Making Peace with Property: Traces of Post-Conflict Colombia

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 reimagining of political possibility, even as promised horizons of peace continually recede into the future.