Christopher Courtheyn | Boise State University (original) (raw)
Papers by Christopher Courtheyn
Political Geography, 2024
Calls for decolonizing theory, knowledge, methods, and the university have taken hold of academia... more Calls for decolonizing theory, knowledge, methods, and the university have taken hold of academia. However, critics have pointed out that these projects are primarily located in the global North and distanced from actual political struggles. This paper proposes a way to disaggregate different elements of the North and evaluate the "decolonization" potential in relation to broader anticolonial political geographies. We define the North as an orientation toward the capitalist-colonial world and Northness as a relational property along three axes of geographical location, social position, and institutional vocation. Applying this, we review historic trends in decolonization thought by using a stylistic scheme of three southern ruptures: resistance to colonial conquest, postcolonial arrivals into the Northern academy, and transnational convergence. This analytical lens cautions against giving primacy to issues of marginalized social position over geographic location and institutional vocation, while also offering a political economic focus on postcolonial engagements with anticolonial politics. We call for attending to the current conjuncture characterized by increasing decolonial discourse alongside southern ruination by aligning epistemic endeavors with social movement struggle.
Geopolitics, 2023
This article presents a decolonial feminist geopolitics of Venezuelan migration to Colombia, with... more This article presents a decolonial feminist geopolitics of Venezuelan migration to Colombia, with Venezuelans fleeing the socialist Bolivarian Revolution and then facing discrimination and violence upon settling in capitalist Colombia amid its failing peace process context. Conflicts over migration and nationality permeate our global order of sovereign nationstates, both in north-south migrations and across the global south, while the feminisation and racialisation of migrants divides the subaltern class and facilitates capitalist exploitation. However, this paper elucidates migrants' international solidarities and grassroots peace struggles. Community organisers along the Colombia-Venezuela border-the women's empowerment organisation Tejedores de Paz and youth leadership foundation Horizonte de Juventud-unite impoverished internally-displaced Colombians and Venezuelan immigrants to create resistance territories against xenophobia, patriarchy, and poverty. Illustrating the utility of the methodology of decolonial feminist geopolitics, I trace the reconfiguration of the spirit of sociopolitical revolution in South America through migrants' emergent form of feminist non-state socialism.
Third World Quarterly, 2023
While illicit crops like the coca leaf can be vehicles of conflict and income for armed groups ac... more While illicit crops like the coca leaf can be vehicles of conflict and income for armed groups across the Global South, this article reveals that coca has alternative uses based on its nutritional and cultural value. Drawing on the experience of the Territory of Conviviality and Peace of Lerma in Colombia, the country’s first community to receive state authorisation to experiment with coca for non-alkaloid purposes, we ponder whether coca can be a catalyst for peace. Lerma has been a large coca producer for decades, which enveloped it in relations of subordination and exploitation tied to illicit economies and armed conflict. Based on qualitative research over a six-year period, we analyse Lerma’s project to overcome capitalist logics driving peasant dispossession through Colombian history and intra-community violence by diverging from production for the drug economy in favour of agroecological coca. In conjunction with other community-based programmes, Lerma’s production of organic coca as part of its food sovereignty project suggests a process of decolonial peace at work, whereby the community breaks from oppressions tied to the rule of armed groups and capitalist markets. This reveals the ecological dimensions of peace, which requires community organising and sustainable relations between humans and land.
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2019
Despite the institution of multicultural policies and pluriethnic governments across Latin Americ... more Despite the institution of multicultural policies and pluriethnic governments across Latin America, racist violence against Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups persists. Yet the racial facets of violence against non-ethnic campesinos remain unexplored. Integrating scholarship on race as a global structure and Latin American racial formations, I offer an account of racialization in Colombia. This article analyzes the racial dynamics of resistance to extractivism in Colombia’s Campesino University, uniting Indigenous and campesino groups like the San José de Apartadó Peace Community. While the dominant race lexicon separates “campesinos” like San José’s peasants from “Indigenous” and “Black” groups, I argue that the identifier campesino mestizo hides how San José’s farmers were “de- indigenized” yet remain racialized as the less-than-human “Indigenous savage”. If racialization works to dominate but also divide the subaltern, then Campesino University participants’ cross-ethnic solidarity network against what they affirm is a shared experience of racist violence both unveils and counters racism.
