Colombian women’s and feminist movements in the peace negotiation process in Havana:complexities of the struggle for peace in transitional contexts

ABSTRACT

The peace process with the FARC-EP has been recognized as pioneering for how it addresses gender issues. This was made possible by the action of feminist and women’s movements. This article analyzes the principle achievements of those movements during the negotiation process and identifies the challenges they face for the materialization of women’s rights. In doing so, we enter into dialogue with two theses from the literature about women and peace. The first argues that political pressure from movements is essential in order to increase women’s participation in negotiation processes; the second argues that neither the incorporation of women in negotiations nor the inclusion of gender considerations in agreements is sufficient to guarantee their implementation. Analyzing the Colombian case, we conclude that, along with political pressure, the recognition of these movements as key for peacebuilding and their accumulated political force were vital for raising their demands. Furthermore, the government in office’s position on peace and women’s right has important impacts on the incorporation and implementation of gender provisions. Along with the government’s political position, we identify other challenges: the delegitimization of women’s demands by characterizing them as promoting ‘gender ideology,’ the instrumental and depoliticized application of a gender perspective, the exacerbation of violence, the predominance of liberal visions of peace in dialogue with the state, hierarchical relations within these movements, and a certain level of disarticulation of diverse feminist struggles in the peace scenarios.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• feminist movement
• peace negotiation
• gender perspective
• Colombia and transitional justice

Since the birth of feminist movements in Colombia at the beginning of the twentieth century, the diverse struggles waged by women have unfolded in contexts of socio-political violence. First, in the midst of the confrontation between the traditional parties that unleashed the era known as La Violencia (1930-1960) and later amid the actions of the guerrillas, the state, and paramilitaries. While various women’s and feminist movements participated in global, national, and local peace initiatives before 1990, it was only at the beginning of that decade when demands and proposals seeking a negotiated end to the armed conflict and the construction of peace became a predominant part of the collective identity and agenda of women’s and feminist organizations and movements (Ibarra, 2007; Wills & Gómez, 2006).

These movements, in the struggles that they have undertaken specifically related to peace, as well as in other struggles around political participation, sexual and reproductive rights, and recognition of care work, among others, have constructed an incalculable political accumulation for peacebuilding (Gómez, 2017; Montealegre, 2020). This accumulation was undoubtedly crucial for reaching significant achievements in the negotiation process between the Colombian state and the FARC-EP. That process was publicly initiated in 2012 and led to the Peace Accord that was signed in 2016. This article examines the main achievements of the aforementioned movements during the peace negotiations held in Havana. It also identifies some of the challenges that these movements currently face for the implementation of women’s rights and their demands related to the changes necessary for peacebuilding with a gender focus in the midst of the complexities of transitional contexts.

This text is in dialogue with literature about women’s participation and the incorporation of gender-sensitive approaches in peacebuilding processes (Coomaraswamy, 2015; Ní Aoláin, 2012; True & Riveros-morales, 2019) including research by feminist and women’s organizations who have presented these demands in Colombia (Humanas & CIASE, 2017; Sánchez, 2018). In particular, we enter into dialogue with two theses from that intellectual production. The first argues that political pressure by women’s and feminist movements is fundamental for increasing women’s participation in peace processes (Coomaraswamy, 2015; Goetz & Jenkins, 2016; Paffenholz et al., 2016).¹ The second argues that neither women’s incorporation into negotiation processes nor gender-sensitive approaches within negotiations necessarily guarantee that agreements are effectively implemented (Goetz & Jenkins, 2016; Paffenholz et al., 2016; True & Riveros-morales, 2019).²

Based on the Colombian case, in regards to the first thesis, we argue that along with the political pressure that movements exerted at the Negotiation Table, it was the political accumulation of those movements that enabled them to obtain their achievements in the negotiations (appointing women negotiators and the creation of a gender sub-commission) and in the Peace Accord. Those achievements were reached amid two contextual factors: the political will that had been cultivated within the negotiating bodies and a more widespread circulation of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda and transitional justice framework on a global scale.

However, despite the importance of what has been achieved by feminist and women’s movements in the Colombian case, challenges persist for effectively implementing the Peace Accord and gender measures. These challenges have to do with structural, organizational, and contextual factors. Those include the delegitimization of gender-based demands by characterizing them as promoting so-called ‘gender ideology,’ the politically correct application of a gender-based and women’s rights perspective, a government that is adverse to the Peace Accord, the exacerbation of violence against social leaders, hierarchical relationships within feminist and women’s movements, the predominance of those movements’ most liberal visions in public debate, and a vision of change that segments struggles instead of articulating them.

