Peacebuilding Amidst Violence and Harm: Rural Women's (Infra)Political Practices in Bajo Cauca (Colombia)

Peace is a contested terrain and peacebuilding an inherently political process. As such, peacebuilding is continuously shaped by power struggles, competing visions of social order, and negotiations, across all the different levels of socio-political life. This paper focuses on the grassroots level as it examines the (infra)political lives of rural women victims of Colombia’s armed conflict in the Bajo Cauca subregion. It explores how some of their ordinary practices, often overlooked or dismissed as non-political, constitute meaningful acts of peacebuilding. Drawing on materials collected during extensive fieldwork in 2024 and 2025, it asks: in a context shaped by enduring violence, fragile transition, and shifting armed dynamics, what does the (infra)political life of rural women look like, and to what extent does it challenge entrenched power structures? The concept of (infra)political, understood as both explicit and implicit practices geared towards achieving a specific form of social organisation or collective identity, provides a lens to analyse how women engage in peacebuilding through everyday actions. Attention to infrapolitics reveals that much of the participants’ political life unfolds in subtle and dispersed ways, amounting to what Donahoe (2017) terms “slow peace”. I demonstrate that infrapolitical and political actions form a continuum through which women “remake a world” during and after violence (Das et al., 2001). Through a feminist and intersectional framework, this work centres women’s agency in reconfiguring political life from below, challenging top-down and technocratic understandings of peace. It shows how women’s everyday actions reveal alternative forms of citizenship and community-making that confront patriarchal norms and challenge the domination exercised by state institutions, international actors, and armed groups. Donahoe, A. E. (2017). Peacebuilding through women’s community development: Wee women’s work in Northern Ireland. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Das, V., Kleinman, A., Lock, M., Ramphele, M., & Reynolds, P. (Eds). (2001). Remaking a world: Violence, social suffering, and recovery. Univ. of California Press.