Fields of Suspicion (Landmines and the Making of Peace in Rural Colombia)

In Fields of Suspicion, Diana Pardo Pedraza examines how decades of explosive contamination, armed conflict, state neglect, and extractive projects have produced environments saturated with anxiety and doubt. Pardo Pedraza draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Colombian “peace laboratory” where army soldiers and FARC-EP guerrillas worked together to clear landmines during the 2012–2016 peace negotiations. Rather than presenting demining as a purely humanitarian or technical activity, she reveals that, as an initiative of liberal peace, it is entangled with broader projects of governance, development, and territorial control. At the same time, Pardo Pedraza traces the fragile labor of rebuilding trust between guerrillas, military members, humanitarian workers, and campesino communities. By foregrounding the long-lived affective and territorial aftermath of war and humanitarian technologies, Fields of Suspicion contributes to anthropological conversations on military waste, ecological and political remediation, post-conflict development, and the ambiguity of nominal war and peace.