Slow Peace: Three Lessons from Grassroots Peacebuilders in Colombia

As I traversed the everyday landscapes of campesino peacebuilding, I began to realize that the call to “slowness” does not negate the pressing needs that animate the collective struggle for peace in Colombia. There is, in fact, a fierce urgency in the campesino call to slow down, take notice, and tend territorial relations of care in the wake of violence. Grassroots peacebuilders do not limit their understanding of time to speed (acceleration and deceleration) or duration (short and long-term frameworks). Instead, slowness is understood as a mode of attention and practice of presence. Slow peace offers a relational framework that locates peacebuilding as a multigenerational, multispecies, and permanent process to cultivate a more just and livable world.