How women in Colombia sustain a peace the state forgot
Víctor Barrera, Researcher, Centre for Research and Popular Education / Program for Peace (CINEP / PPP), Bogotá (Colombia); Paloma Bayona, Researcher, CINEP/PPP; Henry Ortega, Researcher, CINEP/PPP; Inés Arco, Researcher, CIDOB; Pol Bargués, Senior Research Fellow and Research Coordinator, CIDOB.
In an effort to sustain the 2016 Peace Agreement, which the Colombian government seems to have forgotten about, informal “grassroots” dialogues like those led by women’s groups have come to constitute one of the last spaces for keeping peace alive in Colombia.
These informal dialogues do not occur separately from the Peace Agreement but interact with it by interpreting it, contesting it, and expanding its content.
Starting from their own conceptions of dialogue—where dissent, corporality, and everyday life take centre stage—these women’s groups reimagine peace from more transformative perspectives.
Almost a decade after the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement between delegates from the National Government of Colombia and members of the demobilised Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP), peace in Colombia is still fragile. The hope held out by the Agreement has turned into frustration due to its slow implementation and the resurgence of hostilities between various armed groups. Nevertheless, women keep sustaining and reimagining peace in Colombia in their territories and communities, in places where neither the state nor formal processes have a significant presence.
In the worlds of diplomacy and conflict resolution, there is broad consensus that informal and unofficial dialogues—also known as Track Two dialogues—complement and enrich the formal negotiations undertaken by governments, political leaders, and representatives of armed groups in their attempts to settle conflicts. However, we still know very little about how these informal discussions continue to occur after the signing of peace accords, and how they contribute to implementation of agreements as well as to reimagining peace, as is happening in post-Agreement Colombia.
This International Note 325 analyses the contributions and experiences of several women’s groups that promote informal dialogues in Colombia to imagine a broader, more transformative peace from the grassroots. To this end, the study draws on the results of around twenty in-depth interviews with women leaders of groups working for peace and social transformation, the organisation of two focus groups with women leaders (lideresas as they identify themselves in Spanish), direct observation, and a review of documents from 2024 and 2025, which are related to these processes in rural settings—like the Catatumbo region in the Norte de Santander Department, and Cauca Department—and also in urban situations, for example in the cities of Cali, Cúcuta, and Bogotá.
Broadly speaking, we define these informal dialogues led by women as not always structured processes of conversation, exchange, and negotiation which devise alternative solutions to the everyday problems that arise in the implementation of the Peace Agreement. These processes, which guarantee the inclusion of a range of voices, also include sensitive issues like gender issues or art performances, thus generating more innovative forms of peacebuilding.
For all their informality, these initiatives interact in various ways with the implementation of the Peace Agreement, interpreting, expanding, and contesting its content by bringing in their own perspectives and realities. They do this on the basis of their notions of dialogue, which differ from the verbal, rational exchanges between political representatives, which are more restricted in space and time. The women perceive the informal dialogues they promote as: a) strategies for constructively addressing fundamental disagreements about peace and gender inequalities; b) spaces for conversation which, going beyond the verbal level, allow the body and the emotions to hold out new understandings and sensitivities among participants and the wider audiences they address; and c) discontinuous but sustained exchanges that link up with their everyday lives, which allows them to redefine gender stereotypes by means of their strategic use.
A fragile peace after the Agreement
Signed in November 2016, the Peace Agreement ended more than five decades of armed conflict between the Colombian state and the country’s main insurgency group FARC-EP, committing to an unprecedented comprehensive peace process. This aimed to transform territories and provide reparation to the populations most severely affected by the violence. Following the Agreement, more than 13,000 combatants laid down their weapons and have since been returning to civilian life. In a country marked by decades of conflict, bringing an end to the war transformed the political debate to the point that for the first time in the country’s history, a left-wing coalition—headed by Gustavo Petro, a former member of the guerrilla group 19 April Movement (M-19), which was demobilised in 1990—won the country’s presidential election in 2022.