This article is part of the authors’ on-going qualitative and historical research that has involved fieldwork to follow the implementation of the Peace Accord, paying particular attention to the incorporation of a gender-based perspective.³ It also brings together the authors’ experiences of participating in feminist movements for peace since 2000 and their contributions toward analyzing peacebuilding based on critical feminist perspectives about peace and transitional justice.

The text is divided into three parts. First, we present the achievements of women’s and feminist movements during the negotiation process between the Colombian state and the FARC-EP and in the Peace Accord, and we explain the reasons behind those achievements. Second, we address the challenges faced by women’s and feminist movements for the effective implementation of the Peace Accord’s gender provisions. In this section, we make a distinction between challenges that are internal to the movements and those that are external. We also inquire into the reasons that could explain the weak implementation of the gender measures more than three years after the signing of the Accord. Finally, we present the article’s main conclusions, returning to the two theses outlined above.

1. Achievements of feminists and women’s movements in the peace process

The peace process between the Colombian state and FARC-EP has been recognized as pioneering, because it included women as negotiators, created the Gender Subcommittee and incorporated a gender-sensitive perspective transversally throughout the Accord (ONU Mujeres, 2016). Along with these three significant achievements that are highlighted in the international arena, we can identify others: the recognition of women’s and feminist movements as key players in peace building; the respect for a large part of what was agreed upon in the Cartagena Accord before the results of the Plebiscite called for October 2, 2016; and the creation and implementation of a Special High Level Forum for the Implementation of the Gender Perspective Approach.

The recognition of women’s and feminist movements as a key player in peacebuilding is the product of the political accumulation that those movements have gradually developed through their everyday action starting in the 1990s. A central element of that accumulation has to do with the different strategies they have used to make their proposals heard and to gradually gain space for advocacy and dialogue with major political actors. That accumulation, and particularly the related strategies, enabled those movements to position themselves as an important dialogue partner during the negotiation and in some of the settings of the Peace Accord’s implementation.

The strategies we could highlight include mobilization, creation and strengthening of organizational processes, the exercises of truth, justice and reparations undertaken by the movements since the turn of the century, the construction of peace agendas, the legal and psychosocial accompaniment of victims, as well as dialogue with key actors and spaces of conflict negotiation and the application of transitional justice. An essential element shared by all these strategies is women’s and feminists’ organizations' persistence on reaching a negotiated end to the conflict and incorporating their voices into the peace process. This persistence is expressed in one of their slogans ‘Neither a war that kills us or a peace that oppresses us,’ a commitment they sustained throughout the entire peace process.

Once negotiations with the FARC-EP started and faced with the government and its negotiators’ premise that ‘nothing is agreed upon until everything is agreed upon,’ the women’s and feminist movement raised its voice with the premise: ‘don’t leave the negotiating table until everything is agreed upon.’ Undoubtedly, this premise was crucial in the most difficult moments of negotiation. The persistence and pressure of those movements, along with others such as those of victims and for peace, kept the negotiations going and, with them, the hopes of all Colombians in regards to the possibility of achieving peace.

The pressure exerted by feminist and women’s movements was responsible for two women being named to the Negotiating Table, after the negotiation process had begun: María Paulina Riveros, by the Colombian state, and Victoria Sandino, by the FARC-EP. While numerically it might seem insignificant to have two women among approximately twenty negotiators, this participation was an important victory given the patriarchal connotations of the peace negotiations and Colombian society.⁴

Although this is a valuable achievement, women’s organizations, building on their previous experience, warned that this was not sufficient to guarantee the incorporation of their proposals and demands. Therefore, they considered it necessary, on one hand, not only to influence the negotiation structure, but also the mechanisms of consultation and decision-making; and, on the other hand, to construct a specific agenda and advocacy strategy.

To respond to the first challenge, they proposed the creation of the Gender Subcommittee, which was tasked with incorporating a gender focus into the peace process, the agreements, and their implementation (Gobierno de Colombia & FARC EP, 2016). The Subcommittee went into effect in June 2014. It was made up of five members from each delegation and was strengthened by direct dialogue with representatives from feminist and women’s movements, victims of the armed conflict, and women former combatants from Colombia and other countries that had participated in peace negotiations and transition processes.

