Keywords

1 Brief Context of Sociopolitical Violence and Its Main Effects on Communities and Individuals

For more than 60 years, Colombia has endured a prolonged war. This war has undergone complex transformations throughout its history, mainly comprising its degradation and generalization to the entire national territory (Pardo, 2018).

One of the main origins and continued drivers of sociopolitical violence in the country has been land ownership. During the 1920s and 1930s, there were two societal projects underway, namely, one that valued land ownership and one that “proposed the construction of a national economy supported by industrial development and a solid rural middle class” (Fajardo, 2015, p. 4). For a while, the latter gained traction with liberal governments and peaked with Law 200 of 1932 “that sought to limit excessive [accumulation of] unproductive properties, as well as backward ways of labor exploitation” (Giraldo, 2015, p. 13). Later though, these processes were weakened with Law 100 of 1944, when political interests reimposed “archaic ways of labor in country estates” (Giraldo, 2015, p. 5). According to Giraldo (2015), there was a shift from liberal reform to a more repressive regime where forced displacement and massacres were generalized, allowing for the consolidation of a large property-centered agrarian model, with a vacant land policy that disadvantaged small farmers and privileged large agricultural businesses and investments.

The exports of bananas, coffee, sugar, woods, barks, leathers, minerals, and gold have contributed to the monopolizing appropriation of land, restricting the development of middle-sized and small farming properties. This explains the big land concessions granted between 1827 and 1931 and the expansion of large estates into vacant lands (Pécaut, 2015). Due to these concessions, “peasants had to ‘jump over’ this encirclement and go far over into new settlements beyond the agrarian frontier, boosting a spiral of land valuation through the cycle ‘settlement-conflict-migration-settlement’ that endures to this day, pushed by the armed conflict, both legal and illegal mining activity, and illicit crops” (Fajardo, 2015, p. 7).

The dispossession of lands prevents peasants and small farmers from growing crops autonomously, forcing them to depend on work from large estates where labor conditions were inhumane and slave-like. This situation motivated several mobilizations and protests, the first of which was headed by the Quintín Lame in the province of Cauca. This movement led to the native rebellion in the south of the country because it coincided with the dockworker and railway worker strikes that were suppressed by the onslaught of the business owners (Fajardo, 2015).

These issues around labor and access to land continued to drive protests throughout the 1920s, with the most intense driven by the abusive practices of the Tropical Oil Company in 1924 and 1927, and by the United Fruit Company in 1929. These protests were severely repressed and gave rise to the masacre de las bananeras [massacre of the banana fields]. Very few of these protests succeeded, but over time they helped to build a culture of resistance.

In 1929, the global financial crisis caused thousands of rural workers to lose their jobs, and the prevailing agrarian regime seemed to be on its way out. This set the foundation for the formation of several political groups such as the Communist Party and the Unión Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria − UNIR [Revolutionary Leftist National Union] led by Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (Fajardo, 2015), who was assassinated on the 9th of April, 1948, a pivotal event for Colombian history that was instrumental in consolidating “liberal” guerrillas (Sánchez Gonzalo, 1989).

After this assassination, rural areas were ravaged by terror at the hands of the police, the army, and armed groups coordinated by the state armed forces in line with the “counterinsurgency order.” During this time, there was a wave of expulsions and massacres of hundreds of peasant families in addition to the usurpation of their lands. These conditions continued to favor the commercial development of agricultural businesses and served as motivation for the adoption of economic development strategies in the same vein (Fajardo, 2015). These expressions of violence led to a new political climate in the 1950s wherein the confrontation between elites transformed into a fight between the State and a massive organized resistance of popular sectors, as shown by the uprising of 50,000 combatants at the orders of the guerrillero Guadalupe Salcedo, although not all of the resistance was armed (Fajardo, 2015). This marked the advent of an intense period called “The Violence” between 1948 and 1966 (Giraldo, 2015). Thus arose the armed insurgence that still exists today. In 1964, the Marquetalia operation that originated from the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) [Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces] was implemented.

A few months later, on the 7th of January 1965, another insurgent group was established, namely, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) [National Liberation Army]. In 1967, the Ejército Popular de Liberación (EPL) [Popular Liberation Army] formed, and in January 1974 the “Movimiento 19 de abril M-19” [19th of April Movement] was founded, among other insurgent groups that appeared in Colombia in the 1960s and 1970s (Giraldo, 2015).

