In Feel the Grass Grow, Angela Lederach explores peacebuilding in the rural communities of Alta Montaña in the Montes de María region of Caribbean Colombia. This region was heavily affected by the Colombian internal armed conflict, especially during the 1990s, when leftist guerrillas, rightwing paramilitaries, and the national army fought to gain control of this strategic territory. Carefully written, this ethnography is based on extensive fieldwork and builds on feminist, postcolonial, posthumanist, and PAR (participatory action research) approaches to peacebuilding. The author proposes a theory for slow peace aimed at amplifying the voice of campesinos, highlighting their grassroots processes of communal organizing and resistencia campesina, especially during the implementation of state-run peace programs after the 2016 Peace Accord with the FARC guerrillas. Slow peace foregrounds relational, place-based, and affective practices, contrasting with technocratic approaches, usually “hasty” and liable for obscuring grassroots processes. The tensions and divergent ideas about “the times” in slow peace and technocratic peace constitute a “temporal politics” that build the core discussions in the book. The monograph is divided into seven chapters, which are compiled in three parts: Living Memories, Hurry, and Slow Peace.
The first part, Living Memories, sets the ground for understanding the history and cultural positioning of campesino leaders in Montes de María, arguing that peacebuilding processes are not tied to official peace accords, but rather to an ancestral history of resistance dating back to the colonial period. Chapter 1 focuses on campesinos’ multigenerational and posthumanist lens to understand constellations of power and recurring patterns of violence, given that today’s leaders are heirs to older processes of communal organizing and campesino resistance. Chapter 2 presents the ecological imagination of campesinos, according to which the territory is a living entity and all beings that inhabit it deserve care and respect. By describing the case of the death of the avocado forest—the main economic resource in Alta Montaña—Lederach characterizes the formation of the Pacific Process of Reconciliation and Integration in Alta Montaña, a key grassroots regional peacebuilding organization. Local indigenous place-thought sparks tensions with dominant ideas from the agribusiness industry, which sees campesinos as lacking technical knowledge. Therefore, agribusiness people aim at implementing hasty profit-driven projects for rural development without proper mechanisms of community participation.
By characterizing prisa (hurry) as a dominant and colonial approach through which the institucionalidad—alliances between NGOs, INGOs, private companies, and the state—imposes projects on victims of the armed conflict with the aim of demonstrating effectiveness, Part 2 of the book presents a political economy of peacebuilding. In this scenario, the temporal perspectives of communal leaders and outside peace workers stand in radical opposition and tension with each other, which often perpetuates violence. Chapter 3, “Photos and Signatures,” discusses spectacles of peace as contested performances that are key for the state to frame its interactions with campesino leaders. The extraction of photos and signatures on attendance sheets during sparse monthly meetings works as a way of obscuring a lack of intention to generate appropriate spaces for participation and dialogue, enabling deficiency narratives that see campesinos as lacking the organizational capacity to implement the peace projects themselves. This critique spans into chapter 4, where Lederach explores the case of the 2017 ñame (yam) crisis and questions the practices, technologies, and relations that shape the temporalities of prisa. In this case, a hasty and careless reparation project to mitigate the death of the avocado forest led to hyperproduction and an increased economic crisis. Failure of these orphan projects lies in the fact that they arrive suddenly and then disappear, not in accordance to the campesino times.
The third part of the book explores in detail a theory for slow peace, based on the worldview of campesino leaders in Montes de María and the sociohistorical practices and processes they have led. In chapter 5, the author argues that campesino leaders conceive of time as historically situated and relationally constituted, instead of as a quantifiable measure. This assumption leads Lederach to conclude that the technical times of the institucionalidad tend to erase the regional histories of political violence, leading to tensions between the technical and the political, a dichotomy later portrayed as “projects vs. processes.” By underlining a particular way of existing—moving slowly, being attentive, sensitive, and wakeful towards the territory—chapter 6 outlines grassroots processes of sustained dialogue and participation that have facilitated decades-long organizational processes. The author does so by portraying a regional process of coalition-building that stands in radical opposition to the politics of prisa, thereby highlighting two core ideas: participation as “voice and vote” and the method of learning by doing. Chapter 7 rounds up the idea of slow peace by breaking down the author’s understanding of an ethics of attention and the ideas of accompaniment and wake work. She does so by characterizing the work of JOPPAZ, a regional grassroots youth leaders’ peacebuilding organization that embodies slow peace work in Alta Montaña.
The book’s concluding remarks sum up the three main concepts that sustain it and its slow peace theory. First, the idea that more emancipatory approaches to peacebuilding should shift their perspective from “projects to processes.” Second, that a decolonial peace practice requires “critical attunement to the times.” And last, that peacebuilding practice would benefit from a relational approach that accounts for a multispecies awareness and the idea of learning by doing. In general, this is an excellent ethnographic account of grassroots peace processes in Caribbean Colombia from a postcolonial, posthumanist, and postdevelopmentalist perspective. The monograph is useful, not only to peace scholars, but also to anthropologists, sociologists, and researchers interested in international aid and development programs.
--------
[Review length: 931 words • Review posted on April 2, 2025]