(Non)violent Liberation and Politics: Fanon and Colombia’s Peace Community

Frantz Fanon is most often associated with theories of anti-colonial liberation through armed struggle. Yet scholars have typically neglected to analyze his post-colonial program for social justice and its lessons for nonviolent movements. Building from a close reading of Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, this paper uses Fanon’s political program as an analytical framework to examine an emblematic peace initiative in Colombia. For more than two decades in the war-torn Urabá region, the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó has eschewed armed struggle and refused collaboration with guerrilla, state and paramilitary forces. Despite suffering massacres and repeated forced displacements, these small-scale farmers continue to resist in eleven villages. In this paper, I trace the parallels between a) Fanon’s insistence upon a shift from a reactive national consciousness to an assertive social consciousness and b) San José’s practice of peace through community work and solidarity networks. I also signal political divergences between the Peace Community and Fanon, which I argue are indicative of the conjunctural shift from anti-colonialism to alter-globalization. Putting San José’s peace praxis into conversation with Fanon, this paper analyzes the dynamics of social movement peacebuilding with respect to state vs. autonomist politics.