In this context, during the frente nacionalFootnote 1 period, economic development was described as “war against the population, the destruction of entire communities, the displacement of survivors, the dispossession of land and wealth economic growth. This growth was made possible because of availability of labor and unoccupied lands and favored capital accumulation” (Fajardo, 2015, p. 26).

Another contributing factor was drug trafficking since territorial dominion had been gained through strategies aimed at controlling illegal crop fields and laboratory sites, regulation of the illegal market, and tribute collection along the entire drug industry supply chain. The guerrillas entered this scene, as did the paramilitary groups later, as armed actors were required for military control and seduced by the great amounts of money circulating. While this happened, two further strategies, namely, the corruption of public servants and politicians, were set in motion (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2018).

Additionally, “paramilitarism boosted the concentration of arable land ownership, associated with transnational agricultural and mining business capital, intensifying the existing dispossession issues” (Fajardo, 2015, p. 39).

These situations consolidated and exercised direct, structural, and cultural violence in Colombia. According to Johan Galtung (2003), the rural civilians have been exposed to forced displacement, selective assassinations, massacres, torture, threats, prosecution, enforced disappearances, and forced recruitment (i.e., direct violence).

Sociopolitical violence has led to a concentration of wealth in the hands of few, exclusionary elite holding political power, the prevalence of poverty (especially in the countryside), high levels of inequality, poor access to rights and adequate living conditions, and poor access to basic goods and services (i.e., structural violence). In this scenario, a polarized social and political culture has formed that denies (and even annihilates) the participation of political stances outside of the two traditional ones, dehumanizing those who do not think, act, or endorse the same ideologies, further turning these individuals into enemies and legitimizing discriminating against them.

These violations of human rights have left deep physical and psychosocial marks on the victims, injuring their dignity, transforming and limiting their aspirations for the future, destroying the social fabric of communities, hindering the continuity of ancestral knowledge and cultural traditions, as well as impeding the political participation of people, creating new acculturation processes and the construction of identity.

Throughout this time, individuals and communities have had to develop strategies to face and manage multiple instances of vulnerability and violence, creating nonviolent ways to transform and resist these realities. Thus, along with the experiences of history through violence, communities and social organizations have been building their own stories through peace.

2 Three Levels of Communitarian Peace Initiatives in Colombia

It is not possible to recount all grass-roots peace and community initiatives within this chapter. However, according to our experience and knowledge of several of these initiatives, we can categorize them into three groups or levels.

The first level involves taking steps to build and protect collective memory as a form of resistance to the injustices that the group has been subjected to and in an effort to prevent repetition. This may be conducted by a group of people that bond over common experiences and move to promote a public process of memory and denunciation, such as the “Colectivo 16 de Mayo” created in the municipality Barrancabermeja in 1996. After a massacre perpetrated by paramilitary actors left 32 victims (7 people murdered and 25 people missing), social organizations made the massacre visible in the media, turning it into a matter of public interest. The national government recognized the legitimacy of the social organizations and decided to respond to their demands, clearing a path for the consolidation and implementation of public policies directed toward peace.

The second level consists of efforts to seek justice and the restitution of rights that have been violated, move forward with legal processes, and use constitutional tools for integral reparations of injuries caused. For example, consider the case of las Pavas, where the expansion of crops of palm oil for the production of combustible oil jeopardized the territorial sovereignty and food security of the communities, giving rise to dispossession and abandonment. The communities argued that the recovery of peasant agriculture was essential for the conservation of common goods, biodiversity, and the fight against poverty (Espinosa-Manrique & Cuvi, 2016).

The third level comprises the community processes that have an integral scope, involving a disposition for resistance to the armed actors that seek to dispossess them, threaten their lives, intimidate them, and limit their existing possibilities. It is based on declaring their territory and community as neutral and then devising creative nonviolent strategies for protecting lives, de-escalating hostilities, improving internal coexistence, developing resources to bolster well-being, and amplifying their solidarity network beyond the local setting. These processes require the organization of a community life that integrates productive, educational, cultural, and coexistence aspects. An example is the San José de Apartadó Peace Community established during the 1990s in the Urabá region of the Province Antioquia, which suffered under the armed conflict when hundreds of peasants had to face violence. In the face of these circumstances, a group of peasants in nearby Veredas decided to become a neutral community. This meant no participation in any kind of conflict, giving no information or aid to any of the groups, and adopting values that brought unity and tranquility within the group.

