My first book, Fields of Suspicion: Landmines and the Making of Peace in Rural Colombia, coming out in March 2027 with Duke University Press, is an ethnography about a “peace laboratory:” The Pilot Project of Humanitarian Demining. This initiative brought together Army soldiers, FARC-EP guerrillas, humanitarian workers, and campesinos (small farmers) to collaborate in the clearance of minefields during the 2012–2016 peace negotiations. Grounded in years of multi-sited ethnographic research in Colombia, the book examines efforts to dismantle the enduring material and affective relations produced by landmines during the country’s decades-long armed conflict, while probing the possibilities of environmental and political reconciliation.
Rather than presenting demining as a purely technical or humanitarian activity, Fields of Suspicion shows how it is entangled with broader social projects of governance, territorial control, and economic progress. In clearing lands, demining can also enable intensified state presence and new forms of exploitation. Yet the book is equally attentive to the fragile and unfinished labor of partial recuperation. Despite continuing suspicion, this odd group of collaborators strove to rebuild trust among themselves and with the territories they inhabit, testing the possibilities of peace.
Check my current research project, Noses without Borders
Diana Pardo Pedraza 