Embrace Dialogue Academia Seminar 1: Book Launch
Dialogues bridging academic research with policy implications for contemporary peacebuilding challenges in Colombia
Inaugural Seminar and Book Launch: Peace and Rural Development in Colombia: The Window for Distributive Change in Negotiated Transitions (Routledge, 2020), by Andrés García Trujillo
This new series of Embrace Dialogue Academia Seminars, co-hosted by Embrace Dialogue and Merton College brings together presentations of finished academic research with discussions to draw out the implications of this work for the current challenges of peacebuilding in Colombia.
Author: Dr Andrés García Trujillo, Research Associate, Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT); Lecturer in Economics, Universidad Externado de Colombia; & former advisor to the Colombian government on the peace process.
Discussant: Professor Nazih Richani, Associate Professor and Director of Latin American Studies, Political Science Department, Kean University.
Convener: Dr Gwen Burnyeat, Junior Research Fellow in Anthropology at Merton College and member of Embrace Dialogue.
About the Book
In Peace and Rural Development in Colombia Andrés García Trujillo investigates whether peace agreements geared toward terminating internal armed conflicts trigger rural distributive changes.
Combining academic rigour with an insider’s perspective, García Trujillo shows that the peace agreement in Colombia opened an exceptional window for addressing rural inequality. Yet, despite some progress, he argues that the agreement’s leverage to stir change was severely constrained by opposing actors within and outside the government. García Trujillo later applies the framework developed for the Colombian case to explain key dynamics of other post-conflict societies that have dealt with agrarian issues under a transitional context, like El Salvador or South Africa.
The original theoretical framework and empirically rich analysis make Peace and Rural Development in Colombia an indispensable read for scholars and practitioners who wish to gain an understanding on the political economy of peacemaking, policy change, and rural development in Colombia and beyond.