These three levels are not mutually exclusive. Resisting or neutral communities often do undertake and maintain processes in the other two levels, and whoever advances vindications of rights can further memory-saving processes to bolster legal action. However, bringing a perspective anchored in the community to these processes, beyond the narratives of external allies and transcending the state-centric outlook, allows us to see the reach of peace-building efforts.

3 Perspectives on the Construction of Peace in the Colombian Context

There have been several varied efforts at building peace in Colombia across settings, from universities to territories and communities. Each of these efforts contributed to the construction of an understanding around the concept of peace that, little by little, shaped beliefs, perspectives, and ways of thinking about peace.

As a rule, both in Colombia and other countries around the world, the history that is taught in schools is centered around knowledge about the main wars and incidents of violence recorded as milestones of economic, political, and social transformation, giving violence a symbolic and representative place as a driver of history. As such, violence is presented as having a principal role in strategies to achieve peace. This point of view dominated higher education and academic research in politics and sociology for a long time, viewing violence as an element that maintains order, and hence subject to monopoly by a legitimate entity like the StateFootnote 2.

In a similar vein, with the same emphasis on violence, many academics and researchers conceptualized violence as a key to understanding and seeking peace. Vicent Fiças (1987), in his well-known recapitulation of studies on peace, refers to these stances as “violentology” and “polemology.”

Later, during the second half of the 1980s, the first studies on peace that centered on peace negotiation processes commenced. These studies viewed peace as “negative peace” (i.e., peace is the absence of direct violence, such as a ceasefire (Pardo & Ramos, 2005)). These studies also focused on governments that adopted a negotiation solution to resolve armed conflict within their peace public policy (Hernández, 2009).

A substantial portion of these research efforts was made from the point of view of a “Liberal Peace” (Cruz & Fontan, 2014; Landaluze, 2017) that aims to maintain public order and is especially focused on supporting neoliberal economic policy, the monopoly of arms, and emphasizes guaranteeing conditions of political and economic security and stability, and neglecting the guarantees and conditions necessary for true social reparation, non-repetition, and the implementation or execution of transitional justice.

In the 1990s, conceptualizations shifted to focus on other processes, actors, scenarios, and methods for the construction of peace in Colombia. These brought to the fore the historic processes of people, communities, social organizations, women, youth, churches, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and victims of the conflict that have utilized alternatives to the violence and that go beyond the peace negotiation process. This answers to an irenologicFootnote 3 line, as the science that studies peace from the stance of peace, where conflicts are a possibility of transformation that is nonviolent and creative.

In this vein, it is understood that better comprehension of conflicts (and not violence), their essence, and nature facilitates getting closer to peace. This approach recognizes that, in daily life, actions promote coexistence, respect, and the protection of life, solidarity, and collaboration. In other words, actions directed toward peace (Moreno-Parra, 2014).

As stated by López (2004), “the peaceful experiences of exchange, cooperation, solidarity, and diplomacy have been predominant throughout history.” However, these practices have been normalized as part of daily life, making their impact and relevance to human, political, and social relationships invisible. Until recently, research about those experiences had been scarce, demonstrating an overemphasis on the role of violence in history” and creating obstacles to recognizing peace throughout that same history.

As Conflict Theory proposes, peace refers to those practices and scenarios where conflict has been regulated in a nonviolent fashion in high violence contexts like Colombia. This translates into the organization and strengthening of communities that aim to defend and demand their rights, developing procedures for resistance, collaboration, visualizations, and reporting, in addition to building autonomy, self-determination, and sovereignty, while recognizing the particularities of each population.

In the words of Esperanza Hernández (2009), “transformative pacifist powers, imperfect peace, and heartening realities for this country (…) civilian potentials for peace” (p. 2) occur in different scenarios of civil society, such as art, artists, collectives, and cultural groups, universities, NGOs, churches, and community and social ethnic-territorial movements that build multiple social alternatives and actions following the contextual, cultural, and geographic reality in which they are situated.

This breaks away from a concept of peace as something perfect, finished, utopian, remote, and unactionable in the present, allowing conceptualizations of peace as a process more than an end. Simply put, this enables us to think about peace as inherently imperfect, as an unending process. As Gandhi put it, “there is no path to peace, peace is the path.” An imperfect peace that recognizes peace-building practices in daily life, views conflict as both an important part of the present and an opportunity to create and transform, and helps to plan for a future that may feature conflict. Moreover, this view of peace recognizes that it is always unfinished (i.e., an ongoing process) and therefore facilitates a broader, more holistic, less fractionated understanding of peace where all realities are allowed. This view of peace is more inclusive and everyday ideas, attitudes, and values of peace are promoted.

