{"id":14626,"date":"2025-12-05T10:04:48","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T09:04:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.prif.org\/?p=14626"},"modified":"2025-12-05T10:04:49","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T09:04:49","slug":"who-gets-to-mourn-rethinking-grief-resistance-and-the-everyday-politics-of-peace-in-colombia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.prif.org\/en\/2025\/12\/05\/who-gets-to-mourn-rethinking-grief-resistance-and-the-everyday-politics-of-peace-in-colombia\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Gets to Mourn? Rethinking Grief, Resistance and the Everyday Politics of Peace in Colombia"},"content":{"rendered":"

What does it mean to resist when there are no slogans, no marches, no chants, only grief? This piece argues that the Women, Peace and Security agenda\u2014despite its historic contributions\u2014has often reduced women\u2019s political agency to visibility, voice, and institutional participation. A feminist lens invites us to look beyond this framing and recognise the everyday, intimate, and affective forms of resistance through which women remember the dead, survive violence, and hold broken communities together.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Introduction: The Quiet Work of Peace<\/h2>\n

A handful of women gather<\/a> at dawn on the broad grey\u2011stone steps of the Plaza de Bol\u00edvar, in Bogot\u00e1. Each carries a well\u2011worn boot \u2014 the heavy leather boot of a young man from their hometown, executed as part of a systematic pattern of extrajudicial killings later exposed as one of Colombia\u2019s notorious \u201cFalsos Positivos<\/em>\u201d (false positives). Some boots are painted bright red; others bear messages in chalk: \u201cLa memoria no se bota\u201d<\/em> (\u201cMemory cannot be thrown away\u201d). They are the mothers of the disappeared\u2014women from Soacha\u2014bringing their grief and demands to the heart of Colombia\u2019s capital.<\/p>\n

Between 2002 and 2008, Colombia witnessed<\/a> one of the most harrowing episodes of its internal armed conflict: a systematic campaign of extrajudicial killings carried out by sections of the military. In what came to be known as the false positives<\/em>, civilian men, often from rural or marginalised urban zones, were misled or lured with promises of work to remote areas, executed, and then presented by military units as deceased guerrilla combatants. The transitional justice tribunal Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicci\u00f3n Especial para la Paz -JEP), has since documented<\/a> at least 6,402 such cases nationally.<\/p>\n

\"Public
Exhibition by the MAFAPO collective (Mothers of False Positives) entitled \u201cMujeres con las botas bien puestas\u201d (\u201cWomen with their boots firmly on\u201d).<\/a> | Photo: Ami Gueko via Wikimedia Commons<\/a> | CC0 1.0<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In moments like the quiet placing of a boot or the gathering of women between rural roots and urban protest, we see how grief becomes political. Their journey\u2014from remote memorials to the heart of power\u2014challenges the divide between margin and centre. These women carry their boots across that divide, saying: our grief belongs here, too.<\/p>\n

What if grief, then, rather than participation in formal peace processes, is one of the most consequential yet less acknowledged forms of political work that women do in post-conflict societies?<\/p>\n

By mourning in public, they transform silence into denunciation. In doing so, they invite us to reflect and rethink the Women, Peace and Security agenda, which too often centres inclusion at the negotiation table while overlooking the radical politics of those who mourn outside the gates.<\/p>\n

Since its adoption in 2000, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has made<\/a> historic strides in recognising the gendered dimensions of war and in institutionalising commitments to women\u2019s inclusion in peace processes. Yet, in its focus on visibility\u2014women at the table, women as peacebuilders, women as rights-bearing subjects<\/a>\u2014the agenda has often privileged legibility over lived experience<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Soacha mothers remind us that peace is not only made in conference rooms or courtrooms, but also in plazas, kitchens, and cemeteries. Their struggle invites us to expand the scope of WPS\u2014to attend not only to women\u2019s presence in formal processes, but to the everyday and emotionally charged terrains where peace is continually resisted, redefined, and reassembled from below.<\/p>\n

Rethinking Resistance: Civilian Agency and Feminist Disruption<\/h2>\n

Much of what we know about civilian resistance comes from studies that focus on moments of public defiance: marches, boycotts, or community expulsions of armed groups.<\/p>\n

In this blog, I want to invite the reader to consider a broader horizon of what civilian resistance can look like. Beyond marches or confrontations, resistance often takes quieter, slower, and more ambiguous forms. The refusal to legitimise state narratives, the choice to bury loved ones without waiting for official recognition, the act of remembering in ways that unsettle dominant histories.<\/p>\n

