Seizing a window of opportunity: community autonomy and influence in the 2016 Colombian peace process

My dissertation research seeks to understand how rural grassroots movements shape the local impacts of a peace deal. Specifically, I ask: What explains variation in community autonomy and influence in local peace implementation? A peace process creates a fragile, volatile political context that poses both threats and opportunities for rural communities impacted by conflict. I hypothesize that variation in the autonomy and influence of communities in a peace process can be explained by their relative levels of ‘regional integration’, defined as the degree of representative functions and legal authority that individual communities delegate to regional organizations. I focus on rural Afro-Colombian movements in the Pacific region of Colombia in the five year period following the signing of the 2016 Colombian peace agreement. I develop controlled comparisons in two regions of the department of Chocó, Atrato and Baudó. In each comparison, I assess the capacity of groups of communities to maintain their autonomy in the face of post-conflict insecurity created by FARC demobilization, and to advance their collective development interests in the participatory peacebuilding program PDET (Territorially-Focused Development Program). Overall, my empirical data suggest that the relative advantages of regional integration – organizational capacity, regional cohesion, external legitimacy – increase the ability of communities to shape local peace outcomes, although these advantages are mitigated to a degree by the tradeoffs of integration, namely democratic deficits and a lack of local independence.