Moreover, the 2016 Agreement has become an international benchmark in terms of gender mainstreaming, thanks to the mobilisation of women’s and LGBTIQ+ groups throughout the negotiation process. According to the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, 130 of the 578 stipulations of the Agreement are identified as having a gender perspective. Furthermore, in accordance with the plan established for its implementation, a special Gender in Peace Working Group (GPaz) was created to promote and validate compliance with these specific commitments.
Nevertheless, almost a decade after the signing of the Agreement, peace remains fragile. Most of the commitments are still unkept promises, mainly due to a combination of factors including lack of political support, weak institutional capacities, financial constraints, and the persistence of patriarchal cultural barriers. The figures illustrate the magnitude of this stagnation: only 34% of all commitments made in the 2016 Agreement have been honoured (Kroc Institute 2024). As for gender-focused provisions, the figure is only 13% (Gender in Peace group-GPAZ 2025).
As a result of this inadequate implementation, Colombia is trapped in a new cycle of violence. Although it may not be considered as a civil war like the one that ended in 2016, recent years have seen a proliferation of non-state armed groups like the National Liberation Army (ELN), which are much more institutionally fragmented, local in scope, and interested in controlling populations and territories for the purposes of a range of lucrative legal and illegal economic interests. In this situation of fighting between armed groups and the state’s inability to guarantee protection of civilian populations in a good part of the country, some observers calculate that more than 1,000 human rights defenders have been murdered since 2016 in addition to more than 400 former combatants who signed the Peace Agreement. Moreover, political violence continues and disproportionately affects women, LGBTIQ+ people, and Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations. Indeed, in 2025 alone there have been reports of a significant increase in forced displacement, terrorist attacks, forced recruitment, and kidnapping.
In these difficult circumstances, peace is precariously sustained “from below”. This is thanks to initiatives by a variety of actors who are striving to keep the 2016 Agreement alive and address its limitations. Outstanding among these efforts are women who facilitate many kinds of informal dialogues and explore new possibilities for overcoming existing forms of violence.
Interpreting, contesting, and expanding the 2016 Peace Agreement
These informal discussions do not occur separately or in isolation from the 2016 Peace Agreement but, without passively accepting what it offers, they interact with it by interpreting, contesting, and expanding its content, when its provisions seem limited.
With these informal dialogues, women have found, first, a tool for politically translating the content of what was agreed by the state and the now-defunct FARC-EP. In these spaces, they render the more technical aspects of the Agreement into intelligible language and adapt its implementation to territorial realities and local knowledge. The aim is to respond to specific needs and demands of diverse sections of the population, pursuing greater social appropriation of the Agreement and strengthen the capacity of communities to foster peace at the local level. In the words of one of the women leaders, “These discussions are mainly concerned with the question of how this gets through to the local level [… and become] a tool for accountability, as if we were demanding a constitution or an international human rights treaty” (#E1, 2024).1
Second, several women’s groups have challenged the way in which the gender perspective has been incorporated into the implementation of the Agreement. One case that represents this political position is the “Alianza 5 Claves” (5 Keys Alliance) which brings together several women’s organisations that are united in their project of demanding justice for victims of sexual violence committed during armed conflict. Thanks to its informal discussions, the Alliance has challenged the way in which the transitional tribunal designated in the 2016 Agreement, the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP – Special Jurisdiction for Peace), has included the category of gender violence in its investigations. For these organisations, contesting the implementation of what was stipulated in the Agreement means advancing towards a more sustainable peace.
Third, the dialogues also broaden the scope of action. The 5 Keys Alliance has been able to mobilise political support groups and demand that the Special Jurisdiction for Peace should open, on the national scale, a special area dealing with sexual and reproductive violence, and other crimes related with the sexuality of victims, thus expanding the focus of this tribunal. It has also been observed how these discussions lead to the construction of solid coalitions that are able to ensure that their demands are heard. For example, between 2022 and 2025, in a wide-ranging process of discussions led by a diverse coalition consisting of state agencies, women’s social organisations, and international cooperation agencies, Colombia finally adopted, in April 2025, a National Action Plan for Women, Peace, and Security (MPS), after 25 years of supporting but not implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace, and Security. This demonstrates how teamwork and interaction between the formal and informal spheres can compel the state to honour its commitments and expand frameworks for compliance with the Agreement and addressing gender issues.