Feminist thinkers<\/a> have long asked us to shift our gaze. What if resistance isn\u2019t always loud or confrontational? What if it begins in acts of care, memory, and quiet endurance? Such feminist interventions demand that we unsettle our own categories.<\/p>\n

In the context of Colombia\u2019s armed conflict, we must ask: Is a mother\u2019s search for her disappeared son less political than a community\u2019s protest against a paramilitary roadblock? What if the very act of remembering \u2014 of insisting that a son was not a guerrillero<\/em> (guerrilla fighter), but a civilian \u2014 is a form of resistance?<\/p>\n

Women have been resisting armed and state violence in quite ways since decades \u2014 the mothers of Soacha are only one of many examples.<\/p>\n

Another powerful case is found in Bojay\u00e1, a remote, majority Afro-Colombian community in the department of Choc\u00f3, on Colombia\u2019s Pacific coast. On May 2, 2002, over a hundred civilians were killed when a FARC-launched gas cylinder bomb exploded inside a church where residents had taken refuge during clashes with paramilitaries.<\/p>\n

Afro\u2011descendant women of the Atrato basin laboured<\/a> for years to recuperate<\/a> the memory of what has been called a mala muerte<\/em> (bad death), because the victims could not perform their own mortuary rites and their bodies were dispersed, unidentified, or delivered years later. In the ceremony, Bojay\u00e1 honra a los sagrados esp\u00edritus<\/em> (Bojay\u00e1 honours the sacred spirits), held in 2019, the community offered 101 coffers, including unidentified remains, for a collective and symbolic vigil. After nearly two decades, the ritual allowed<\/a> the community to perform a proper goodbye according to their traditions.<\/p>\n

In urban\u2011adjacent contexts, similar dynamics of mourning\u2011as\u2011resistance appear, albeit in different social and spatial registers. In Medell\u00edn\u2019s Comuna 13, for example, the women known as las cuchas<\/em> (a local, affectionate term for mothers) led years-long efforts to have La Escombrera\u2014a vast rubble site\u2014recognised<\/a> as a clandestine graveyard used by paramilitary groups and the military during the early 2000s. Their struggle has taken many forms: public memorials and murals like \u201c<\/em>Las cuchas tienen raz\u00f3n<\/em><\/a>\u201d<\/em> (\u201cThe mothers are right\u201d), performative actions in public spaces, pressure on media and institutions, and tireless efforts to search for the disappeared<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rethinking the WPS Agenda: Beyond Visibility and Voice<\/h2>\n

Over the past twenty-five years, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has made important gains, recognising the gendered nature of conflict and promoting women\u2019s inclusion in negotiations, quotas, funding, and protection measures. Yet this institutional progress carries persistent blind spots: which women are included, under what terms, and at what cost to more intimate, collective, or subversive forms of political agency?<\/p>\n

The WPS agenda still operates through a politics of visibility. \u201cWomen\u2019s participation\u201d often becomes a matter of counting seats at the table or highlighting leadership in forms legible to donors and institutions. While this has value, it also privileges women already close to power or able to speak in institutional terms. In turn, quieter forms of agency\u2014mourning, care, memory work, refusal\u2014are sidelined.<\/p>\n

Consider the case of the Madres de la Escombrera<\/em> in Medell\u00edn. These women spent decades searching for their forcibly disappeared relatives, suspected to be buried beneath a rubble dump.\u00a0 Yet this kind of grief-based activism rarely fits within the performance of agency expected by the WPS framework.<\/p>\n

Similarly, in Bojay\u00e1, Afro-Colombian women turned mourning into a form of community repair. After the 2002 massacre, they spent years documenting oral histories, organising collective funerals, and developing rituals that blended ancestral spiritual practices with public political claims. Their memory work created a new moral landscape: one that refused to reduce their experience to a number in a report, and instead reclaimed the dead as sacred ancestors, as community members whose loss demanded public recognition.<\/p>\n

Grief, as these Colombian cases reveal, is not a neutral or private emotion\u2014it is a deeply political and gendered practice that can unsettle dominant narratives<\/a> of post-conflict recovery. And yet, it remains vulnerable<\/a> to co-optation, institutional instrumentalisation, or outright neglect. State transitional justice mechanisms may seek to \u201cinclude\u201d victims\u2019 voices, but often do so on highly regulated terms. Pain is allowed, even invited, but only if it fits institutional scripts of reconciliation, or contributes to official statistics. In such spaces, mourning is not heard as resistance but framed as catharsis or closure.<\/p>\n

