School of Public Service

Scholars have shown how memory is an embodied and spatial practice that potentially generates more just possible futures, and that peace is a politicized and contextually speci c process, but how does place-based memory performance actually contribute to social movements’ construction of peace? This article explores massacre commemoration pilgrimages and stones painted with victims’ names in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, a group of small- scale farmers living in the war-torn region of Urabá, Colombia. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in Colombia from 2011 to 2014, including participant observation and 49 interviews, I explore the relationship between these spatially embodied practices and the community’s resistance to forced displacement and peace-building project. I argue that these forms of memorialization cultivate key elements for an autonomist ‘other politics’, including solidarity with allies; mobilizing bodies across space to defend life and land; and ongoing re ection, education and strategic planning that strengthen community cohesion and organization. Integrating scholarship on memory performance, peace geographies, and social movements, I illustrate how the San José de Apartadó Peace Community’s massacre commemorations and stones reject vindictive violence and instead build an alternative, transformative and emancipatory politics through internal and external solidarity.

Este artículo de investigación problematiza el concepto de paz a partir de su concepción y práctica en la Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó, Colombia. Se basa en 16 meses de investigación etnográfica en Colombia entre 2011 y 2016, incluyendo 49 entrevistas con miembros de la Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó y otras organizaciones. Al definir y crear la paz, como al negarse a colaborar con los grupos armados y la construcción de comunidad a través del trabajo colectivo esta experiencia campesina encarna una perspectiva activa y empoderada de la paz en lugar de depender
de lo que deberían hacer el Estado y los grupos armados. En conversación con los nuevos subcampos de estudios de paz en geografía, y las investigaciones sobre Trans-rational peace, se aboga por una conceptualización de paz como la construcción de vida digna en las redes de solidaridad de las comunidades en resistencia que contrarresta las violencias interseccionales de la crisis ecológica de la modernidad.

Scholars are increasingly re-theorizing territory beyond the nation-state given Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups’ demands for ‘territory’ as they confront land grabbing in Latin America. Yet alternative territorialities are not limited to such ethnic groups. Based on 16 months of ethnographic research between 2011 and 2016, I explore the relational territoriality produced by a peasant ‘peace community’ in San José de Apartadó, Colombia. By tracing the collective political subject produced by the Peace Community’s active production of peace through a set of spatial practices, places and values, which include massacre commemorations, food sovereignty initiatives and Indigenous–peasant solidarity networks, this contribution presents a conceptual framework for analyzing diverse territorial formations.

The emerging peace geographies subfield has made significant contributions to peace research by showing how peace is a contested spatial process and political discourse. This article integrates peace geographies with the until now ignored trans-rational 'many peaces' framework's exploration of an even wider range of peace imaginaries. Yet some forms exacerbate rather than provide alternatives to intersectional violences pervasive in today's world. I argue for a normative framework to evaluate the 'plurality of the peaces' illuminated by these subfields, proposing 'radical trans-relational peace' – ecological dignity and solidarity through trans-community networks – as a geographically and politically situated conception to analyze the 'many peaces'.

Despite the institution of multicultural policies and pluriethnic governments across Latin America, racist violence against Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups persists. Yet the racial facets of violence against non-ethnic campesinos remain unexplored. Integrating scholarship on race as a global structure and Latin American racial formations, I offer an account of racialization in Colombia. This article analyzes the racial dynamics of resistance to extractivism in Colombia’s Campesino University, uniting Indigenous and campesino groups like the San José de Apartadó Peace Community. While the dominant race lexicon separates “campesinos” like San José’s peasants from “Indigenous” and “Black” groups, I argue that the identifier campesino mestizo hides how San José’s farmers were “de- indigenized” yet remain racialized as the less-than-human “Indigenous savage”. If racialization works to dominate but also divide the subaltern, then Campesino University participants’ cross-ethnic solidarity network against what they affirm is a shared experience of racist violence both unveils and counters racism.

El libro que hoy se pone a disposición de los lectores de la academia y de las comunidades es un producto colectivo, resultado de investigaciones situadas en dos territorios (localidad de Engativá en Bogotá y sur del departamento de Bolívar) y realizadas por un equipo de trabajo del grupo de investigación Ciudadanía, Paz y Desarrollo de la Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios (uniminuto) que tuvieron como objetivo avanzar en la comprensión de las conexiones entre lo común y los bienes comunes, por un lado, y la paz por el otro.

Es frecuente concebir la consecución de la paz como resultado de operaciones militares o negociaciones adelantadas por el Estado. No obstante, los procesos que llevan a alcanzar la paz también tienen lugar en organizaciones de base, entre las cuales existen comunidades que imaginan y configuran la paz por sus propios medios. La Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó, una organización campesina, no esperó a que un acuerdo de paz fuera producido por la acción de las altas esferas del poder. En contraste, sus miembros se han resistido activamente al desplazamiento forzado y a la coerción que sobre ellos han querido ejercer guerrilleros, Ejército Nacional y paramilitares durante dos décadas en Urabá, una región devastada por la guerra en Colombia. A partir de una etnografía sustentada en métodos de investigación-acción, efectuada a lo largo de doce años, Christopher Courtheyn arroja luz sobre la interpretación que los miembros de la Comunidad dan a la paz y sobre sus prácticas territoriales para afrontar los constantes desplazamientos y masacres que han padecido. La paz de los campesinos de San José, sustentada en la autonomía comunitaria, constituye una alternativa a formas tradicionales de política practicada mediante la representación electoral y la lucha armada. Courtheyn explora el significado de la paz y el territorio, al tiempo que interroga el papel de la raza en la guerra colombiana y la relación entre memoria y paz. En medio de la violencia generalizada que caracteriza a la crisis global actual, Comunidad de Paz ilustra cómo San José ha roto con lógicas del colonialismo y del capitalismo mediante la construcción de solidaridad política y paz comunitaria.

Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations. Yet it also happens at the grassroots level, where communities envision and create peace on their own. The San José de Apartadó Peace Community of small-scale farmers has not waited for a top-down peace treaty. Instead, they have actively resisted forced displacement and co-optation by guerrillas, army soldiers, and paramilitaries for two decades in Colombia’s war-torn Urabá region. Based on ethnographic action research over a twelve-year period, Christopher Courtheyn illuminates the community’s understandings of peace and territorial practices against ongoing assassinations and displacement. San José’s peace through autonomy reflects an alternative to traditional modes of politics practiced through electoral representation and armed struggle. Courtheyn explores the meaning of peace and territory, while also interrogating the role of race in Colombia’s war and the relationship between memory and peace. Amid the widespread violence of today’s global crisis, Community of Peace illustrates San José’s rupture from the logics of colonialism and capitalism through the construction of political solidarity and communal peace.

This article presents a decolonial feminist geopolitics of Venezuelan migration to Colombia, with Venezuelans fleeing the socialist Bolivarian Revolution and then facing discrimination and violence upon settling in capitalist Colombia amid its failing peace process context. Conflicts over migration and nationality permeate our global order of sovereign nationstates, both in north-south migrations and across the global south, while the feminisation and racialisation of migrants divides the subaltern class and facilitates capitalist exploitation. However, this paper elucidates migrants' international solidarities and grassroots peace struggles. Community organisers along the Colombia-Venezuela border-the women's empowerment organisation Tejedores de Paz and youth leadership foundation Horizonte de Juventud-unite impoverished internally-displaced Colombians and Venezuelan immigrants to create resistance territories against xenophobia, patriarchy, and poverty. Illustrating the utility of the methodology of decolonial feminist geopolitics, I trace the reconfiguration of the spirit of sociopolitical revolution in South America through migrants' emergent form of feminist non-state socialism.

As the earth continues to see the negative and highly devastating impacts caused by climate change, it is now more than ever increasingly important to make an effort to implement more sustainable and eco-friendly behavior into our day-to-day lifestyle. An obstacle we have identified prior to our research was the feminine gendered implication toward more eco-friendly and sustainable ways of living. Gender perception and marketing styles have highly impacted the use of more eco-friendly and sustainable products. In this study, a survey was conducted to gauge the perspective of people regarding sustainable consumption. In our results, we found that men agreed that women are more eco-friendly than men. We also found that a majority of people believe sustainable products are marketed more towards women. We conclude that as a society, we need to start evaluating our impact on this earth, regardless of gender. Sustainable behaviors are highly dependent on established societal norms and gen...

Many cities in Idaho have historically contracted with their county sheriff for police services. Because county sheriffs are charged with enforcing Idaho Code countywide, these arrangements often allow the sheriff to also enforce city ordinances. This arrangement provides small towns access to an increased police presence without incurring the expense of maintaining their own department. The sheriff, in turn, receives more financial resources to improve service delivery. For many cities and counties, it is a mutually beneficial arrangement that acknowledges the unique challenges facing small-towns and rural communities. For many years, the City of Driggs contracted with the Teton County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO) for police services under just such an arrangement. However, Driggs officials canceled their contract with TCSO in 2016. City officials alleged inadequate service delivery, poor follow-through and a lack of transparency, combined with a belief that their resources would be bet...

There exists what appears to be an impressive potential for geothermal energy production in the United States, yet it has remained largely untapped. Geothermal power represents just 0.4 percent of the utility-scale electricity generation compared to 37 percent for the clean energy sources of nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind. Geothermal district heating systems number a mere 23 in the United States. What explains this gap? Why is it, given the ongoing energy transition in the United States, that geothermal energy production’s time has not yet come? Existing research points to the economic, geographic, and technical limitations of geothermal. But more needs to be done to understand non-technical hurdles and opportunities for geothermal. This paper reports on preliminary research from an ongoing qualitative study examining how the geothermal energy community frames and discusses geothermal technologies, which shape policy attention and agenda setting both intentionally and unintentional...

How can Boise State University engage with Ada County stakeholders to end homelessness? To answer this question, the Blue Sky Institute at Boise State University partnered with the university’s Idaho Policy Institute to analyze the Ada County, Idaho, homelessness service provider network. Research included conducting a SWOT analysis, mapping the network, interviewing stakeholders and analyzing provider operations. While this particular research project used Interfaith Sanctuary, a nonprofit homelessness service provider in Ada County, as the focal point, the project analyzed and addressed the entire homelessness service network in the county. This report demonstrates that the Ada County homelessness service network functions best when stakeholders collaborate to address the issue of homelessness. Ultimately, this report recommends Boise State University work to purposely build relationships within the homelessness service provider network in order to work collaboratively with the co...