In terms of the second challenge, and as part of a strategy previously used by these movements, the National Summit on Women and Peace (Cumbre Nacional de Mujeres y Paz) emerged in 2013 as a space for the articulation of women’s demands and contributions to that process. Today this alliance is made up of ‘eight organizations, networks, and platforms in which more than 1,500 organizations of mixed, ethnic, peasant, Indigenous, Afrodescendent, student, and young women from around the country participate’(Cumbre Nacional de Mujeres y Paz, n.d.). A large number of women’s and feminist organizations situated their proposals and demands in relation to the different items on the negotiation agenda through this space in two ways. The first was through participation in regional and national forums organized by Congress’s Peace Commissions and the Negotiation Table; and the second was through their direct presentation at the Table in Havana through the Gender Subcommittee. These proposals and demands aimed to incorporate a gender focus and promote specific transformations in relation to women’s situation in each one of the negotiation items.

Along with the pressure exerted by women’s and feminist movements and their political accumulation, the inclusion of two women on the Negotiating Table, the creation of the Gender Subcommittee, and the specific alliance of women’s and feminist movements through the Cumbre all played a fundamental role in consolidating women’s role as a key actor for peacebuilding.

The sensitivity to women’s experiences displayed by the women plenipotentiaries and the women in both negotiation teams, as well as the alliances and trust built between them and women’s and feminist movements, resulted in the political will to exert pressure within the negotiation teams to include women’s realities. This conferred greater legitimacy to the movements’ demands, while making it possible to make greater progress on gender issues in the negotiation, in the incorporation of a gender-based approach in the Accord, and in the follow-up and monitoring that would come after signing. The advances in the recognition of the specific ways in which women experience violence and their role as political actors in peace building within both negotiating teams were also important factors.

This took place in a context of wider global circulation of two international normative discursive frameworks: that of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda and that of transitional justice. The narrative about the centrality of victims contributed to positioning women as important players since they not only argued the necessity of their participation in negotiations, but also the inclusion of the particular harm experienced by women in the midst of the armed conflict, situating women both as victims and as peace builders and political actors. Those two normative frameworks served as reference points for the Negotiating Table and for accompaniment by the international community, which encouraged their implementation.

We argue that these different factors—the political accumulation of the movements, the pressure that they exerted on the Negotiating Table, the political will that had been cultivated within the negotiating parties, and the broader circulation of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda and transitional justice at a global scale—contributed to the achievement of women’s and feminist movements’ objectives in the negotiations (appointment of women negotiators and the creation of the Gender Subcommittee) and in the Peace Accord. In respect to the latter, it is important to highlight the explicit inclusion of a gender-based approach in all the items on the negotiation agenda and in the monitoring mechanisms for the implementation phase.

1.1. The gender focus in the peace agreement

The importance of the gender measures incorporated into the Peace Agreement primarily lies in the resulting public recognition of women as subjects of rights, as social and political actors, who not only have experienced the conflict differently, but are also key for peacebuilding in the country. The historical problems that women have experienced are recognized throughout the Accord and it proposes approaches to generate solutions to those problems.

The first point of the Accord, about Comprehensive Rural Reform, incorporated provisions to guarantee gender equality in land access and a territorial approach that would foster women’s participation at a local level in the creation and implementation of related policies and programs. In respect of the first, the agreement establishes preferential measures for women’s access to the Land Fund, non-sexist sexual education programs in rural areas, subsidies, and credit lines specifically for women’s rural production and housing programs (Gobierno de Colombia & FARC EP, 2016). Regarding the second, Development Plans with a Territorial Focus (PDET) were proposed, which seek to achieve the ‘structural transformation of the countryside’ and, in general, to promote comprehensive development in the regions most affected by the armed conflict (Gobierno de Colombia & FARC EP, 2016).

The Accord recognizes the historical exclusions that women have faced in terms of political participation and that reversing that exclusion would greatly benefit democracy and public and political deliberation about peace and the country’s future. In this regard, the item about Participation Measures incorporates affirmative measures to guarantee women’s participation and political representation as part of historically excluded sectors. Those include the recognition and strengthening of their organizational processes and access to national, regional, and local communication channels for their dissemination; incorporation of a gender-based and a territorial approach in the individual and collective security measures in the framework of the Comprehensive Security System for the Exercise of Politics; provisions designed to promote equal opportunities for women and men such as media campaigns and steps for women’s effective participation in control, citizen oversight, and planning mechanisms (ONU Mujeres, 2018).

