Panel discussion: Colombia's Peace Agreement: Challenges of Implementation

Grace Livingstone (ILAS), Nick Morgan (Newcastle), Louise Winstanley (ABColombia). Chair: Par Engstrom (UCL Americas) - This event offers an opportunity to take stock of the many challenges facing the implementation phase of the recently concluded peace agreement between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC) in Colombia.

Organised shortly after the scheduled plebiscite on Sunday 2 October, this panel discussion with three renowned experts on the longstanding Colombian armed conflict and its multifaceted drivers and consequences will provide an assessment of the election result, as well as reflections on what ‘peace’ may mean for Colombian society. 

Central areas of the peace agreements to be covered include Colombia’s drug economy, regional dimensions of peace and conflict, gender aspects of the peace agreement, as well as the innovative approaches to the peace talks that made the agreement possible.

Dr Grace Livingstone is a research fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, and teaches at the Centre of Latin American Studies, Cambridge. She is also a journalist and has reported for the BBC World Service, The Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and The Observer. She is the author of Inside Colombia: Drugs, Democracy and War and America’s Backyard: Latin America and the United States from the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Drugs. She recently contributed a chapter on drugs and criminal organisations to the Routledge Handbook on South American Governance which will be published in 2017.

Dr Nick Morgan is Director of the MA in Latin American Interdisciplinary Studies at Newcastle University. His work has focused on political discourse, the politics of race, and participatory democracy in Colombia. For the last five years he has been engaged in ethnographic work on community organisation and political culture in Quibdó in the department of Chocó on the Pacific coast. In November 2015 and March 2016 he carried out pilot work in Colombia with a team of researchers from the UK and Colombia as part of a major comparative study of the local imaginaries of conflict and post-conflict in Colombia, Northern Ireland, Argentina, Indonesia and Algeria.

Louise Winstanley is the Programme and Advocacy Manager of ABColombia, the advocacy platform of 5 major British and Irish development agencies working in Colombia. Louise has worked on the issues of human rights and sustainable development in Colombia for the last 12 years, two of which were spent working in-country. She has an MSc in Globalisation and Latin American Development.

Dr Par Engstrom is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at UCL Institute of the Americas and co-chair of the London Transitional Justice Network.

This event is co-organised by UCL Institute of the Americas and London Transitional Justice Network