What would peace look like if we recognised grief as political? To unlock the transformative potential of WPS, we must begin by challenging its epistemic assumptions: Who defines peace? What counts as participation? And who gets to decide what a feminist intervention looks like? Rather than expanding the existing agenda to \u201cinclude\u201d more women or more voices, we might instead ask how the entire frame could be reoriented\u2014away from visibility and toward attentiveness; away from representation and toward relationality.<\/p>\n

One possibility lies in shifting the register of WPS from reform to refusal. Drawing from the concept<\/a> of negativity as hope<\/em> (following scholar Valerie Waldow), we might see grief not as something to be processed or overcome, but as a productive political force\u2014a force that resists closure, refuses reconciliation on unjust terms, and holds space for what remains unresolved.<\/p>\n

This is not a call to abandon the WPS agenda, but to reimagine it from the margins. As Sandra Harding reminds us, the task is not to \u201cadd women and stir,\u201d but to rethink what counts as knowledge. If mourning, care, and memory are understood as forms of knowing and resisting, then peace becomes more than the absence of war\u2014it becomes the ongoing effort to name violence, confront it, and refuse its erasure.<\/p>\n

What Peace Asks of Us<\/h2>\n

In Bogot\u00e1\u2019s Plaza de Bol\u00edvar, the Madres de Soacha<\/em> lined up boots for their sons\u2014victims of the false positives<\/em>. Their silence spoke louder than protest: grief as refusal, as resistance.<\/p>\n

This image remains etched in Colombia\u2019s post-conflict memory landscape\u2014not because it was absorbed into policy or broadcasted widely, but because it refused to perform peace in the way institutions expect. The boots said: we are not moving on. We are still here. This act, like the mourning rituals of Bojay\u00e1 and the unrelenting search of the Madres de la Escombrera<\/em>, calls us to widen our lens. To rethink not only what counts as resistance, but what counts as peace.<\/p>\n

The Women, Peace and Security agenda\u2014despite its historic contributions\u2014has often reduced women\u2019s political agency to visibility, voice, and institutional participation. Yet a feminist lens reminds us that this framing overlooks the everyday, intimate, and affective labour through which many women resist violence, remember the dead, and sustain broken communities. In essay I have endeavoured to illustrate alternative modes of political agency. Whether in rural cemeteries or urban margins, whether through collective rituals or solitary care, women perform a kind of peace work that is both political and profoundly personal, yet too often invisible to the formal architectures of transitional justice, security governance, and international peacebuilding.<\/p>\n

To imagine grief as political is to imagine a WPS agenda not limited to seats at the table, but open to the politics of tending graves, naming the disappeared, and holding vigil in silence. It is to say that peace cannot be declared solely by institutions\u2014it must also be enacted in plazas, kitchens, riverbanks, and ruins.<\/p>\n

For policy makers, this means listening differently, not only to what is said but to what is withheld, repeated, embodied. It means noticing the silences that resist translation, the gestures that do not fit our coding frameworks, the truths that are spoken not in words but in rituals, photos, and scars. For activists and institutions, it means honouring the labour of those who mourn without asking them to perform resilience. It means supporting memory not as closure but as continued struggle. For those of us invested in post-conflict futures, it means recognising that care is not the opposite of politics, but its foundation.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most radical act in a post-conflict society is not to forgive, or to forget, but to grieve openly. To build memory when no one is watching. To insist on the value of every life, even when the state has tried to erase it. These are not small acts. They are the beginnings of another kind of peace\u2014slower, deeper, and more just.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What does it mean to resist when there are no slogans, no marches, no chants, only grief? This piece argues that the Women, Peace and Security agenda\u2014despite its historic contributions\u2014has often reduced women\u2019s political agency to visibility, voice, and institutional participation. A feminist lens invites us to look beyond this framing and recognise the everyday, intimate, and affective forms of resistance through which women remember the dead, survive violence, and hold broken communities together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":426,"featured_media":14623,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1427,1125,1091],"tags":[1196,1209,1194,1379],"coauthors":[1459],"class_list":["post-14626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-25-years-of-women-peace-and-security","category-english-en","category-feminist-peace-research","tag-colombia","tag-gender-en","tag-peace-process","tag-wps-en"],"acf":[],"views":395,"yoast_head":"\nWho Gets to Mourn? 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