All these milestones are often the result of virtually unnoticed dialogues that happen far from the media spotlight. Informally constructed, without institutionalisation or formal programming, they have become essential for sustaining and reimagining peace. They are shaped around immediate local realities and respond to needs that constantly appear in situations affected by violence during times of supposed peace.
Constructing peace through dissent, corporality, and everyday life
The informal dialogues led by women in Colombia share characteristics that do not always coincide with normative concepts of formal dialogue understood as a tool for achieving consensus through rational, structured, oral deliberation that is lineal and sequential in its logic. By contrast, these informal discussions occur around three distinctive characteristics: dissent, corporality, and everyday life.
Dissent
While dialogue is usually understood as having the aim of achieving consensus, the women with whom we spoke see it as a political strategy that challenges and unsettles the status quo by drawing attention to basic disagreements about peace and gender inequalities. Far from having an idealised or harmonious notion of dialogue, the context of conflict compels them to consider disagreements that separate them from others whose viewpoints are different (#E3 and #E4, 2024). For these women, what is at stake in their dialogues is “how we relate with alterity, with difference” (#E1, 2024). Hence, although the emphasis is on dissent, it does not preclude the possibility of reaching agreement and, when any consensus is reached, it is understood as provisional and open to change, susceptible to adjustment and transformation over time in response to changes of context and unforeseen situations.
The women, then, do not start out from rigid views or binary or essentialist distinctions when addressing disagreements in their informal dialogues. For example, the “Coalición de Mujeres del Caribe por la Tierra y el Territorio” (in English, Coalition of Caribbean Women for Land and Territory) designed and engaged in a series of community dialogues on non-violent masculinities with the aim of involving men in the transformation of patriarchal structures, which then led to discussions and disagreements on the roles of men. Similarly, these women are also aware that they have their own contradictions. They recognise internalised misogyny in their communities and in themselves as one of the main challenges they must combat and overcome if they are to make a better contribution towards sustainable peace. For them, dialogues have also become a practice that allows them “to struggle within women’s organisational processes to get rid of the misogyny inside ourselves (…) because we must constantly take on everything that culture has told us we are” (#GF1, 2024).2
In a country like Colombia where political violence, misogyny, and homophobia are commonplace, promoting dialogues around dissent and critique increases the risk of violence. A group of women leaders in the city of Cúcuta have therefore found in Casa Moiras, a feminist organisation, a safe space where they and other women can speak, report abuse, and receive social and emotional support. Nevertheless, engaging in apparently inoffensive activities such as creating murals with messages like “no es piropo, es acoso” (A catcall’s not charm but harassment harm) prompted violent reactions from several men in the city (#GF2, 2024). This also demonstrated the deep-rooted discord in society—within and outside the women’s discussions—over structural issues like gender inequality.
Corporality and creativity
A combination of playful, performative, and communicative repertoires in a notably hostile environment has allowed the women who promote these informal dialogues to reduce the risks they face, and to diminish the resistance of potential participants, by encouraging greater willingness to address disagreements constructively. In the deployment of these repertoires, corporality plays an essential role.
Unlike formal dialogues that are usually limited to typically rational verbal exchanges among mainly men, the informal dialogues led by women in Colombia tend to include forms of communication and interaction that transcend speech and engage the five senses. Accordingly, corporality—understood as the ways in which the women and people who participate in these processes experience, express, and attribute meaning through their bodies—takes pride of place in these discussions.
Since women and LGBTQ+ people have experienced in their own bodies the impact of gender-based violence deriving from armed conflict (see for example, in English), these informal discussions start from the fact that “everything goes through the body and the body is also an expression of our inner suffering” (#E1, 2024). On the one hand, then, the centrality of the body goes beyond the strictly verbal because its movements and silences convey individual and collective pain without need for verbalising, and these expressions are recognised, legitimised, and addressed from the standpoint of care (#E1 and #E3, 2024), thereby temporarily diminishing the forms of resistance that are inherent to Colombian society.