Progress in Human Geography, 2018
The emerging peace geographies subfield has made significant contributions to peace research by s... more The emerging peace geographies subfield has made significant contributions to peace research by showing how peace is a contested spatial process and political discourse. This article integrates peace geographies with the until now ignored trans-rational 'many peaces' framework's exploration of an even wider range of peace imaginaries. Yet some forms exacerbate rather than provide alternatives to intersectional violences pervasive in today's world. I argue for a normative framework to evaluate the 'plurality of the peaces' illuminated by these subfields, proposing 'radical trans-relational peace' – ecological dignity and solidarity through trans-community networks – as a geographically and politically situated conception to analyze the 'many peaces'.
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2018
Scholars are increasingly re-theorizing territory beyond the nation-state given Indigenous and Af... more Scholars are increasingly re-theorizing territory beyond the nation-state given Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups’ demands for ‘territory’ as they confront land grabbing in Latin America. Yet alternative territorialities are not limited to such ethnic groups. Based on 16 months of ethnographic research between 2011 and 2016, I explore the relational territoriality produced by a peasant ‘peace community’ in San José de Apartadó, Colombia. By tracing the collective political subject produced by the Peace Community’s active production of peace through a set of spatial practices, places and values, which include massacre commemorations, food sovereignty initiatives and Indigenous–peasant solidarity networks, this contribution presents a conceptual framework for analyzing diverse territorial formations.
Polisemia, 2016
Este artículo de investigación problematiza el concepto de paz a partir de su concepción y prácti... more Este artículo de investigación problematiza el concepto de paz a partir de su concepción y práctica en la Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó, Colombia. Se basa en 16 meses de investigación etnográfica en Colombia entre 2011 y 2016, incluyendo 49 entrevistas con miembros de la Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó y otras organizaciones. Al definir y crear la paz, como al negarse a colaborar con los grupos armados y la construcción de comunidad a través del trabajo colectivo esta experiencia campesina encarna una perspectiva activa y empoderada de la paz en lugar de depender
de lo que deberían hacer el Estado y los grupos armados. En conversación con los nuevos subcampos de estudios de paz en geografía, y las investigaciones sobre Trans-rational peace, se aboga por una conceptualización de paz como la construcción de vida digna en las redes de solidaridad de las comunidades en resistencia que contrarresta las violencias interseccionales de la crisis ecológica de la modernidad.
Social & Cultural Geography, 2016
Scholars have shown how memory is an embodied and spatial practice that potentially generates mor... more Scholars have shown how memory is an embodied and spatial practice that potentially generates more just possible futures, and that peace is a politicized and contextually speci c process, but how does place-based memory performance actually contribute to social movements’ construction of peace? This article explores massacre commemoration pilgrimages and stones painted with victims’ names in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, a group of small- scale farmers living in the war-torn region of Urabá, Colombia. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in Colombia from 2011 to 2014, including participant observation and 49 interviews, I explore the relationship between these spatially embodied practices and the community’s resistance to forced displacement and peace-building project. I argue that these forms of memorialization cultivate key elements for an autonomist ‘other politics’, including solidarity with allies; mobilizing bodies across space to defend life and land; and ongoing re ection, education and strategic planning that strengthen community cohesion and organization. Integrating scholarship on memory performance, peace geographies, and social movements, I illustrate how the San José de Apartadó Peace Community’s massacre commemorations and stones reject vindictive violence and instead build an alternative, transformative and emancipatory politics through internal and external solidarity.
Books by Christopher Courtheyn
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022
Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations. Yet... more Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations. Yet it also happens at the grassroots level, where communities envision and create peace on their own. The San José de Apartadó Peace Community of small-scale farmers has not waited for a top-down peace treaty. Instead, they have actively resisted forced displacement and co-optation by guerrillas, army soldiers, and paramilitaries for two decades in Colombia’s war-torn Urabá region. Based on ethnographic action research over a twelve-year period, Christopher Courtheyn illuminates the community’s understandings of peace and territorial practices against ongoing assassinations and displacement. San José’s peace through autonomy reflects an alternative to traditional modes of politics practiced through electoral representation and armed struggle. Courtheyn explores the meaning of peace and territory, while also interrogating the role of race in Colombia’s war and the relationship between memory and peace. Amid the widespread violence of today’s global crisis, Community of Peace illustrates San José’s rupture from the logics of colonialism and capitalism through the construction of political solidarity and communal peace.
Editorial Universidad del Rosario, 2022
Es frecuente concebir la consecución de la paz como resultado de operaciones militares o negociac... more Es frecuente concebir la consecución de la paz como resultado de operaciones militares o negociaciones adelantadas por el Estado. No obstante, los procesos que llevan a alcanzar la paz también tienen lugar en organizaciones de base, entre las cuales existen comunidades que imaginan y configuran la paz por sus propios medios. La Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó, una organización campesina, no esperó a que un acuerdo de paz fuera producido por la acción de las altas esferas del poder. En contraste, sus miembros se han resistido activamente al desplazamiento forzado y a la coerción que sobre ellos han querido ejercer guerrilleros, Ejército Nacional y paramilitares durante dos décadas en Urabá, una región devastada por la guerra en Colombia. A partir de una etnografía sustentada en métodos de investigación-acción, efectuada a lo largo de doce años, Christopher Courtheyn arroja luz sobre la interpretación que los miembros de la Comunidad dan a la paz y sobre sus prácticas territoriales para afrontar los constantes desplazamientos y masacres que han padecido. La paz de los campesinos de San José, sustentada en la autonomía comunitaria, constituye una alternativa a formas tradicionales de política practicada mediante la representación electoral y la lucha armada. Courtheyn explora el significado de la paz y el territorio, al tiempo que interroga el papel de la raza en la guerra colombiana y la relación entre memoria y paz. En medio de la violencia generalizada que caracteriza a la crisis global actual, Comunidad de Paz ilustra cómo San José ha roto con lógicas del colonialismo y del capitalismo mediante la construcción de solidaridad política y paz comunitaria.
Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios, 2021
El libro que hoy se pone a disposición de los lectores de la academia y de las comunidades es un... more El libro que hoy se pone a disposición de los lectores de la academia y de las comunidades es un producto colectivo, resultado de investigaciones situadas en dos territorios (localidad de Engativá en Bogotá y sur del departamento de Bolívar) y realizadas por un equipo de trabajo del grupo de investigación Ciudadanía, Paz y Desarrollo de la Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios (uniminuto) que tuvieron como objetivo avanzar en la comprensión de las conexiones entre lo común y los bienes comunes, por un lado, y la paz por el otro.
Political Geography, 2024
Calls for decolonizing theory, knowledge, methods, and the university have taken hold of academia... more Calls for decolonizing theory, knowledge, methods, and the university have taken hold of academia. However, critics have pointed out that these projects are primarily located in the global North and distanced from actual political struggles. This paper proposes a way to disaggregate different elements of the North and evaluate the "decolonization" potential in relation to broader anticolonial political geographies. We define the North as an orientation toward the capitalist-colonial world and Northness as a relational property along three axes of geographical location, social position, and institutional vocation. Applying this, we review historic trends in decolonization thought by using a stylistic scheme of three southern ruptures: resistance to colonial conquest, postcolonial arrivals into the Northern academy, and transnational convergence. This analytical lens cautions against giving primacy to issues of marginalized social position over geographic location and institutional vocation, while also offering a political economic focus on postcolonial engagements with anticolonial politics. We call for attending to the current conjuncture characterized by increasing decolonial discourse alongside southern ruination by aligning epistemic endeavors with social movement struggle.
Geopolitics, 2023
This article presents a decolonial feminist geopolitics of Venezuelan migration to Colombia, with... more This article presents a decolonial feminist geopolitics of Venezuelan migration to Colombia, with Venezuelans fleeing the socialist Bolivarian Revolution and then facing discrimination and violence upon settling in capitalist Colombia amid its failing peace process context. Conflicts over migration and nationality permeate our global order of sovereign nationstates, both in north-south migrations and across the global south, while the feminisation and racialisation of migrants divides the subaltern class and facilitates capitalist exploitation. However, this paper elucidates migrants' international solidarities and grassroots peace struggles. Community organisers along the Colombia-Venezuela border-the women's empowerment organisation Tejedores de Paz and youth leadership foundation Horizonte de Juventud-unite impoverished internally-displaced Colombians and Venezuelan immigrants to create resistance territories against xenophobia, patriarchy, and poverty. Illustrating the utility of the methodology of decolonial feminist geopolitics, I trace the reconfiguration of the spirit of sociopolitical revolution in South America through migrants' emergent form of feminist non-state socialism.