The third point in the Accord, End of the Conflict, which creates the Monitoring and Verification Mechanism, establishes the inclusion of information that is disaggregated by sex in reports, the inclusion of women’s organizations as direct or primary sources for monitoring, the socioeconomic reincorporation of women former combatants and the provision of logistical elements for them in the Transitory Local Zones for Normalization. Provisions to guarantee immediate basic medical care during the process of laying down arms for gestating mothers and maternal and childcare were also important in this respect (ONU Mujeres, 2018).

The measures for solving the problem of illicit drugs recognize the failure of crime and anti-drug policies and the particular effects that illegal apparatuses and economies connected to drugs have had on women and youth. Building on that, they propose specific provisions in the fourth point of the Accord: Solution to the Problem of Illicit Drugs. It sets out participatory construction of the National Comprehensive Program for the Substitution of Crops Used for Illicit Purposes (PNIS), which includes the voluntarily substitution of those crops, women’s participation in productive projects within the substitution plans, attention to violence against women related to the use of illicit drugs within the Program of Substance Abuse Prevention and Public Health, and specific measures regarding the issue of health care for women incarcerated in relation to drug-related crimes (ONU Mujeres, 2018).

The fifth point, Victims of the Conflict, recognizes the existence of gender-based violence and, particularly, violence against women, the specific obstacles that women face in accessing justice, and the existence of an exacerbated impunity for sexual violence. The Comprehensive System for Truth, Justice, Reparations, and Non-Recurrence (hereinafter the Comprehensive System) created by the Accord identifies one of the central elements of its work to be the elucidation of the differential impact of the armed conflict on women.

The Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Recurrence Commission (CEV) created a gender working group whose main responsibility is to contribute specific tasks of a technical and research nature to ensure the transversality of the gender-based approach in all the Commission’s work areas. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) establishes the formation of a special research team for cases of sexual violence and the prohibition of amnesty or pardon for that form of violence in accordance with the provisions of the Rome Statute.

Pertaining to the Special Unit for the Search for Persons Deemed as Missing in the Context of and Due to the Armed Conflict (UBPD), it explicitly adopts a gender-based approach in the lines guiding the search. Its humanitarian and extra-legal character enables women’s direct, active, and informed participation and recognizes their experiences as searchers (UBPD, 2020). The reparation mechanisms incorporate the possibility of collective reparations to women’s organizational processes. Both the CEV and JEP establish criteria for equal participation of men and women in the formation of commissioners and magistrates (ONU Mujeres, 2018), which allows for making advancements in the equal presence of women and men in the mechanisms established by the Peace Accord.

The point that structures the processes of Implementation, Verification Mechanisms and Endorsement of the Agreement creates the Commission for Monitoring, Promoting, and Verifying the Implementation of the Final Agreement (CSIVI), and within that the Special High Level Forum for the Implementation of the Gender Perspective Approach to (hereinafter the Special Forum, in Spanish Instancia Especial de Mujeres), which is made up of representatives of eight women’s organizations.⁵ The creation of this civil society Special Forum has been important for maintaining the meaning of the Accord and its gender provisions. This has allowed for monitoring the implementation and identifying the progress and obstacles for implementing the gender-based approach and formulating recommendations for the entities responsible for its implementation. Therefore, it has become a bridge between civil society, women’s and feminist movements, and the institutional mechanisms created in the context of the Accord. The Special Forum takes into account the experiences of other peace processes, which show that part of the problem with implementation has to do with little or no monitoring by civil society of what has been agreed upon.

These measures respond to specific materializations of historical demands that feminist, women’s, and victim’s movements have raised in peace processes and transitional scenarios. They reflect a specific understanding of the causes of the armed conflict and the harm experienced by women and they bring together the proposals of the women’s and feminist movements for building peace with gender equality.

1.2. Setbacks for women as key actors in peacebuilding

The signing in Cartagena of the ‘Agreement to End the Armed Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace’ on September 26, 2016 was followed by the call to a plebiscite convened by the government for October 2 for a referendum on the agreement. This plebiscite sought to consult Colombian women and men on whether they approved or rejected the Accord reached with the FARC-EP, with the ‘No’ vote winning. Part of the campaign promoting the ‘No’ vote argued the existence of a supposed gender ideology in the Peace Accord that would affect the family and ‘promote homosexuality’ (Chaparro & Martinez, 2016; Gómez, 2017). That denunciation is articulated with a global tendency that uses that same accusation against other demands raised by feminist movements, such as sexual and reproductive rights (Viveros & Rodríguez, 2017).

