Bottom-up peace: community alternatives to armed violence in Brazil and Colombia

Abstract

Latin America, often described as a non-war zone, paradoxically registers some of the world’s highest homicide rates. Throughout different parts of the region, persistent conflict emerges from entrenched forms of armed violence, affecting both countries with legacies of internal warfare, such as Colombia, and those formally at peace, like Brazil. These realities expose overlapping patterns of direct, structural, and cultural violence and challenge simplistic dichotomies of war and peace. In view of the limitations imposed by top-down frameworks within the prevailing regional peace and security agenda, this research reimagines peacebuilding in Latin America from the bottom-up. It foregrounds the imperative to incorporate the voices and lived experiences of communities most affected by violence into strategies for achieving sustainable peace. To this end, the study examines the Instituto Favela da Paz in Brazil and the Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó in Colombia, exploring how both respond to deep-rooted insecurities and armed violence through grassroots, transnationally connected initiatives.