Third World Quarterly, 2023
While illicit crops like the coca leaf can be vehicles of conflict and income for armed groups ac... more While illicit crops like the coca leaf can be vehicles of conflict and income for armed groups across the Global South, this article reveals that coca has alternative uses based on its nutritional and cultural value. Drawing on the experience of the Territory of Conviviality and Peace of Lerma in Colombia, the country’s first community to receive state authorisation to experiment with coca for non-alkaloid purposes, we ponder whether coca can be a catalyst for peace. Lerma has been a large coca producer for decades, which enveloped it in relations of subordination and exploitation tied to illicit economies and armed conflict. Based on qualitative research over a six-year period, we analyse Lerma’s project to overcome capitalist logics driving peasant dispossession through Colombian history and intra-community violence by diverging from production for the drug economy in favour of agroecological coca. In conjunction with other community-based programmes, Lerma’s production of organic coca as part of its food sovereignty project suggests a process of decolonial peace at work, whereby the community breaks from oppressions tied to the rule of armed groups and capitalist markets. This reveals the ecological dimensions of peace, which requires community organising and sustainable relations between humans and land.
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2019
Despite the institution of multicultural policies and pluriethnic governments across Latin Americ... more Despite the institution of multicultural policies and pluriethnic governments across Latin America, racist violence against Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups persists. Yet the racial facets of violence against non-ethnic campesinos remain unexplored. Integrating scholarship on race as a global structure and Latin American racial formations, I offer an account of racialization in Colombia. This article analyzes the racial dynamics of resistance to extractivism in Colombia’s Campesino University, uniting Indigenous and campesino groups like the San José de Apartadó Peace Community. While the dominant race lexicon separates “campesinos” like San José’s peasants from “Indigenous” and “Black” groups, I argue that the identifier campesino mestizo hides how San José’s farmers were “de- indigenized” yet remain racialized as the less-than-human “Indigenous savage”. If racialization works to dominate but also divide the subaltern, then Campesino University participants’ cross-ethnic solidarity network against what they affirm is a shared experience of racist violence both unveils and counters racism.
Progress in Human Geography, 2018
The emerging peace geographies subfield has made significant contributions to peace research by s... more The emerging peace geographies subfield has made significant contributions to peace research by showing how peace is a contested spatial process and political discourse. This article integrates peace geographies with the until now ignored trans-rational 'many peaces' framework's exploration of an even wider range of peace imaginaries. Yet some forms exacerbate rather than provide alternatives to intersectional violences pervasive in today's world. I argue for a normative framework to evaluate the 'plurality of the peaces' illuminated by these subfields, proposing 'radical trans-relational peace' – ecological dignity and solidarity through trans-community networks – as a geographically and politically situated conception to analyze the 'many peaces'.
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2018
Scholars are increasingly re-theorizing territory beyond the nation-state given Indigenous and Af... more Scholars are increasingly re-theorizing territory beyond the nation-state given Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups’ demands for ‘territory’ as they confront land grabbing in Latin America. Yet alternative territorialities are not limited to such ethnic groups. Based on 16 months of ethnographic research between 2011 and 2016, I explore the relational territoriality produced by a peasant ‘peace community’ in San José de Apartadó, Colombia. By tracing the collective political subject produced by the Peace Community’s active production of peace through a set of spatial practices, places and values, which include massacre commemorations, food sovereignty initiatives and Indigenous–peasant solidarity networks, this contribution presents a conceptual framework for analyzing diverse territorial formations.
Polisemia, 2016
Este artículo de investigación problematiza el concepto de paz a partir de su concepción y prácti... more Este artículo de investigación problematiza el concepto de paz a partir de su concepción y práctica en la Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó, Colombia. Se basa en 16 meses de investigación etnográfica en Colombia entre 2011 y 2016, incluyendo 49 entrevistas con miembros de la Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó y otras organizaciones. Al definir y crear la paz, como al negarse a colaborar con los grupos armados y la construcción de comunidad a través del trabajo colectivo esta experiencia campesina encarna una perspectiva activa y empoderada de la paz en lugar de depender
de lo que deberían hacer el Estado y los grupos armados. En conversación con los nuevos subcampos de estudios de paz en geografía, y las investigaciones sobre Trans-rational peace, se aboga por una conceptualización de paz como la construcción de vida digna en las redes de solidaridad de las comunidades en resistencia que contrarresta las violencias interseccionales de la crisis ecológica de la modernidad.
