In Making Peace with Property, Meghan L. Morris investigates the role of property in armed conflict and peacemaking in Colombia. Property is widely understood to be a root cause of Colombia’s decades-long civil war, and the reordering of property has become both a necessity for and obstacle to peace. Drawing on ethnographic research, legal studies, and historical analysis, Morris examines two of Colombia’s major property reordering projects: one designed to return land to people displaced by war, and another that aspired to overcome a violent past through equitable urban planning. These projects excavated traces of past conflicts to determine truths that would ground property allocation in a future peace. Morris shows how land claims and property disputes facilitate reconfigurations of natural and social worlds and a broad reimagination of political possibility, even as promised horizons of peace continually recede into the future.

Meghan L. Morris is Associate Professor of Law and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Temple University.

Acknowledgments  vii
Preface  xiii
Introduction  1
1. Speculative Fields  40
2. Territories in Dispute  78
3. Soil Conflicts  117
4. Levantamientos  151
5. City for Life  183
Epilogue  222
Notes  233
References  251
Index