats in all three cases, but they are far from being the only sources of insecurity. In Lerma, security tends to be defined in terms of the long-standing concern to find alternative livelihoods to those offered by the illegal coca trade, not only as a way of exiting from violence but as a reassertion of traditional cultural practices. In Caldono, security is both about protecting the lives and futures of children and young people and about safeguarding the integrity of the indigenous community from dynamics that make it difficult to work together and maintain collective identity and spiritual relations. In Buenaventura, security is again linked to the defence of life, but also – indeed mainly – to concerns about the conflict’s damaging impacts on traditional Afro-Colombian ways of being in society, the sustainability of social ties, and the ability to inhabit the territorio with dignity.
Directly or indirectly, these different forms of insecurity threaten communities on at least three interrelated levels: (i) individuals who live in the communities – in particular young people and those who exercise leadership roles; (ii) the social fabric and existence of the community as a relational network; and (iii) the right to remain, live with dignity, and to imagine a flourishing future in the territorio. In other words, what is seen as being under threat is future-oriented: not only physical safety in the present but the health and vitality of social bonds and community ties, as well as the long-term sustainability of traditional forms and spaces of sociability. Also at stake are the existence and reproduction of collective identities, permanence in the territorios, as well as the social, economic, and cultural practices that give individual and social life meaning. Security, then, is a matter of collective care, protecting the community as a social whole, and resisting the atomisation and fragmentation that conflict has brought. Accordingly, in all three communities, we found notions of care, protection, and resistance – all of which evoke a sense of agency and autonomy for communities themselves – to be regular features of what vernacular security scholars (but, as discussed above, not the communities themselves) might term ‘security discourses’.
Practising security: accommodation, resistance, and minga
These vernacular conceptualisations of security have profound implications for individual and collective security practices, many of which fall outside what a Western, liberal, state-based view might recognise as ‘security practices’.
To begin with the most ‘traditional’ forms of security practice, we found a variety of efforts to accommodate the presence of armed actors in an attempt to mitigate the impacts of violence on their communities. In Caldono, people previously exhibited passive resistance, refusing to cooperate with armed groups or surrender to their intimidation or threats. That changed when the FARC withdrew and new armed actors emerged. These groups targeted any form of resistance and defiance, posing an even greater threat to safety and community life. In Buenaventura, where urban conflict involves a range of competing armed actors and invisible frontiers are constantly changing, people’s capacity to accommodate is constantly being tested. Over the past years, gangs have imposed curfews, leaving tens of thousands of people confined to their homes for days or even weeks without much opportunity to dispute these restrictions, merely having to adapt their lives to them.
Yet, as shown in the previous section, many of the strategies of resistance that have emerged do seek to challenge the social impacts of armed groups, even if they do so without direct confrontation. This can be seen, for example, in the efforts to recover public space in Caldono and Buenaventura, and in the educational, artistic, and training initiatives in all three communities that seek to provide young people with alternative paths to joining an armed group and/or to provide safe spaces for community members to be together and to develop individually and collectively. Resistance can be seen in community mobilisation to rescue children forcibly recruited by illegal groups, collective protection of activists against individual threats, and ‘mingas of solidarity’, where the community comes together to demonstrate, to support a group, or to address a common need. It can also be seen in longer-term initiatives such as the creation of schools in Lerma, and similar initiatives elsewhere, that are created and sustained by communities and seek to make possible alternative livelihood projects to those offered by armed groups and/or the coca economy, and thereby to prevent the reproduction of those phenomena that have fuelled violence and social fragmentation. Such strategies, which can certainly be interpreted as security practices, aim to mitigate and transform the consequences of armed actors’ domination for individual and collective life projects. Protection, in such cases, is provided not directly ‘against’ violent actors but in response to what is imposed by them.