Social & Cultural Geography, 2016
Scholars have shown how memory is an embodied and spatial practice that potentially generates mor... more Scholars have shown how memory is an embodied and spatial practice that potentially generates more just possible futures, and that peace is a politicized and contextually speci c process, but how does place-based memory performance actually contribute to social movements’ construction of peace? This article explores massacre commemoration pilgrimages and stones painted with victims’ names in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, a group of small- scale farmers living in the war-torn region of Urabá, Colombia. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in Colombia from 2011 to 2014, including participant observation and 49 interviews, I explore the relationship between these spatially embodied practices and the community’s resistance to forced displacement and peace-building project. I argue that these forms of memorialization cultivate key elements for an autonomist ‘other politics’, including solidarity with allies; mobilizing bodies across space to defend life and land; and ongoing re ection, education and strategic planning that strengthen community cohesion and organization. Integrating scholarship on memory performance, peace geographies, and social movements, I illustrate how the San José de Apartadó Peace Community’s massacre commemorations and stones reject vindictive violence and instead build an alternative, transformative and emancipatory politics through internal and external solidarity.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022
Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations. Yet... more Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations. Yet it also happens at the grassroots level, where communities envision and create peace on their own. The San José de Apartadó Peace Community of small-scale farmers has not waited for a top-down peace treaty. Instead, they have actively resisted forced displacement and co-optation by guerrillas, army soldiers, and paramilitaries for two decades in Colombia’s war-torn Urabá region. Based on ethnographic action research over a twelve-year period, Christopher Courtheyn illuminates the community’s understandings of peace and territorial practices against ongoing assassinations and displacement. San José’s peace through autonomy reflects an alternative to traditional modes of politics practiced through electoral representation and armed struggle. Courtheyn explores the meaning of peace and territory, while also interrogating the role of race in Colombia’s war and the relationship between memory and peace. Amid the widespread violence of today’s global crisis, Community of Peace illustrates San José’s rupture from the logics of colonialism and capitalism through the construction of political solidarity and communal peace.
Editorial Universidad del Rosario, 2022
Es frecuente concebir la consecución de la paz como resultado de operaciones militares o negociac... more Es frecuente concebir la consecución de la paz como resultado de operaciones militares o negociaciones adelantadas por el Estado. No obstante, los procesos que llevan a alcanzar la paz también tienen lugar en organizaciones de base, entre las cuales existen comunidades que imaginan y configuran la paz por sus propios medios. La Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó, una organización campesina, no esperó a que un acuerdo de paz fuera producido por la acción de las altas esferas del poder. En contraste, sus miembros se han resistido activamente al desplazamiento forzado y a la coerción que sobre ellos han querido ejercer guerrilleros, Ejército Nacional y paramilitares durante dos décadas en Urabá, una región devastada por la guerra en Colombia. A partir de una etnografía sustentada en métodos de investigación-acción, efectuada a lo largo de doce años, Christopher Courtheyn arroja luz sobre la interpretación que los miembros de la Comunidad dan a la paz y sobre sus prácticas territoriales para afrontar los constantes desplazamientos y masacres que han padecido. La paz de los campesinos de San José, sustentada en la autonomía comunitaria, constituye una alternativa a formas tradicionales de política practicada mediante la representación electoral y la lucha armada. Courtheyn explora el significado de la paz y el territorio, al tiempo que interroga el papel de la raza en la guerra colombiana y la relación entre memoria y paz. En medio de la violencia generalizada que caracteriza a la crisis global actual, Comunidad de Paz ilustra cómo San José ha roto con lógicas del colonialismo y del capitalismo mediante la construcción de solidaridad política y paz comunitaria.
Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios, 2021
El libro que hoy se pone a disposición de los lectores de la academia y de las comunidades es un... more El libro que hoy se pone a disposición de los lectores de la academia y de las comunidades es un producto colectivo, resultado de investigaciones situadas en dos territorios (localidad de Engativá en Bogotá y sur del departamento de Bolívar) y realizadas por un equipo de trabajo del grupo de investigación Ciudadanía, Paz y Desarrollo de la Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios (uniminuto) que tuvieron como objetivo avanzar en la comprensión de las conexiones entre lo común y los bienes comunes, por un lado, y la paz por el otro.