Disarmed but Not Invisible: Former FARC-EP Combatants Shaping Peace Beyond WPS Frameworks

In Colombia, former combatants from the FARC-EP rebels are building peace in ways that fall outside the formal, institution-centered focus of the UN Women, Peace and Security agenda. In the rural zone of La Montañita, the grassroots initiative ASMUPROPAZ brings together women and men – ex-combatants and victims – to turn aromatic plants into essential oils and conflict into cooperation. Their everyday work reveals a relational, community-based form of peacebuilding that unsettles the familiar WPS categories of “victim” and “perpetrator.” This blog article invites us to ask, what becomes visible when we shift our gaze from institutions to local realities, and from women’s vulnerability to their agency as peacebuilders?

From Fighters to Peacebuilders: Where Do Former Female Combatants Fit in the WPS Agenda?

Situated in the Caquetá Department – a rural and remote southeastern region that joins Colombia’s Amazonian lowlands with the Andean foothills – the rural zone of La Montañita has long been affected by conflict. When I first arrived in 2018, I was visiting a reintegration camp established after the   between the Colombian government and the former rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP). I wanted to understand how former female combatants were redefining their social roles after laying down arms.

During this visit, I encountered a led by a female former FARC-EP fighter. In this project, peace signatories and victims – both women and men – work side by side to produce aromatic plant-based products. When they showed me the processing plant, I was surprised to see ex-combatants and local residents collaborating so closely.

As a white-mestiza woman from Bogotá, I had been deeply influenced by mainstream media narratives that portrayed former FARC-EP combatants as dangerous enemies. Witnessing victims and ex-combatants working together challenged these assumptions and revealed local realities that are central to understanding Colombia’s peacebuilding process. These everyday forms of cooperation are precisely the kinds of practices that WPS frameworks rarely capture.

As the WPS agenda marks its 25th anniversary, we have an opportunity to reconsider how its principles unfold on the ground – and to recognize the crucial role that ex-combatants play in shaping more inclusive forms of peace.

Yet this focus has also created blind spots. Former female combatants rarely fit the victim-perpetrator binary that underpins much WPS programming, leaving their agency and contributions largely invisible. This raises important questions: What does WPS actually look like at the local level, beyond formal negotiations? And where do former female fighters fit within its vision of peace and security?

Former FARC-EP Combatants as Peacebuilders

The Colombian Peace Agreement marked a milestone for the WPS agenda. During the negotiations, the world’s first formal gender sub-commission in an official peace negotiation was created, and through its work – together with years of feminist advocacy – gender-responsive provisions were incorporated into the accord. As a result, Colombia is often cited as a global reference point for advancing women’s participation in peacebuilding.

During the war, female FARC-EP combatants assumed diverse roles, including frontline combat positions. After the signing of the agreement, they have become central actors in rebuilding social life in conflict-affected territories. Yet many of their contributions unfold far from the formal, institutional, and state-centered arenas typically emphasized in the WPS agenda. On the ground, female former combatants frequently lead productive projects, community organizations, and reconciliation initiatives. They coordinate collective work, manage resources, and mediate local disputes. Their everyday peace work – organizing meetings, sustaining households, and advocating for community needs – helps create the social conditions in which coexistence can take root. These forms of peace activism may be less visible to policy frameworks, but they are indispensable for peacebuilding.

These efforts take place despite profound challenges. continue to face serious security risks due to the presence of armed groups and ongoing disputes over territorial control, while delays in implementing reincorporation measures further strain their daily lives. On top of this, gendered expectations mean that women must often balance political engagement, community responsibilities, childcare, and the need to generate livelihoods. The overlap of these burdens highlights how their contributions to peace are made under conditions of existential precarity that are rarely acknowledged.

Despite these pressures, former FARC-EP combatants continue to sustain collective initiatives and local peacebuilding projects, often with scarce resources and limited institutional support.

ASMUPROPAZ as an Alternative Vision of Peacebuilding

One example of a collective initiative led by female ex-combatants is ASMUPROPAZ, a grassroots organization in La Montañita, Caquetá, composed of former FARC-EP members, victims, and local residents. What began as a small effort has grown into a collective project that produces aromatic plant-based essences and other local products. Beyond generating livelihoods, the initiative has become a space where trust is rebuilt through shared work, dialogue, and everyday cooperation.

Women play a central role in shaping the organization’s direction: they design ecological and agricultural projects, coordinate production, teach new skills, protect the Amazonian ecosystem, and market the products not only in nearby municipalities but also nationally. At the same time, ASMUPROPAZ challenges the assumption that peacebuilding is an exclusively female domain. Although only five of its forty-five members are men, they participate actively, cultivating crops, maintaining the processing plant, and supporting the organizational structure. This mixed-gender collaboration broadens our understanding of reconciliation, moving beyond the narrow gender binaries often reproduced in WPS programming.

Perhaps most importantly, ASMUPROPAZ demonstrates that (1) victims and former fighters can build peace together, (2) ex-combatant women are key agents of community transformation, (3) men can also contribute meaningfully to peacebuilding and to the spirit of the WPS agenda, and (4) local peacebuilding does not always follow the institutional logic emphasized by WPS frameworks. The organization’s work shows that coexistence is not an abstract aspiration, but a practice enacted daily through shared labor, collective decision-making, and relational ties. In this sense, ASMUPROPAZ represents a form of peacemaking that is deeply local, profoundly relational, and largely invisible to formal WPS measures – yet indispensable for sustainable peace in Colombia.

Rethinking WPS from the Everyday

Recognizing the agency of former combatants is essential for strengthening the WPS agenda. Their trajectories challenge long-standing assumptions about who counts as a legitimate peace actor and help to expose the gendered forms of labor that quietly sustain post-conflict reconstruction. They remind us that peace is not only negotiated in formal arenas but enacted relationally and collectively in everyday life.

The experience of ASMUPROPAZ shows that peace is being built – just not always in the places or through the actors that institutional frameworks expect. In La Montañita, former FARC-EP combatants, victims, and local residents work side by side to rebuild trust, generate livelihoods, and protect their territory. These forms of collaborative, gender-inclusive peacebuilding push beyond the victim-centered narratives that have long shaped WPS approaches. They demonstrate that women (and men) who once took up arms are now active agents of reconciliation, economic recovery, and social coexistence.

Bringing these actors into view expands the boundaries of what the WPS agenda can – and should – recognize. A feminist, context-sensitive WPS approach must take seriously the everyday practices through which peace is made durable: shared labor, collective decision-making, and relational care. Looking ahead, incorporating these experiences into policy discussions is not only analytically necessary but vital for building more grounded, inclusive, and sustainable visions of peace in Colombia and beyond.