Although the incorporation of a gender-based approach in the Accord is not sufficient in itself to explain the results of that consultation, it demonstrated the challenges that persist for achieving feminist demands that are considered as transgressors of the patriarchal ‘order’ in and outside of war. The denunciation of gender ideology not only contributed to the ‘No’ vote’s victory, but also to minimize the achievements of women and the LGBTI community in the Accord (Gómez, 2017). Faced with that situation, LGBTI, women’s, and feminist movements feared that in such difficult circumstances for the consolidation of peace, conquests related to gender would be the easiest and quickest to negotiate in order to sustain the possibility of peace.

This situation required an effort of articulation between those movements and between them and other social movements, such as those for peace and victims’ rights. This led the women’s and feminist movements to not only form part of the major organizational platforms and mobilizations in defense of the Accord and negotiations, but also to enter into direct dialogue with the government, the FARC-EP negotiators, and the Gender Subcommittee. Due to this dialogue, along with the important role played by women’s and feminist movements, a large part of what had been agreed upon in terms of gender in the Cartagena Agreement was ultimately respected.

Given that ‘gender ideology’ was a hobbyhorse but not the main reason for opposing the Peace Accord, the ‘No’ campaigners had little impact on elements related to gender. Meanwhile, they delved into other proposals that were quite harmful for building a transformative peace, especially regarding justice, state violence, and third-party responsibility for the conflict (Gómez, 2017b; Semana, 2016a; Semana, 2016b). These would even have impacts on sanctions for gender-based violence, including sexual violence. The provisions having to do with gender were maintained, although, according to Gómez (2017), in some sections, this was done more from a liberal vision alluding to equality of opportunities between men and women and, in consequence, omitting references to discrimination and diversity in terms of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The rights of women and LGBTI communities were an object of negotiation by No campaigners and the two delegations, thus ratifying exclusion and discrimination that insists in ignoring women’s rights and the existence of non-heteronormative sexualities and subjects. In this way, it also caused setbacks in the process of constructing a secular state in Colombia, since the idea of gender ideology was primarily promoted by various churches and the most conservative sectors of society in order to deny rights to women and LGBTI communities. For women’s and feminist movements, the ‘No’ vote meant a setback in their recognition as a central political subject for peacebuilding, which, unfortunately, would have lasting effects.

2. Challenges for implementing a gender-based approach in the peace accord

Although feminist and women’s movements made significant achievements in the negotiation process in Havana, those have not been sufficient to guarantee the materialization of the demands and proposals incorporated into the Accord in the implementation phase. Their recognition as key political subjects for peacebuilding, while definitive in the negotiation phase, was minimized following the triumph of the ‘No’ vote and President Duque’s rise to power.

In this way, the political centrality achieved by a collective subject, such as feminist and women’s movements, not only depends on their activity (pressure and political accumulation), or on the pressure of powerful international actors, but it also depends on the political position of the government in power. In this second section, we want to highlight the external and internal challenges that these movements face to enact their proposals and demands in the implementation phase of the Peace Accord and in a transitional scenario. By external challenges we are referring to those that have to do with the context and that do not depend exclusively on the movements in question, while the internal challenges refer to those that concern movements’ internal logic.

2.1. External challenges

In the implementation phase of the Peace Accord, women’s and feminist movements face at least four challenges that could be characterized as external. The first has to do with delegitimization caused by the idea of the Accord containing a ‘gender ideology.’ This has made it more difficult to position and defend the rights of women and the LGBTI population, as well as to implement the gender provisions in the Agreement. The victory of the No vote gave this particular stamp to the Peace Agreement, which has been difficult to erase, and it could be said to have covered the Havana agreement with the cloak of gender ideology.

The second challenge has to do with a government that is adverse to the Havana negotiation process and the Accord itself, even with the changes brought about following the triumph of the No vote. Duque’s government’s adversity toward the Peace Accord demonstrates a limited vision of peace, vastly different from what was agreed upon, in which a minimal implementation process is maintained, but primarily limited to politically overshadowing the FARC-EP and insisting that their members be the main, if not only, contributors to the materialization of victims’ rights, ignoring the fact that the Accord also mandates taking into account victims of state crimes. This vision has involved, along with the changes made to the Accord after the No victory and during the Fast Track,⁶ a reduction of the budget for implementing the elements included in the agreement and the construction of a weak institutionality for enacting and disseminating dialogue with civil society. The latter contributes to the setbacks in women’s visibility as key political actors in peacebuilding.

