The intersectional politics of antagonism in peacebuilding
The Colombian peace process signed in 2016 has shown that even when peace agreements include comprehensive measures to tackle structural inequalities seen as the root causes of the conflict, they may still be rejected by the very societal groups meant to benefit from such transformative provisions. IPAP addresses this dilemma by exploring how peacebuilding institutions can implement a peace agreement that is contested and work to include groups who have engaged in antagonistic actions against the peace accord. The research counters a tendency in the literature to treat resistance against peacebuilding as deviance or abnormality or as a mere manifestation of political and economic elites’ fear of losing power, by including the intersectional politics which explains these groups’ undermining or rejection of the peace process. The objectives of IPAP are: 1) to identify the fabric of antagonistic forces to peace and map their relations with political actors; 2) to examine the intersectional systems of power differentials through which antagonistic subject positions emerge and analyse how they transform into agonistic, i.e. constructively conflictive, relations with the work of peacebuilding institutions; 3) to explore possibilities for peacebuilding institutions to gain sustained legitimacy among the local population; 4) to identify ways in which peace institutions might engage with difference and create spaces where adversaries can engage in agonistic dialogue. To achieve these objectives, IPAP uses a feminist intersectional lens to peacebuilding, and an ethnographic fieldwork approach, to empirically study Colombia as a rich case of antagonism to peacebuilding. The innovative approach of IPAP consists in advancing the notion of antagonistic subject positions to peace to identify the intersecting relations of power through which groups of population who resist peacebuilding processes are organized and how they can commit to agonistic dialogue.