The previous chapter set out the historical context framing Colombia's five-decade-long armed conflict and the factors pushing the Santos government and the FARC-EP guerrilla towards Havana. This chapter now turns to the analysis of the core theme of this book, namely the role that Colombia's victims’ delegations played in the Havana peace process. First, it details the antecedents to direct victim participation in the Santos– FARC-EP negotiations – specifically, the victims’ forums carried out in 2014 – before discussing the rationale for victim inclusion in the Havana talks, in both cases by drawing on the perspectives of both those who participated in and those who organized Colombia's victim-centred initiatives. The empirical discussion is situated in a broader framework which contends that the Havana talks and the nature of victim inclusion therein demonstrate the evolving trajectory of both the liberal peacebuilding and transitional justice paradigms. How transitional justice was addressed during the Havana talks illustrates the manner in which the foundational tenets and objectives of the paradigm have shifted over time, becoming embedded gradually within liberal peacemaking and peacebuilding, and, subsequently, in recent years, towards the conferral upon victims and survivors of a central role as protagonists driving the paradigm towards victim-centredness.

The international context: transitional justice and peacemaking

Since the 1990s, the application of transitional justice interventions has progressively shifted away from its original terrain of authoritarian regimes and post-authoritarian societies (Gonzalez-Ocantos 2020) towards the provision of a notional postconflict justice during and in the wake of war to peace transitions (Bell 2009). Since the launch of the UN Agenda for Peace in 1992, transitional justice has become increasingly embedded in the dominant global peacemaking and peacebuilding architecture and now sits alongside DDR, security sector reform (SSR), the rule of law, human rights, democratization and economic liberalization as part of the ‘checklist’ of liberal peacemaking and peacebuilding interventions (Leebaw 2008; Andrieu 2010; Sharp 2013), which are intrinsic in that regard to post-accord state and nation-building (Sriram Lehka 2007; Lambourne 2009). Accordingly, the framework of rights that had undergirded transitional justice interventions since the 1980s – victims’ rights to truth, justice, reparation and nonrecurrence – has itself become gradually pivotal to mainstream peacemaking and peacebuilding interventions (Robins 2017: 56).