Lecturer from the UIC Barcelona Faculty of Communication Sciences Ana Isabel Rodríguez has just received the award for best doctoral thesis for her project titled ‘Peace without roots? The ethnic dimension of peace in Colombia. It explores the participation of Colombia's ethnic-territorial organisations in the historic peace agreement signed in 2016 by the Colombian government and the FARC-EP guerrillas. In particular, it analyses the meaning of the ethnic dimension of peace for these communities in a country marked by an internal colonialism that reproduces structures of power and exclusion by the elites of the country’s Andean regions over marginalised peoples. 

For this analysis, Rodríguez spent a year and a half conducting ethnographic peace research in the department of Chocó, where she helped design and implement the peace policy known as Territorial (and Ethnic) Development Programmes. Through participant observation and more than one hundred interviews with key actors in the negotiations and implementation, her thesis concludes that the same challenges that have prevented the inclusion of these communities in the construction of the nation-state for centuries, are the same ones that underlie the implementation of the peace policies approved in 2016, even though black and indigenous peoples have achieved certain spaces of representation and have positioned themselves as peacebuilders. 

The lecturer from the Faculty has valued the award very positively, recognising that it recognises a collective work with the ethnic communities of Colombia in favour of peace: “This award means a lot to me, also given the fact that my experience living in Chocó was a personal and professional lesson, impossible to translate into academic work”. In addition to the transformative impact in both a personal and academic sense, Ana Isabel Rodríguez is grateful to the jury for “assessing all dimensions of the research and recognising this contribution to knowledge on peace studies from the periphery”.