The corporality animating these women-led dialogues increases their chances of sharing how they have managed to engage in initiatives that go beyond the pain caused by various forms of victimisation. One example along these lines is the collective project Mujeres Pacíficas (Peaceable Women) in which the researcher Tania Lizarazo joined leaders of an organisation of Afro-descendant women in Chocó Department. Through discussions about the “corporality of survival”, they produced a series of digital narratives which, integrating a “flow of sensorial information (sounds, voices, images, testimonies, and stories)” made visible what neither orality nor writing can depict alone. This is how these women have, day after day, been able to negotiate their existence in violent situations by means of bodily practices which, because of their repetition and ordinariness, are not perceived as the political acts they really are.
Hence, performative repertoires like plays, film clubs, marches, and cultural activities, offer women tools with which they can introduce new meaning, energise, and express new ideas and sensibilities about peace in high-risk situations. For example, discussing the rights of LGBTIQ+ people in peacebuilding is still met by hostility in cities like Cúcuta and other regions in the northeast of the country. However, using such tools allows the creation of spaces for dissent to present the realities of the LGBTIQ+ collective to the rest of society. One LGBTIQ+ rights activist in Cúcuta told us, “If I approach a community and tell them I’m going to talk about peace and the LGBTIQ+ population, many people will be against me, but if I do this through a play and they don’t know what it’s about, the relations can change (…). This way, we’re not talking about whether or not they like the LGBTIQ+ population, and we’re not saying whether they believe in the feminist movement. It simply means that, if they’re listening to a trans person for the first time, a new relationship is opening up” (#E2, 2024).
On other occasions, handicrafts associated with textile art have provided a powerful metaphor to give particular meaning to the dialogues, while furthering an alternative peace. One of the women promoting these dialogues described it in the following words: “A female peace is connected with textile art because it’s related with the act of repairing (…). Textile art is a tool [for working in these dialogues] because there’s also a philosophical position that understands repairing, sewing, and mending as an act of peace, and it’s also something that’s within our reach as the only thing we can do” (#GF2, 2024). While they weave together, “listening” becomes important (#GF2, 2024).
Everyday life
The women see informal dialogues as a process that flows through their community networks in a series of encounters that are discontinuous but sustained over time. By contrast with formal dialogues that are usually scheduled, their discussions are not locked into specific spatiotemporal boundaries. Moreover, they work with everyday life, and use creatively, to their advantage, the gender stereotypes that usually exclude them. They optimise the always scant resources available to them and manage to act collectively in situations where threats to their leadership are ever-present.
Practices like the comadreo (gossiping) cultivated by Afro-descendant women of Colombia are a good example of how these dialogues, which are rooted in everyday life, build upon gender stereotypes that oppress them in other circumstances. Comadreo inverts the negative connotations of rumour-mongering when it is inserted into an ancestral tradition where song, dance, and conversation all come together to foster deep, affectionate dialogue. In its cultural garb and associated with the cliché image of typical women’s chatter, comadreo is a practice that is less likely to arouse suspicion in contexts of violence, and also less costly in terms of resources. Embedded in the women’s everyday routines and activities it is, however, a highly effective way of sharing knowledge, consolidating care networks, and working together in healing processes.
A mayora3 (elder) who lives in the city of Cali, the main urban centre of Colombia’s southwestern Pacific region, succinctly summarised the practice. “We start with a song […] and then someone who comes by there says, ‘Oh well, dear, they’re only singing’. After that song, we [women] sit down again to keep chatting, to keep discussing the situation we’re in. And whenever we feel we’re being watched, we start singing again. We spend the time like this until the discussion is done. This makes building peace possible” (#E5, 2025).
We found a similar process in the Catatumbo region, in the northeast of Colombia. A local female leader told us that, paradoxically, “gender stereotypes protect women” in their informal dialogues happening during weaving workshops. This is because they engage in an everyday female-coded activity that is deemed inoffensive by armed groups operating in the area, “because a bunch of old women sitting around weaving and embroidering won’t be getting up too much” (#GF2, 2024). This allows them to meet more safely and to use such spaces for reconstructing the memory of violent events and support journalistic investigations to denounce them.