More than three years after the signing of the agreement, the point about agrarian issues is the one with the least amount of operational implementation (Gpaz, 2018). According to the Instancia Especial de Mujeres (2019), in practice, women do not identify real possibilities for access to land tenure, use, and titling, and the government has no interest in recognizing and legalizing peasant reserve areas. Due to their leadership in the territories, women play an important role in the formulation of the PDETs; however, those have only been implemented to varied degrees and are far from generating a structural transformation in the countryside (Gpaz, 2018; Instancia Especial de Mujeres, 2019).

In regards to the point on participation, the regulatory and public policy developments needed for its implementation have not addressed the Special Transitory Peace Constituencies nor political reforms regulating parity and alternation to increase women’s representation in electoral contests. Although many women’s organizations have gained strength in the territories, creating peace agendas and development plans at the local level, very few provisions have been complied with and implemented by local authorities (Instancia Especial de Mujeres, 2019, p. 26).

According to the Instancia Especial de Mujeres (2019), the processes of political, economic, and social reincorporation of women former combatants have faced even greater difficulties, due to patriarchal sociocultural patterns that severely judge women’s participation in war and limit their entrance into the local political scene or labor market. Additionally, their prior knowledges in different trades or know-hows (health, education, security, etc.) are not valued in the reincorporation processes, making their socioeconomic stability even more difficult. Pertaining to the item about victims, along with the changes made during the renegotiation of the Accord and the Fast Track, there were also subsequent changes to the JEP proposed by the government aiming to protect the Armed Forces (Gómez, 2017b). While all the instances of the Comprehensive System have prioritized the development of a gender-based approach in their components, the implementation of those components, especially at the territorial level, has taken place very slowly and with a 50% decrease in the guaranteed funding, structure, and personnel than what was planned for its implementation (Instancia Especial de Mujeres, 2019).

According to the latest report from the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute (2019), the slow implementation of the gender considerations within the Accord not only increases the chance that women and citizens in general lose confidence in the process, but also has negative impacts on the rest of the provisions in the Accord. Overall, this institute calls for an acceleration of the time-frame for meeting the commitments related to Comprehensive Rural Reform, Participation Measures, and Security and Protection Guarantees.

The third challenge that women’s and feminist movements face in the implementation process has to do with a context of continued violence that has intensified the extermination of social leaders, especially at the local level, and has turned reincorporated former combatants into military targets. Contrary to the guarantees for political participation provided in the Accord, political violence against women who decide to participate in politics persists and there are high levels of impunity for the crimes against them (Instancia Especial de Mujeres, 2019).

The most recent report of the CSIVI international component (Kroc Institute et al., 2019) and data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights indicate that, following the signing of the Accord, between 2016 and 2019, there were 320 assassinations of leaders and human rights defenders, of whom 36 were women and 6 belonged to the LGBTI community. According to the Public Ombudsman’s Office, between February 2018 and May 2019, 447 threats against women leaders have been recorded (Kroc Institute et al., 2019). Indepaz (2020) indicates that so far in 2020 (up until May 25), 105 social leaders have been assassinated. Many of those leaders had been demanding the fulfillment of the central elements of the Accord, especially those related to land, victims’ rights, and the substitution of illicit crops (EFE, 2019).

Regarding security conditions for former combatants, between 2016 and 2020, 203 former combatants from the FARC-EP were assassinated (ONU, 2019; Indepaz, 2020). The national government has not made sufficient advancements to protect the lives and rights to participation of leaders and reincorporated former combatants. Nor has it progressed in taking apart the new armed groups that have emerged after the negotiation process, linked both to the drug business and to dissidents from the FARC-EP, including the rearmament process led by Iván Márquez. This situation demonstrates the maintenance and/or reconfiguration of political, economic, and military powers in the country that sustain and benefit from war.

The final external challenge that we want to address has to do with a politically correct use of the category and perspective of gender and women’s rights stripped of its subversive nature, turning it into a yet another element for building public policy, but without involving real transformations for women and society as a whole (Gómez, 2019). For the members of the Instancia Especial de Mujeres, the gender-based approach ‘that was recognized as a central focus of the Peace Agreement was gradually diluted in the realization of a single chapter on gender within the Framework Plan for Implementation (PMI)’ and in the construction of management indicators or activities that do not take into account the commitments to incorporating a gender focus in the Peace Accord (Instancia Especial de Mujeres, 2019).

