Colombia has a decades-long history of internal armed conflict, during which there has always been talk of peace. The Peace Agreement between the Colombian state and the FARC, the country's oldest guerrilla group, was the latest milestone in the long history of peace processes in the South American country. However, seven years later and in the face of internal conflict and ongoing violence, peace is once again a promise of a better future, even though, a distant prospect on the political horizon. The recurrent and never-concluding peace negotiations raise the question of whether the various discourses and concepts related to peace in Colombia should not themselves be considered part of the problem. In this research project, from a critical and propositional perspective, a discursive approach and ethnographic elements are combined to demystify peace from its problematic promise of universality and salvation, examining it in the light of a concrete social reality. Peace is understood as a historical and political (discursive) field on which, first, a topography is elaborated, locating different branches and actors of the discourse according to the degree of centrality or peripherality of their position. In a second step, this analysis is related and contrasted with a concrete social context through the voices of women and their daughters and granddaughters, who are all direct and indirect victims of the armed conflict. For this purpose, field research was carried out with the residents of ‘Plaza de la Hoja’ in Bogotá, a residential complex built for persons displaced in the context of the armed conflict. The research shows, on the one hand, how in post-conflict contexts such as Plaza de la Hoja certain mechanisms of coexistence marked by the legacy of the armed conflict persist. On the other hand, it highlights how, from a peripheral, 'imperfect' and relational perspective, these same spaces offer an alternative vision of peace with a transformative potential to the academic and political discourse in Colombia.
