Colombia’s Long Road Towards Peace – Implications for Environment and Human Rights Defenders

Human rights defenders, social leaders and environmental and indigenous activists fight for political, cultural, social, economic and environmental rights and often face intimidation and violence as a consequence. We analyze how the implementation of the peace agreement signed in 2016 between the government of Colombia and the FARC-EP guerrilla group affects Environment and Human Rights Defenders (EHRD) in Colombia. Despite the expectation of a more peaceful future following the peace agreement, EHRD face increased intimidation and violence, making Colombia the most dangerous country for EHRD. We seek to understand this counter-intuitive development through Fraser’s theory of social justice that stresses the need for integrated measures to address economic, political and cultural injustices in parallel. The focus on correcting cultural misrecognition and political underrepresentation of vulnerable groups may, paradoxically, mask or even facilitate further injustices, if that focus is not matched by sufficient efforts to address economic maldistribution. The fate of EHRD since the peace agreement reflects such an imbalance in justice priorities, undermining lasting and sustainable peace. Drawing on data from secondary sources, ethnographic interviews, and an analysis of policies and laws, we find that new forms of maldistribution have emerged and solidified in Colombia, including land grabbing, displacement of local populations, resource extraction and illicit economies, which are strongly related to the growing influx of drug cartels. Despite the increasing advocacy of international organizations and regional legal agreements to protect EHRD, they are caught in precarious roles between cultural recognition and political and economic abandonment by state institutions and are affected by the global trade in illicit products, and the demand for land for agricultural products and minerals. This finding, we argue, warrants more research into the imbalance of addressing local and global injustices during peace processes and its fatal implications for EHRD in Colombia and globally.