Widening roads: Towards a feel-thinking (sentipensante) socio-environmentalism in Colombia

Abstract

The end of the conflict in Colombia is the end of an era, and tries to close the longest and most painful chapter the country has lived since its independence. It is a conflict that started because of land and now it ends in the same way – due to land. In that sense, the peace agreement signed in Havana in 2016 is a deal that has a double meaning, since it recognizes the structural cause of the conflict, at the same time it tries to solve it from there. The first point of the agreement, called “A new Colombian countryside, comprehensive rural reform”, shows that within the outcome of the talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) there is a socio-environmental conception of conflict, a notion that sees, in the territory, an expression, to be claimed, of freedom and people’s autonomy. Thereby, this article tries to demonstrate that the Havana Agreement has a social-environmental conception that widens those constitutional lines that are found in the Colombian Constitution of 1991, giving to the land a protagonism that Colombia has needed so much to advance in rural questions. However, not as a land to be exploited, but a land that is composed of nature, human beings and culture; a land that feeds on the socio-environment to advance as a people, to give meaning to the territory from a feel-thinking socio-environmentalism.