This is a peace that is not predefined and does not align with a prewritten set of instructions. As proposed by Cruz and Fontan (2014), a “subaltern peace” is a peace bottom-up, that is “the protagonist of its own reality and focused on the community as a weaver of its own processes” (p. 137). For this reason, it invites us to reject the idea that building peace is just an issue for experts and external agents with a programmed agenda. Therefore, it is necessary to reflect constantly to identify colonialist practices and give way to local knowledge and processes.

According to Roger Mac-Ginty (2014), everyday peace is directly related to the agency that humans have to face conditions of violence and thus connected to resilience, stress management, and the strategies people devise to achieve reconciliation and rebuild social networks. This includes the reconstruction of trust and the survival and protection mechanisms fashioned and maintained from their own cultural and historic knowledge.

In the same vein, it is important to ask another question: what is the utility of taking a stance of imperfect peace, everyday peace, and subordinate peace in communal and institutional work? Adopting this stance involves recognizing the social significance of our own history, exploring past experiences of peace. This brings about hope and is profoundly mobilizing. Rescuing these histories of peace implies recognizing their complexity and contemplating the multiple dimensions involved. Simultaneously, it shows us the many ways there are to build peace in situated contexts with their display of creativity and moral imagination, as Lederach (2016) proposed. It takes us away from Manichaeist posturing and allows us to advance toward depolarization.

4 Psychosocial Accompaniment in the Construction of Peace in Community Settings

Until now, we have offered an overview of the different ways peace is built in Colombia and the perspectives and meaning ascribed to peace that underlie these efforts, emphasizing initiative bottom-up and the community setting. Next, we will address what psychology has contributed, and by extension, what role psychologists have played in these efforts, and from what perspective these efforts have been launched. We will also describe the approach we propose should be taken.

Conceptualizing peace as the absence of conflict or the maintenance of law and order was aligned with the view of the armed conflict in Colombia as a war of ideologies, between sides or actors that were well differentiated. This view implies that peace could be achieved by defeating an enemy, or by negotiating the ceasefire and ending the effects on the civilian population, which were understood to be an involuntary product of crossed fire. This view further implies that peace could only be achieved with medical, moral, and economic attention.

Within that frame, the participation of psychologists and other professionals was not a contribution to peace, but a part of the humanitarian aid package. The first approach undertaken focused on the effects of armed violence and forced displacement on mental health. This approach recognized traumatic consequences, life crises, and bereavement for losses due to assassinations and forced disappearances. The cumulative knowledge of psychology had theoretical and technical advances that could be applied without hesitation to the people affected. That is how the first toolbox in psychology that gathered perspectives on trauma, crisis, and bereavement was deployed in the work with victims (Tovar, 2013). These theories and techniques:

…were circumscribed to a medical model under an outline of diagnosis (based on symptoms), prognosis, and treatment (or therapy). The task was to identify the symptoms derived from the adverse experience and to combat them with the methods developed, tested, and divulged throughout more than a century of psychological and psychiatric knowledge, especially in Europe and the US. (Tovar, 2013, p. 394)

This formula, apparently reliable and evidence-based, rests on several premises that are not met within the Colombian armed conflict. First, in environments without armed conflict, the person affected by a violent event is not surrounded by a generalized situation of violence that is affecting their social group. On the contrary, in many of the situations of political violence, the community as a whole suffers from victimization (especially in the case of massacres). For example, consider the event in Bellavista, Bojayá in 2001 where 117 civilians died in an encounter between the FARC and the paramilitaries (AUC) when a bomb fashioned with gas cylinders fell on the church where the villagers were taking refuge. Given the family composition of the Chocó population (extended families and kinship relationships between the majority of the people that live in a village) practically all of Bellavista lost a friend or a relative and was bereaved. In a case like this, emotional effects are not a strange occurrence. They are widely shared and require a shared address as well.

Second, the traditional approach presupposes that, before treatment starts, the source of injury has been resolved, or the victim has been taken outside of the damaging environment. In the Colombian case, professionals have had to act in the middle of social circumstances associated with persistent war.

Third, professionals would act under the assumption that, when a person is victimized, they tend to generalize their case and develop a paranoid fear of others and their environment. However, in armed conflict contexts, the victimizer and their intentions to prosecute and harm are not a paranoid delusion product of an inadequate generalization; they are an undeniable reality.