Despite the multiplicity and multifaceted nature of these initiatives, they share common characteristics. In line with the vernacular conceptualisations of security that predominate in the region, they promote ways of living together, and with dignity, in the territorio, with time horizons far into the future. They are also fundamentally collaborative – strategies of protection, care and resistance deployed from, by, and for the collective. The vernacular security strategies studied here are based on (and find their meaning in) the protective and empowering effects of being, acting and feeling together. This is where the concepts of minga and juntanza converge: faced with a series of insecurities that affect the social fabric, damage social bonds and threaten traditional forms of being together, individual inhabitants and organisations in the three communities seek to protect themselves by appealing precisely to the power of their social bonds. Their vernacular security strategies function through common effort and collective work, aiming not only at physical protection in the present but also at reclaiming and repairing practices and spaces of sociability that link their collective pasts to their futures.
‘Coming together’ as a form of protection, however, has its limits. Our aim here is not to romanticise the responses of these communities to insecurity. Indeed, they are often fraught as a result of internal divisions and external pressures. In Buenaventura, and to a certain extent in Caldono, the fact that the armed actors are from the same community makes it difficult for individuals and families to get involved in collective strategies of resistance, hindering the construction and maintenance of safe spaces, discouraging public denunciations, and impeding the restitution of bonds of solidarity and trust. One local leader in Buenaventura noted that in meeting spaces it is possible to talk, but not everyone does so in complete confidence. In Caldono, togetherness has not prevented the leaders of Fridays in the Park from being threatened, and armed confrontations have at times limited the continuity of these events. Yet, although the threats, risks, and conditions of insecurity continue (and even intensify at times), the inhabitants and organisations of Lerma, Caldono, and Buenaventura continue to deploy their vernacular security strategies, persisting in their efforts to protect both the lives of individuals and the territorio as a socio-ecological construct.
Conclusion
It is notable, and in some ways surprising, that vernacular security studies has so far engaged only to a limited extent with Latin America, and scarcely at all with Colombia. For us, this is significant not simply because Colombia offers an opportunity to add additional empirical examples of vernacular security but because it enables us to identify points of connection with other literatures. This includes those which have drawn on Latin American concepts – perhaps most notably buen vivir, which has achieved prominence amongst critical scholarship in the Global North – in an attempt to move away from Western-centrism and incorporate ontologies and epistemologies drawn from indigenous and Afro-descendant movements in Latin America. There are clear conceptual links between buen vivir’s broad focus on living well and the conceptualisations of security that we have covered in this article – for example, the idea of ‘living with dignity’. Yet we have also shown the ways in which other concepts that are central to indigenous, Afro-Colombian and mestizo communities in the Pacific South-West are similarly implicated in thinking about security – including territorio and minga. We certainly do not claim that these concepts are unique to the Pacific region of Colombia. Similar notions of territorio are present across Latin America, as are ideas close to minga. The vernacular security literature also reveals strong echoes of the ways in which these communities conceptualise security in a wide range of other places around the world. Yet it is important for scholars of security to fully understand the nuanced ways in which locally resonant conceptualisations of security fundamentally shape community-level security practices. In these cases, and likely in other places around the world too, these practices are strongly rooted in local cultures and traditions and are not simply transferable between different settings.
Research that merely assumes the universality of a Western-centric concept of security would not even recognise many of the things that these communities are doing to protect themselves and the future of their territorios as security practices. The same misalignment is true in relation to security policy responses. Frequently we found that government initiatives – especially those of a military character – designed to provide ‘security’ to these communities have actually run counter to their own visions of security. What the people of Buenaventura, Caldono, and Lerma see as the most important contributions to the protection of their territorios, indeed, more often relates to bottom-up visions of community development: support for productive and educational initiatives that can enable people (especially young people) to imagine their future in the territorio, respect for traditional/indigenous forms of governance and spiritual practice, and spaces and practices of ‘being together’ that enable the (re)construction of social bonds.
