Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-11-02
Category: ODA·개발정책 | Keywords: development, government, policy, politics
금방섭 지침에 따라 작성 전 스킬을 먼저 확인했습니다. 이 글은 ODA 제안서/보고서(oda-master-writer 계열), 발표자료(oda-ppt-design), 회의·미팅 보고서(plaud-meeting-report), 통화·회의 기록(call-meeting-records) 중 어느 것에도 해당하지 않는 "학술 기사 기반 분석 칼럼" 유형이며, 현재 세션에서 로드 가능한 스킬 목록에도 이 작업에 맞는 전용 스킬이 없습니다. 맞는 스킬이 없음을 먼저 밝히고, 아래와 같이 직접 작성했습니다.
The question of how violence and peace are organized across urban space has become increasingly central to debates over the implementation of peace agreements in the Global South, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Colombia a decade after its landmark 2016 Peace Agreement. The accord, signed between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), was widely celebrated as a model for negotiated settlements, yet it was designed with an overwhelmingly rural lens, treating conflict and reconciliation as phenomena rooted in the countryside. The article "Cities and the Spatial Politics of Violence and Peace in Post-Accord Colombia," published in Latin American Perspectives (Volume 53, Issue 5, pages 123-138, September 2026), directly confronts this omission, arguing that cities have functioned as a structural blind spot in the agreement despite being critical arenas where armed groups, displaced populations, and state institutions continually renegotiate control and legitimacy. This matters now because urban violence in Latin America has not receded in the post-accord period; rather, it has adapted, migrating into metropolitan peripheries, informal settlements, and secondary cities in ways that conventional rural-focused peacebuilding frameworks are ill-equipped to address.
The article's core contribution lies in tracing how the urban dimension of peace has only recently been given explicit policy recognition, specifically through its incorporation into the Petro government's Total Peace (Paz Total) policy. This represents a significant evolution from the 2016 framework: whereas the original accord concentrated resources and attention on rural reincorporation zones and territorial development plans, the Total Peace initiative under President Gustavo Petro has sought to extend negotiation logics to urban armed actors, including criminal and paramilitary successor groups operating in cities such as Medellín, Cali, and Buenofo neighborhoods of Bogotá. By examining this shift, the article demonstrates that the spatial politics of peace are not static but are being actively renegotiated in the post-accord phase, with cities emerging as sites where the state's capacity to project authority, deliver services, and curb violence is most visibly tested. The analysis suggests that urban informality, land tenure insecurity, and uneven municipal governance capacity shape how peace is experienced unevenly across different neighborhoods within the same city, complicating any uniform national narrative of post-conflict transition.
This focus on urban spatial politics resonates with broader regional and global trends in development cooperation, where donors and multilateral agencies have increasingly recognized that fragility and violence are not confined to rural conflict zones but are deeply embedded in rapid, unplanned urbanization across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia. Latin American Perspectives, as a journal with a long tradition of political economy analysis of the region, situates this Colombian case within a wider pattern in which civil society organizations, community-based actors, and local governments are being asked to absorb responsibilities that previously fell to national-level peace architecture. The keywords attached to the article—development, government, policy, and politics—signal that its relevance extends beyond conflict studies narrowly defined, touching on core ODA concerns such as decentralized governance, municipal capacity-building, and the political economy of resource allocation between rural reincorporation programs and urban violence-reduction initiatives. This mirrors debates in other post-accord or post-conflict settings, from urban gang truces in Central America to territorial pacification efforts in parts of West Africa, where the omission of cities from formal peace architecture has similarly produced governance gaps that non-state and quasi-state actors fill.
For policy practitioners and research institutions engaged in ODA programming, the implications are substantial. Development agencies designing urban resilience or peacebuilding portfolios in Colombia and comparable contexts cannot treat the 2016 accord's rural focus as a complete map of where conflict risk and peace opportunities actually lie; the Total Peace policy's extension into urban negotiation suggests that future funding windows, technical assistance, and monitoring frameworks will need to account explicitly for intra-urban variation in security and governance outcomes. This has direct relevance for institutions such as IOCSS that track civil society dynamics within development cooperation, since the article implies that civil society actors operating at the neighborhood or municipal level—rather than solely national-level peace secretariats—are becoming key interlocutors in determining whether Total Peace translates into tangible reductions in urban violence. Research funders and evaluators should also take note that measuring the success of post-accord peacebuilding may require spatially disaggregated indicators at the city and neighborhood level, rather than the territorial or departmental metrics typically used to assess compliance with the 2016 agreement's rural provisions.
Looking forward, the article's attention to the spatial politics of violence and peace in post-accord Colombia offers a useful corrective for both researchers and practitioners who have, until recently, under-theorized the urban dimension of conflict transitions. As the Petro government continues to operationalize Total Peace amid ongoing negotiations with urban-based armed and criminal structures, scholars will need further empirical work tracking how specific cities—and specific neighborhoods within them—experience divergent trajectories of security and insecurity under the same national policy umbrella. For practitioners in development cooperation and civil society research, the lesson is that peace agreements framed primarily around rural territorial control risk leaving urban populations exposed to new or displaced forms of violence unless explicit, well-resourced urban strategies are built into implementation from the outset. The Colombian case, as analyzed in this Latin American Perspectives article, thus stands as an instructive and still-unfolding example of how post-accord states attempt to retrofit urban peace into frameworks that were never designed with cities in mind.