"Based on twenty-four months of ethnographic fieldwork across three war-affected villages in Colombia, Fields of Suspicion examines a landmark "peace laboratory" where Army soldiers and FARC-EP guerrillas collaborated to clear landmines during the 2012-2016 peace negotiations, an initiative officially known as the Pilot Project of Humanitarian Demining. An experiment between long-standing enemies, the initiative was meant to prove that "peace is possible." Yet on the ground, living and working with "the enemy" was fraught. Diana Pardo Pedraza introduces the concept of "fields of suspicion" to describe how the persistent threat of improvised landmines and decades of armed conflict, state neglect, and extractive projects produce a climate of anxiety and doubt that saturates rural environments and social relations. These conditions endure despite humanitarian clearance and an imminent peace agreement, and in many ways precisely because of them. While liberal peace initiatives like demining promise to repair war-scarred rural life, they can also enable more aggressive forms of state control and other forms of occupation. Amid this persistence of suspicion, still-active enemies, humanitarian workers, and campesino communities strive to rebuild trust among themselves and with the landscapes they inhabit, making peace a grounded, ongoing experimental achievement. Tracing how suspicious relations persist within, alongside, and despite these reconciliation efforts, Pardo Pedraza shows that suspicion is not eliminated but recast through humanitarian action, diplomatic rapprochement, and development schemes.

Suspicion then emerges both as a lingering aftermath of war and as a critical political sensibility through which people experience, confront, and sometimes unsettle new configurations of power"-- Provided by publisher.