It is here that the value-added of PAR comes to the fore as both an approach to researching vernacular security and a way of supporting and sustaining vernacular security practices. The central place of ideas such as territorio and minga in the vernacular concepts and practices of security in the region would likely not have emerged if we had limited ourselves to more traditional methods such as interviews or focus groups, in which participants’ answers are inevitably shaped by the questions that outside researchers ask.Footnote 67 Neither would we necessarily have recognised many everyday community practices as ‘security practices’. The fact that we were able to have a long-term engagement with the three communities, centre locally hired researchers who acted as a ‘bridge’ between the community participants and those of us who were ‘outsiders’, and provide training to enable the semillero participants to engage in ‘self-research’ was crucial to opening up opportunities for working together to more deeply understand communities’ own visions of security. Amongst many other things, this approach enabled participants to challenge those of us who are ‘outsiders’ on our inadvertent overriding of conceptualisations that resonated locally, to challenge others where they felt the true meaning of concepts was being distorted or co-opted, and to surface for themselves the connections between traditional practices and future-oriented efforts of resistance, protection and care. This reinforced the importance of building concepts ‘from the ground-up’, showing the possibilities of a PAR approach for the wider vernacular security studies project, crucially involving those who are themselves affected by insecurity in the research process.
At the same time, the PAR activities were not just windows onto vernacular security practices, but contributions to them. As was described above, the creation, training, and support for semilleros in all three communities not only built local ‘research capacity’ but created cohorts of young people interested in exploring their own communities’ perspectives and practices, learning about their collective histories, and becoming part of shaping the future – including engaging in forms of community leadership. The intra-community spaces of dialogue they created opened up opportunities for community members to reflect on and debate their situations and the community’s responses to them. The outputs that they produced – such as the Caldono semillero’s video on the true meaning of minga – also represented shared resources for building collective understanding and identity. As Orlando Fals Borda, the Colombian sociologist who was so central to the development of PAR, argued, when communities participate in research they do so not to fill libraries with new works but to coproduce action-oriented knowledge that contributes to advancing their own struggles.Footnote 68 The cases we have analysed here have provided us with valuable insights into the different ways in which PAR can support efforts to defend communities’ lives and territorio. Through this, we have together learned more about an often-neglected element of participatory epistemology that directly connects to these communities’ sense of protection and care: its methodological-political dimension. In other words, this refers to PAR’s ability to reaffirm the desire and strengthen the capacity of groups and communities to live, act, and celebrate together.
Video Abstract
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526102149.
Acknowledgements
We are extremely grateful to all the inhabitants of Buenaventura, Caldono, and Lerma who engaged with this research, directly or indirectly. Our particular thanks go to the members of the three semilleros who continue to work in their communities to document and support local perspectives, needs, and initiatives. We express our gratitude to Corporación Memoria y Paz (CORMEPAZ) and Minga de la Memoria in Buenaventura; Central Cooperativa Indígena del Cauca (CENCOIC) in Popayán; Asociación de Pequeños Productores La Esperanza (ASPROLE) in Caldono; and Escuela Agroambiental El Arraigo in Lerma. We are also grateful to Joanna Tidy, Jonna Nyman, Lee Jarvis, and the reviewers for RIS, who provided valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.
Funding statement
This article draws on participatory research conducted through three externally funded projects: ‘Improbable Dialogues: Participatory Research as a Strategy for Reconciliation’, funded by the ESRC (Ref. ES/R01096X/1) and Minciencias (Ref. CT 276-2018); ‘Community strategies for Unarmed Civilian Protection in South-West Colombia: local experiences and lessons learned’, funded by the AHRC Creating Safer Space Network (Ref. AH/T008024/1); and the follow-on project ‘Systematization of indigenous methodologies for Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP)’, funded by the AHRC Creating Safer Space Network (Ref. 190433). Additional financial support was provided by the Higher Education Impact Fund (Ref. 178993) and the Research England International Science Partnership Fund (Ref. 185518) via the University of Sheffield.
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