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Dealing with Peace presents the struggles of the Guatemalan campesino (peasant) social movement during the country’s post-conflict transition from 1996 to the present, focusing on efforts to obtain land and improve livelihoods within a shifting, yet consistently hostile, political-economic environment. With special focus on the relationship between the movement and the neoliberal state, Simon Granovsky-Larsen asks whether the acceptance of neoliberal resources – in this case, support for land access in Guatemala provided by the World Bank-funded
Fondo de Tierras – reduces the potential for social movements to continue to work for transformative change.
Positioned in contrast to studies warning that social movements cannot maintain their original vision after accepting such support, this book
argues that organizations within the Guatemalan campesino movement have engaged strategically with neoliberalism, utilizing available resources to advance visions of social change. Using a wealth of primary data collected over more than a year of fieldwork, it contributes significantly to the study of Guatemalan politics and advances understandings of the grounded operation of neoliberalism. Exploring both the dynamics of a national neoliberal transition and the ways in which these play out within civil society,
Dealing with Peace reveals the long-term and often contradictory negotiation of political and economic transitions.
List of contents
List of Tables, Figures, and Illustrations
Map: Location of Main Research Sites
Acronyms
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Dispossession, Violence, and Poverty
Positioning the Case Studies: CCDA and CONIC
Methodology: Activist Research Amid Violence
Overview of the Book
1. Strategic Engagements with NeoliberalismTransitions to and through Neoliberalism
Peace, Land, and Neoliberalism
Challenging Guatemala’s Neoliberal Peace
2. The Guatemalan Campesino Movement: Organizing through War and Peace
From the Ashes of Genocide and Revolution, 1944-1985
The Perils of Peace, 1986-2010
The Guatemalan Campesino Movement Today
3. Between the Bullet and the Bank: Campesino Access to Land
The Market Model
Agrarian Conflict and Rural Struggle
4. CONIC: An Organization ApartCONIC and Territorial Collectives
Victorias III: "We’re screwed but happy"
San José La Pasión: "We have to work together"
5. CCDA: A Revolutionary EnterpriseCCDA and Café Justicia
Salvador Xolhuitz: A Divided Community
Don Pancho: "We’re used to giving it our all"
6. Beyond the Post-Conflict PeriodCONIC and CCDA: Within and Against the Market
The Neoliberal Temptation
CCDA and the Rearticulation of Resistance
Glossary
List of Interview Participants and Research Sites
Bibliography
About the author
By Simon Granovsky-Larsen
Summary
Dealing with Peace explores the relationship between the Guatemalan campesino social movement and state agrarian institutions in the period since the end of armed conflict in 1996.