Finally, in situations outside of war, in the cases where there are accosting perpetrators, the citizen protection and justice apparatus, as well as the social services and the informal support network of the victim, will cooperate so that the people responsible are punished and the threat is removed. In an environment of armed conflict, the reality is frequently social control, daily tension, and impunity, which makes revictimization highly likely.

Even if it is true that the main contribution of the medical model of mental health was to decrease psychological suffering and to help the individual resume their daily life, it was insufficient to maintain those achievements in the long term. However, the main criticism came about when the nature of armed conflict became more understood more broadly. This occurred in the framework of interdisciplinary dialogue that derived in a process of hypothesis formulation that allows the recognition of forced displacement as a war strategy that armed actors use and that has political, military, and economic reference points (Pérez, 2002).

Initially, structural aspects of the armed conflict were emphasized, especially the economic considerations (Castillo, 2004; CODHES, 1999; Fajardo, 2015; Lozano & Osorio, 1999; Pérez, 2002; Reyes, 1997). This allowed recognition of the fact that armed actors were motivated by factors that transcended the dispute for territorial control and required the clearing of large extensions of land since it was related to economic dynamics in which several social and political actors (foreign and domestic) had an interest in. In the end, the motivation was to facilitate traffic and deploy megaprojects.

At the same time, peace studies advanced worldwide, shifting from the view of peace as order and the absence of confrontation toward the more complex view proposed by Johan Galtung, which included cultural and structural aspects of violence for the first time.

In this new landscape, the tools of traditional psychology, psychiatry, and sociology were found to be extremely limited in understanding the complexity of the emotional, relational, and social effects. It was shown that the way to inflict damage to victims included manipulating their dwellings, bodies, minds, and social bonds. Thus, the violent act and its emotional effects were beginning to be seen within a broad context of the interests at play and a dynamic in which the social and the political were inextricably intertwined with the understanding and feelings of victims and society as a whole.

With this in mind, many professionals and academics took a sober distance from peace perspectives derived from the medical model and showed that, in addition to the aforementioned limitations and their out-of-context applications, its effects served the armed actors for several reasons. First, centering the effects, responsibility, and care actions around the individual meant that political, social, and cultural aspects of people’s lives were left behind, ignoring the context that generates, maintains, and feeds violent conflict. A clear example of this is to label social leaders as paranoid and work individually to alleviate their suffering while not doing anything to protect them and validate the social role they play. Second, by deploying only individual care techniques, such as classic therapy, it is impossible to provide all people affected. This further shifts responsibility to each individual for their own problems, ignoring collective processes and decreasing the likelihood of common resistance in the affected territories. Third, by maintaining the pretense of “neutrality” or academic asepsis, professionals did not feel responsible or capable to report or denounce violations or interests at play, nor did they feel required or able to create protection strategies for victims and communities.

In an effort to propose alternatives and ways of understanding, a new perspective emerged in the country, namely, the psychosocial approach. This view, although interdisciplinary in nature, has a salient contribution to psychology and is a product of the efforts of several disciplines and sectors (civil society, church, state, and academia) to communicate with one another and understand contexts and individuals with respect to their emotions, experiences, actions, interactions, and the social fabric (Bello, 2001; Castaño, 2003; Martín Beristain, 2000).

This new approach proposes transcending the individualizing perspective of emotional injury, extending beyond the pathologizing of victims, and favoring a contextual view that integrates structural and cultural dimensions to understand the suffering of people and the rupture of social bonds within and between communities, in addition to the personal and collective resources available for recovery. Indeed, what this approach emphasizes, even more, is its political character, since it centers around the subject of rights and pushes for a contextual view that recognizes personal experience.

The representatives of this school of thought have discussed the construction of peace in several scenarios and with several approaches, including its more liberal modality, that focuses on the efforts in facilitating a negotiated peace and supporting the institutions that emerge from there that affect the lives of victims, perpetrators, and society as a wholeFootnote 4. They have sought to escape the constant demand to be symptom reducers, managing tears and preventing revenge, to be actively involved in a critical and outspoken stance in the face of interests that underlie the violent strategies used by legal and illegal armed actors, social injustice and its structural components, cultural meanings that legitimize the use of violence, and the intersection of identity markers and the dynamics of war.