According to the Special Forum, at the territorial level, people do not know about the more than 100 provisions that were agreed upon in relation to women. Some local authorities consider the implementation of the Accord to be the national government’s responsibility and even when some of those local authorities have the political will to implement the provisions, they do not have access to the institutional resources to do so or the institutional dialogue between the national and territorial levels that would be required (Instancia Especial de Mujeres, 2019). Additionally, there is a widespread idea that women should be responsible for monitoring the gender measures, but not the whole agreement.

According to the CSIVI, the implementation not only of the Peace Accord, but also the gender provisions, by the Colombian state has been fragmented, insufficient, and disarticulated, due to the lack of a comprehensive and transversal understanding of what that approach means and the resources that are required for its incorporation (Tapia, 2020). The gender-based approach has become common place for privileging a description of reality (information and indicators disaggregated by sex), but not for the analysis and social transformation that the category implies.

2.2. Internal challenges

The majority of the literature about women’s participation in peace processes points to the challenges that they face in influencing negotiations with their feminist visions and incorporating a gender perspective, in having their proposals and demands heard, and in making those being implemented. However, little attention has been paid to identifying the internal challenges that they face in making their political action be more effective and having a greater transformative capacity. In that regard, we have identified three internal challenges, which we think are important to make visible in order to confront the challenges of the post-agreement period.

The first challenge has to do with the fact that it is the liberal vision of peace and transitional justice from these movements that has prevailed in dialogue with the state. In general terms, there is a weak reading within movements of what underlies both narratives. Women’s and feminist movements have tended to be more proactive than critical in the face of the peace and transitional scenario. They have especially been afraid of closing the doors to negotiation in the midst of strong opposition to the peace process from certain political sectors. This makes it necessary to delve deeper into a perspective that is as critical as it is propositional in respect to discourses of peace and transitional justice. Additionally, the women’s and feminist movements that have a more critical vision about the structural transformations that society requires, and the possibilities offered by the peace and transitional scenario are less visible in dialogue with the state. They were also less visible in the negotiation table and continue to be so in the implementation process.

The second internal challenge that these movements encounter in their activity, directly related to the previous, has to do with the need to destructure hierarchical power relations within women’s and feminist movements. These hierarchies are seen in how certain organizations position themselves in public space and, within those organizations, the positioning of certain figures who do not promote the movements’ most critical perspectives, but to the contrary, the most liberal visions about peace and transitional justice. Those hierarchical relations are reflected in the center–periphery binary in which the majority of movements’ decision-making processes, access to funding, political positioning, and dialogue with actors that have national power are concentrated in the country’s capital. These power relations also include the tutelage that some organizations and women have established with victims, making it more difficult for victims to consolidate as a political subject.

The third challenge has to do with the disarticulation between the expressions of feminists and women for peace and other struggles undertaken by different women’s and feminist processes. Therefore, it is necessary to create a horizontal articulation of the demands and proposals from different instances of women’s and feminist movements in the peace struggle so that the struggles and organizational processes, while maintaining their specificity, function less as individual terrains that only demand change in particular social spheres, and more as a plural field that articulates demands and objectives, which only together would allow for the construction of a truly transformative peace with gender equality.

This would lead to recognizing that women, along with being characterized by differences, are also marked by inequalities related to class, gender identity, geographic origin, and ethnic belonging, among others and that it is urgent to transform these inequalities in their entirety, especially in peace-building scenarios. This would also make it possible to reveal that these movements are not only fighting against patriarchy or heteronormativity, but also against the capitalist system, the dominant development model, neoliberalism, and colonialism, which is kept alive through the insidious presence of racism as a structuring axis of social relations.

3. Conclusions

During the peace process, women’s and feminist movements became a key actor in peacebuilding in Colombia. From that position, they achieved important victories such as the appointment of women negotiators, the creation of the Gender Subcommittee, the transversalization of a gender-based perspective with 130 specific measures incorporated into the Accord, the defense of a majority of what had been agreed upon after the No’s triumph in the Plebiscite, and the creation of the Special Forum as a concrete mechanism of follow-up, monitoring, and pressure for implementation. These achievements are the result not only of the political pressure exerted by women’s and feminist movements, but also their positioning as a key actor in the peace process, their political accumulation built over decades, and the widespread circulation of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda and the transitional justice framework at a global scale.

