Landscapes of Repair

How efforts to repair violence have created new forms of inequality in Colombia’s post-conflict countryside

What happens when efforts to repair the harms of war fall short of transforming the inequalities that caused the conflict? In Landscapes of Repair, Max Counter addresses that question by focusing on the process of returning land to rural Colombians who lost it due to armed conflict. Examining the current land restitution program in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio region, this book offers a new perspective on the effects of repair in the aftermath of violence.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of judicial records, Counter studies the struggles among displaced conflict victims, current landowners, and rural elites to demonstrate how reparations can simultaneously repair past harms and create new inequities. This book reveals how restitution, even when it fails to radically reorient unequal agrarian economies, nonetheless reshapes geographies of land dispossession, access to territory, and whose memories of conflict count as valid. At a time when governments and international organizations increasingly rely on transitional justice to address mass violence, Landscapes of Repair provides vital insights into the relationships among land, justice, memory, and peace, with implications far beyond Colombia.