Thus, even though the medical model persists in many scenarios, research topics and intervention reports have shifted from these processes (i.e., centering around symptom inventories, the prevalence of mental health disorders, the adaptation of displaced peasants to live in the cities, and dysfunctional behavior in the affected population) to concerns such as collective memory (Castro Sánchez, 2006; Girón & Vidales, 2010; Grunebaum & Castillejo Cuéllar, 2007; Jaramillo, 2016; Molina & Páez, 2010; Salcedo, 2005), collective identity (Jimenez, 2004; Osorio, 2004), the social construction of victimhood (Daniels Puello, 2003; González, 2002), and the differential impact of conflict across ethnicity, age, and gender groups (Bello, 2001; Duque, 2000; Meertens, 2003).

At the same time, the continuous outreach of professionals and academics to communities in their regions has involved gaining a deeper understanding of the nature of violence associated with armed conflict and a better comprehension of lived experience and resistance in local communities. Simultaneously, a reflective look at the positive and noxious effects of one’s own work has been added. From all that experience in psychosocial teams, a new school has emerged that prefers to call their work “accompaniment” instead of “intervention.”

Psychosocial accompaniment involves questioning the position of “experts” that professionals and academics assume, as well as their tendency to create dependent relationships with the community (that are often detrimental long term). Psychosocial accompaniment has demanded the recognition and documentation of the high degree of exhaustion of the care teams, due to the type of support work to other people in contexts of violence and injustice and conditions hazardous to their life and well-being. It has also been recognized that interventions were invasive, failing to consult the will, availability, and unmet needs of people and communities, barging into the local environment without care for consequences.

Hence, to accompany, get involved, and commit to the people and their initiatives, emphasizing the communities’ own resources, including the care of the team itself in the routines and aims of the projects, and cementing the reflective and genuine receptiveness are essential components (Sacipa et al., 2005). We argue that the outlook of imperfect, everyday peace, subordinate peace emphasized in this work is consistent with psychosocial accompaniment.

While psychosocial accompaniment may not be an adequate approach in all scenarios, it does undoubtedly have the best capacity to transform communal and daily living environments. Outside of care centers, medical practices, laboratories, and cold institutional infrastructure, community work meets the complexity of life. It cannot (and does not want to) isolate variables, control factors, and classify population groups. Its outlook exists in the same vein of what Martínez (2014) calls “involvement” that challenges the pretense of an aseptic outlook that disguises its political function, obscures power relationships, promotes asymmetric relationships, limits active participation of communities, and impoverishes the potential of fieldwork since due to its lack of reflection. Similarly, in the context of cooperation for development, there have emerged critical proposals that invite us to “re-politicize” our work (Belda-Miquel et al., 2018), re-situating aspects such as solidarity, opting for the oppressed, idiosyncratic knowledge of peoples, self-reflection, and critique at the center of our approaches.

In this way, even in the twenty-first century, community work takes us back to the teachings of the “sensing-thinking” sociology of Orlando Fals Borda, the psychology of liberation of Ignacio Martín Baró, the critical pedagogy inspired by the popular education of Paulo Freire, the barefoot economy of Manfred Max Neef, among other Latin American schools of thought that, by way of daily contact with community life to gain pertinence heuristic capacity and transformation potential. Each of these is inspiring to community psychology in the continent (Montero, 2003). However, it is not the end of the road, there is new knowledge being produced, tools are being renewed, the context is being reexamined, and we are simultaneously facing a globalized world as proposed by Mark Burton and Carolyn Kagan (2016) and, in a multiscale perspective, as practiced by resisting communities (Tovar, 2015).

At this point, the reflection about the central actor for the construction of peace has already transcended the subject of rights that was the protagonist of the psychosocial approach. New approaches are currently discussing political actors, political subjectivities (González et al., 2013; Tovar, 2015), and decolonizing practices (Flórez Flórez & Olarte Olarte, 2020) that are not tied to the state-centric view of politics and what is political.

At the same time, subaltern peace, bottom-up, and everyday peace obey a logic that goes beyond demanding rights which accompaniment and involvement schools have understood. Beyond the rights enshrined in charters and supranational documents (that pretend to be universal but have been largely unmasked), peace is framed in the life lived, how each community has built plural universes throughout its history, diverse worlds that go beyond human groups, and embrace nature as a mother and sister. Guided by Escobar (2015), we could say that to accompany means to connect and resonate with those universes and, by their side, to resist the hegemonic forces that opened up the bloody paths of civilization and progress, and to prepare ways to build other possible worlds.