Post-Conflict Territorialization in Three Dimensions: Volumetric Territorial Struggles in Post-Peace Agreement Colombia

Four years after the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement that ended the longest armed conflict in the history of the Americas, violent struggles over territory continue apace in many parts of rural Colombia. Official and academic explanations for this ongoing violence tend to link the problem to unequal land access, meaning that political solutions have tended to focus on rural land redistribution. However, we argue that shifting from a planar to a volumetric analysis of the problem reveals how the state and private capital have dramatically reconfigured territorial access in the post-Peace Agreement era. Drawing evidence from the department of Cesar, in the northeast of the Colombian Caribbean, we show how biophysical and social interconnections as well as legal disconnections between the land, subterranean, and atmosphere shape the daily lives of rural people and their expectations in the context of political transition.