Despite the historic exceptionalism of several of these achievements, women’s recognition as a key actor in the peace process became minimized in a patriarchal society whose conservatism was exacerbated. That recognition and the reach of their demands and proposals thus depends on the political position of the government in office. While Santos’s administration pushed a liberal vision of peace that enabled the recognition of women as a central actor for peace and the legibility of certain demands coming from the feminist and women’s movements, mostly those of a liberal nature; Duque’s government has pushed a limited vision of peace, far from what was agreed upon, in which women’s recognition has suffered setbacks in parallel with the consolidation of a right-wing society that reifies patriarchy and heteronormativity as the social norm.

Women’s and feminist movements thus face challenges in the implementation phase that have to do with so-called ‘gender ideology,’ the current government’s adverse position toward peace, a post-agreement context characterized by violence against social leaders and reincorporated former combatants of the FARC-EP, and the politically correct implementation of a gender perspective and women’s rights. The low levels of implementation of the Agreement make it so that achievements in terms of gender continue to be marginal in respect to the peace objectives and the enactment of victims’ rights. In this sense, neither women’s participation in negotiation processes nor the incorporation of a gender-sensitive approach within those can be evaluated separately from the scope of the negotiation’s goals and, particularly, the fulfillment of the broad objective of the Peace Accord (Montealegre, 2020).

Along with the external challenges, women’s and feminist movements face internal ones that have to do with the privileging of a liberal vision of peace and transitional justice in dialogue with the state, hierarchical relations of power within movements that undermine their plurality and the circulation of the variety of perspectives that they contain; and a type of politics that segments their demands and proposals instead of connecting them. Therefore, it is necessary for these movements to confront not only external challenges, but also internal ones.

This twofold perspective on challenges can offer new paths for action, such as new emphasis on participation, movements’ goals, and ways of confronting the current government’s adverse vision toward peace. It can also contribute to a profound and structural questioning of the foundations of liberal notions of peace and transitional justice, and their relationship with dominant society and the different aspects that make it up beyond patriarchy and heteronormativity. Perhaps, for women’s and feminist movements, this means rethinking the concept of peace and what it means to act in the face of this collective aspiration.

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Universidad de los Andes.

Notes

1 For the Colombian case, this has been addressed by the works of Vargas and Pérez (2018), Bouvier (2016), Chaparro and Martinez (2016), Céspedes-Báez and Jaramillo Ruiz (2018); as well as by feminist and women’ organizations such as Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres (Pacific Route of Women), Mujeres por la Paz (Women for Peace), Iniciativa de Mujeres Colombianas por la Paz (IMP) (Colombian Women’s Initiative for Peace), Mujeres Autoras y Actoras de Paz (Women Authors and Actresses for Peace), Liga Internacional de Mujeres por la Paz, among many others.

2 The Colombian case in particular is examined in Paarlberg-Kvam (2018) and Meger and Sachseder (2020).

3 These include Peace and Development in the Political Transition: Imaginaries and Practices of Historically Neglected Subjects, Inclusion of the Effects Experienced by Women and Their Processes of Resistance in the Truth Commissions in Peru and Colombia: Looking Forward and Back at Transitional Justice and Feminisms, Resistances, and Transitions in Colombia: Political Positions of Feminist Struggles for Peace. These researches have been funded by Los Andes University. Both investigations have the approval of the Ethics Committee of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies on Development, CIDER.

4 Before the Peace Accord was signed, they officially signed seven prior acts and agreements about the items on the negotiation agenda, in which 43 men and 8 women appear as signatories, for a total of 16% women (Chaparro & Martinez, 2016). These acts later constituted the body of the Peace Agreement. According to a UN Women’s study from 2012, of the 31 peace processes that took place around the world between 1992 and 2011, only 9% of negotiators were women (Coomaraswamy, 2015).

5 Within the International Accompaniment Component, they also created a forum with participation of UN Women, a Representative of the General Secretary for sexual violence in armed conflicts, the International Democratic Federation of Women, the Swedish Embassy, and the CSIVI (ONU Mujeres, 2018). With the same purpose of monitoring the implementation of the gender measures, a national government’s High Forum on gender was created under the Vice-Presidency.

6 A special and transitory legal procedure created to facilitate and ensure the implementation and regulatory development of the Peace Accord. Unlike ordinary legal proceedings, fast track receives preferential treatment in regards to other legislative initiatives and fewer debates, among other provisions.