Article

Colombian President Santos's government and the leftist guerrilla group, the FARC, have led three years of peace negotiations to end the half-century long internal conflict. Not surprisingly, "peace" and its significance have emerged as loci of debate in all sectors of political and social life. This work draws on hegemonic discourses and ethnographic research among conflict affected actors in the department of Caquetá in order to analyze a core site of contestation: the sequencing of peace in relation to other domains of sociopoliticial and economic well-being. the article finds that the state articulates these other areas of citizen life as contingent upon achieving peace, while citizens believe that peace will only come once there are changes in these other domains. The article argues that competing representations in this domain comprise the processes through which key state actors work to set the terms for a very particular kind of Colombian posacuerdo subject.