María del Pilar File-Muriel, a PhD candidate studying Ethnology in the Department of Anthropology, was awarded an LAII PhD Fellowship for the 2017-2018 academic year. Her dissertation centers on the assemblage of interdependently linked actors and cultural objects that constitute peace in the making in Colombia, and aims to answer the following question: How, in a context of protracted political violence, are alternative forms of power that contrast with state power assembled in order to build peace? She proposes to study peace building as a process that is simultaneously articulated at the local and global levels that necessitates a global circulation of a multiplicity of political and social actors and their relationships and that may produce multiple meanings of peace. By looking at the processes and relationships that feed peacemaking, she hopes that this project will expand the understanding of state-social movements relations beyond the dynamics of a repressive state and antagonistic practices of counter-hegemony social movements, and will elucidate the multiple ways in which complex actors mutually contribute to transforming society and therefore the state.