Yet everyday practices and the strategic use of gender stereotypes in informal dialogues are not limited to domestic or private space. When circumstances demand it, women also move into public spaces, urging larger-scale gatherings and actions in which they openly defy the perpetrators of violence against them or members of their families. Mothers’ groups that have consolidated in different regions of Colombia using the slogan, “We women don’t give birth to sons and daughters to feed war”, have politicised their role as mothers by projecting it from the domestic domain into the public sphere and inviting a range of new and varied actors to join a broader conversation to stop the conflict. As authors like Zubillaga and Hanson (2023) describe in other contexts, the Colombian women redefine cultural scripts pertaining to motherhood and use to advantage in their own project the image of authority assigned to this figure in grassroots traditions.
A peasant leader and one of the founders of the movement Madres del Catatumbo por la Paz (Catatumbo Mothers for Peace) in the northeast of Colombia told us how the group is combatting recruitment of adolescent boys and girls by armed groups that are fighting to gain control of the region (#GF2, 2024). This practice which, according to a United Nations report has alarmingly increased in Colombia since the Peace Agreement, has pushed the women to protest, denounce and, on many occasions, to recover recruited minors by engaging in direct discussion with commanders of the armed groups to demand their immediate liberation. It is estimated that, so far, more than 200 recruited minors have been recovered thanks to this direct action, which has also prevented more than 400 young people from joining the armed groups.
Other ways of (re)imagining peace
In a world where negotiated solutions to armed conflicts are increasingly rare, informal, ”bottom-up” or grassroots dialogues have appeared as one of the last bastions of peacebuilding. The fact that so many women’s and LGBTIQ+ groups persist in this endeavour in circumstances as adverse as those they face in Colombia shows that it is still possible to (re)imagine peace more creatively through innovative forms of dialogue which, in this particular case, have managed to keep alive a public agenda inspired by the 2016 Peace Agreement. However, this agenda goes beyond the Agreement in a situation where the state seems to have forgotten the commitments it made when signing it.
In emphasising the value of dissent in the discussions they encourage, the women’s efforts are a reminder that peacebuilding is a never-ending and constantly disputed political process. The peace they imagine is, then, closer to relational conceptions—with an emphasis on the quality of human interactions in keeping with the principles of deliberation, cooperation, and non-domination—than it is to the traditional notions of negative or positive peace. This is so because, to a large extent, these latter approaches fail to take into account the real situations of postwar societies as they are so narrow that they conflate peace with the end of war (in the case of negative peace), or they are so sweeping that they are utopian and simply unattainable (when seen from the standpoint of positive peace).
The women we spoke with strive to bring the body and corporality back in peacebuilding. In particular, since violence has had such a huge impact on their bodies, women show that their informal dialogues make it possible to convey and manage much of what orality and writing are unable to fully express and communicate.
Finally, along lines that differ from the caution expressed in certain circles when referring to “everyday peace”, the fact that everydayness is the raw material with which the Colombian women speak about and construct peace does not mean mobilising for “small causes” or struggling for a “small peace”. On the contrary, by taking advantage of the opportunities offered them by their run-of-the-mill interactions, these women include in their everyday conversations the “great peace debates” that really matter to them.
Interviews and focus groups
Interview #E1 with a woman leader (personal communication). Interviewed by CINEP/CIDOB, Bogotá, 18 July 2024.
Interview #E2 with an LGBTQI+ activist (personal communication). Interviewed by CINEP/CIDOB, Cúcuta, 9 July 2024.
Interview #E3 (personal communication). Interviewed by CINEP/CIDOB, Cúcuta, 9 July 2024.
Interview #E4 (personal communication). Interviewed by CINEP/CIDOB, Cúcuta, 10 July 2024.
Interview #E5 (personal communication). Interviewed by CINEP, Cali, 12 July 2025.
Focus Group #GF1 (personal communication). Interviewed by CINEP/CIDOB, Cúcuta, 9 July 2024.
Notes:
1- This code refers to the woman interviewed as Number 1 in 2024. No further information is offered for reasons of privacy and personal data protection. See further details at the end of the article.
2 -This code refers to focus group 1, from 2024.
3- A mayora (elder) is a woman who, owing to her life story, knowledge, and experience, is recognised as a leader and guide in Colombia’s Afro-descendant communities.
E-ISSN: 2013-4428
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24241/NotesInt.2025/325/en
All the publications express the opinions of their individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of CIDOB or its donors
Imagen: © UN Women (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)