How to build real peace

From Colombia to Syria, I’ve seen that capitalist logic can’t help to rebuild postwar countries but cooperatives can

In Rojava, a formerly autonomous region in northeastern Syria, August 2017. Photo by Jade Sacker/NurPhoto/Getty Images

is an associate professor in politics and economics at the Mora Institute in Mexico City. Originally from Kurdistan, she has a master’s degree in development economics from Marmara University, Turkey and a PhD in sociology from the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP), Mexico. She is the author of Anticapitalist Economy in Rojava: The Contradictions of Revolution in the Kurdish Struggles (2023).

Edited byAlizeh Kohari

When I was seven years old, my family was forced to flee escalating violence. We left Bakur – a Kurdish region in what is currently southeastern Turkey – for a city further west, where we worked in Turkish fields, living in a tent until we could save up to rent a house on the city margins, in a neighbourhood with no electricity or road access. Those are some of my earliest memories of everyday violence against people like me.

For centuries, my ancestors had lived in relative harmony with other communities. But, with the emergence of modern nation-states in the region, Kurdistan – the traditional homeland of the Kurds – was fractured into southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and northeastern Syria. A violent assimilation was imposed upon us. For more than a century, Kurdish people have been denied recognition as a nation, their language banned, erased from maps, stripped of citizenship rights, and dispossessed of their lands. For my generation, therefore, freedom was never an abstract political matter; armed struggle was often seen as a necessity to achieve it. Even so, national liberation movements always sought dialogue with the states they fought against. I grew up inside that insistence, carrying the hope of a dignified peace.

In 2013, after almost three decades of war, peace talks were held between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which first sought an independent Kurdish state and, later, autonomy and increased political and cultural rights for Kurds within Turkey. In 2015, these collapsed. War returned to Kurdistan and, with it, the persecution of everyone who had staked something on that possibility of peace. This included me. I was a doctoral student at the time, researching economic autonomy in Kurdistan, and it became clear that this work would no longer be tenable in the new political climate. I moved to Latin America, to complete my doctoral studies and study revolutionary movements in that part of the world, grappling all the while with a question that had become inseparable from my own existence: how could peace be built in Kurdistan?

The academic literature on peace told me I might find an answer in Guatemala. Between 1960 and 1996, civil war had ravaged the country, killing more than 200,000 people and displacing more than a million – more than a 10th of the total population. The conflict – which began as an uprising against extreme inequality, particularly in land ownership, and systemic discrimination against the Maya people – had turned the state into a counterinsurgency apparatus, powered by paramilitary death squads and a doctrine of the ‘internal enemy’ that erased the line between combatant and civilian. Against this backdrop, the Acuerdo de Paz Firme y Duradera (Agreement on a Firm and Lasting Peace) was both celebrated and touted as innovative when it was signed in 1996. The agreement broke ground by confronting the past directly: the Commission for Historical Clarification investigated the atrocities committed during the civil war, most of them attributable to the state, and, unusually, partly as a result of its findings, heads of state were later tried for war crimes.

But it was soon apparent that the peace accord had failed to address the problems that led to the conflict in the first place. The guerilla fighters who returned to their villages – or who had to reinvent themselves in cities where no one was waiting for them – found intact the system they had been unable to transform through armed struggle: poverty. Today, Guatemala remains one of the most unequal countries in Latin America vis-à-vis class, ethnicity and gender. The deepest wound of the war – land tenure – was never resolved: no equitable land redistribution took place after the 1996 accords. In fact, as the World Bank researchers Caroline Moser and Cathy McIlwaine have noted: ‘Guatemala has become a substantially more violent country since the end of the internal armed conflict.’

One ex-combatant had joined the insurgency as a 13-year-old and stayed in the mountains until the peace accord was signed. I met him in 2017, more than 20 years after the formal end to the war, at the community radio project he had built near Xela, in the western highlands of Guatemala. ‘Despite the deaths and the hardship of the war, I never cried,’ he told me. ‘But the day the war ended, I cried – because I didn’t know how to live in peace: I had no home, no job, no trade. And I asked myself: what now?’

Peace, as currently practised, doesn’t break the cycle of injustice that leads to war in the first place

I had come to Guatemala searching for an answer to my own political and existential preoccupations but it was the ex-combatant’s question – What now? – that stayed with me, an accusation directed at the very concept of peace he had been promised.

Guatemala is not an anomaly in this regard. Since the end of the Cold War, more than 30 comprehensive peace agreements have been signed around the world but few, if any, have succeeded in building a durable peace. Accords signed under the dominant peacebuilding paradigm focus almost exclusively on stopping direct violence through ceasefires, weapons handovers, disarmament, individual reintegration, all on the assumption that democratic institutions and free markets will naturally produce lasting peace. But peace, as currently practised, doesn’t break the cycle of injustice that leads to war in the first place.

The sociologist Johan Galtung, often described as the founder of peace and conflict studies, distinguished between ‘negative peace’ – the absence of direct violence – and ‘positive peace’, which requires dismantling the structures of injustice that fuel conflict. The typical approach to peace in post-conflict contexts is encapsulated in the United Nations’ classic disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration model, first implemented by its peacekeeping operations in El Salvador in 1989 and used in more than 30 countries since. Under this strategy, former combatants are required to surrender their weapons and disband their command structures, and are entitled to short-term stipends and training that will facilitate their reintegration into civilian economic life. This approach was also implemented in Guatemala.

But what neither Galtung nor other sophisticated theorists of a liberal framework for peace tend to question is whether capitalist relations of production can........

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