On an early morning during a visit to my grandparents, I looked through their shop located in a rural area of the Antioquia department in Colombia. While sipping my coffee, I noticed some men sitting in the centre square abusing a man with learning difficulties. They kept shouting insults for about half an hour without anybody intervening. I asked my grandad what was going on and he just looked at me and said, ‘desocupados mija’ (people without anything better to do) and went back to his shop. Three years after the peace agreement had been signed, it struck me that the silence and tension that had dominated that space had been replaced (although not for long) by people feeling free enough to exchange insults. This had been a disputed municipio (municipality) during the height of the Colombian conflict between guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries, and, although most of my extended family lived in cities, the potential fate of this rural town and my grandparents was always present for all of us.

To my dismay, most of my family voted against the peace agreement, but I was uneasy about the discourse in political circles of the two Colombias: one that knew the conflict directly, and one who did not and did not care. I knew how much we all cared, and how many families and people around us had real ties of love with a countryside devastated by violence even if divided over the best way forward. Still, that duality, that disconnection built in the political discourse between the countryside and the developed urban Colombia as an axis of the conflict intrigued me, and was well illustrated by Antonio Guterres in a declaration in January 2018 when he said: