Fanonian peace

Returning to Fanon: On consciousness and political transition

To conceptualize Fanonian peace, it is important to complement attention to his most-widely read chapter ‘On Violence’ with other texts that are equally relevant yet rarely integrated into scholarly reviews of Fanon. Close readings of additional chapters in Wretched of the Earth – especially ‘The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness’ and ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’ – plus supplementary writings such as A Dying Colonialism provide a more complete picture of Fanon's complex analysis of violence and his prescriptions for sociopolitical change.

Three concepts of consciousness that appear in ‘The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness’ provide an outline of Fanon's analysis of decolonization. ‘National consciousness’ refers to unification as a people, while ‘social consciousness’ is a transnational commitment to dignity for all; knowing how to organize communities and transform the world materially constitutes ‘political consciousness’. After denouncing the postcolonial bourgeoise who take the place of the former colonizer and reproduce the imperial economy's inequalities and corruption, he argued, ‘we must rapidly switch from a national consciousness to a social and political consciousness’ (Fanon, 2004: 142). To understand this argument – and my interpretation of Colombian political conflict and resistance communities through it – it is useful to delineate these concepts.

During anticolonial rebellions, the colonized can unify across difference through an oppositional national consciousness against the foreign empire – ‘Algerians against the French’, for instance. This is productive to organize a mass movement powerful enough to overthrow the imperial power. However, he argues that consciousness rooted in one's identity as people are dangerous. Religious and ethnic nationalisms that splinter people from one another through different tribes or faith traditions can lead to inherently exclusionary and oftentimes violent political systems. Colonial rule entrenched racial capitalism's division, dehumanization and exploitation, which can then be reproduced within or between postcolonial societies.

Fanon's nuanced analysis of violence dovetails with his critique of national consciousness. His complex critique oftentimes goes unnoticed, as in Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall's (2000) depiction of him as an apologist of violence: ‘Frantz Fanon extol[ed] violence as a “great organism” that linked men together … [This was] a form of intoxication … In such a drunken state, death was not to be feared but embraced as a kind of apotheosis’ (p. 467). To the contrary, while Fanon legitimized violent means to get rid of a colonizer, he acknowledged the traumatic consequences of inflicted violence and inflicting violence (Abane, 2011; Turner, 2011), as in the psychological states faced by Algerians post-independence that he detailed in ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’. More importantly, armed struggle was only the first phase of Fanon's liberation project, which the subaltern must supersede or risk unleashing violent power relations instilled under colonialism on each other: ‘the question is not so much responding to violence with more violence but rather how to diffuse the crisis’ (Fanon, 2004: 33).

To counteract the legacies of colonial division, a broader social consciousness is essential, whereby people are committed to wellbeing for everyone rather than to their nation alone. In so doing, he foresaw the pitfalls of the postcolonial world order's ubiquitous ‘home rule’ conflicts over who is truly native in a given society that result in persistent social conflicts and exclusions (Sharma, 2020). Transnational social consciousness also emphasizes the importance of internationalist movements. On the role of French solidarity for the Algerian cause, Fanon wrote:

The Left has done nothing for a long time in France. Yet, by its action, its denunciations, and its analyses, it has prevented a certain number of things … [Although] unable to impose negotiation [for Algerian independence,] … undeniably they are constantly forcing the extremists to unmask themselves, and hence progressively to adopt the positions that will precipitate their defeat. (Fanon, 1965: 149–150, emphasis original)

Political consciousness, meanwhile, is the knowledge and ability to organize and intervene concretely. Fanon insisted upon the articulation of a postcolonial social program, including the need for a diverse economy and urban–rural integrations to reverse colonial economics.

Independence has certainly brought the colonized peoples moral reparation and recognized their dignity. But they have not yet had time to elaborate a society or build and ascertain values (Fanon, 2004: 40) … Following national liberation they are urged to fight against poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment. The struggle, they say, goes on. The people realize that life is an unending struggle. (p. 51)

Therefore, building a robust state and society must be bottom-up rather than top-down, with community-level democracy being its political foundation:

[T]he important point is not that three hundred people understand and decide but that all understand and decide, even if it takes twice or three times as long. In fact the time taken to explain, the time ‘lost’ humanizing the worker, will be made up in the execution … the sense of time must no longer be the moment or the next harvest but rather that of the rest of the world. (Fanon, 2004: 134–135)

Political consciousness involves everyday organizing toward a clear social program that empowers and meets the needs of everyone. Democratization must occur at all levels of the society, with grassroots empowerment its centerpiece. In the wake of the reactive action against colonialism, political consciousness is the affirmative action that creates wellbeing and dignity.

Fanonian peace, therefore, is neither pacifist nor resigned to the conditional ‘modern’ or ‘negative’ peace of state domination of land and population through the suppression of overt warfare within and between states (Dietrich, 2012; Galtung, 1964). Instead, Fanonian peace is a process of ongoing organizing and social programming toward sovereignty and dignity.

Radical peace in Colombia

Colombia is not a formally colonized state like Algeria was, but postcolonial theory remains relevant given the country's ongoing settler colonialism that takes place amid global racial capitalism. This is especially true in conflictive regions like Urabá, where San José de Apartadó is located and where certain indigenous- and African-descendant communities contest the ‘narco-bourgeoise's’ accumulation by dispossession (Richani, 2002).

The Colombian parallel to an anticolonial reactive action of national liberation against oppression was the rebel insurgencies that arose in the 1960s against state terror, political exclusion, and the concentration of land. They included but were not limited to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The FARC, however, failed to achieve the sociopolitical and economic transformation it sought; one reason among others was the way its vanguardist approach reproduced the hierarchical politics of the Colombian state, including repression of Indigenous and Black communities it claimed to represent, which created an impasse for subaltern liberation (Dest, 2025).

In the wake of the paramilitary genocide in 1990s of the leftist Patriotic Union party seeking to reform the state, various communities forged autonomous alternatives to both electoral politics and armed struggle. They developed self-proclaimed ‘projects of life’ rooted in political autonomy from armed groups, food sovereignty, and intercommunity networks, which I conceptualize as ‘radial relational peace’. One example was the transethnic Peasant University of Resistance that San José de Apartadó founded with other rural communities refusing the dominion of both the state and the FARC. Some of these deployed ‘international protective accompaniers’ from Global North NGOs to deter (para)military aggression (Koopman, 2011). Despite persistent attacks against it, the Peace Community celebrated its 29-year anniversary in March 2026.

The Peace Community and its network, in my view, reflect the affirmative action indicative of a ‘switch from a national consciousness to a social and political consciousness’ that Fanon (2004: 142) called for. Across the national, racial, ethnic, and gendered divisions instilled by patriarchy and colonialism, inter-community and internationalist solidarity forge a Fanonian peace of autonomous struggles that are networked with one another. On Arreguin Vega's (2026) question about gender, new communal rules – such as a rejection of alcohol and illicit crops as well as everyone actively participating in agricultural work groups and leadership rather than just men – are reminiscent of the societal changes that Fanon elucidated, even if traditional gender roles nonetheless remain the norm in rural Colombia.

One of these communities’ core practices of resistance – memory performance – complement Fanon's examples of political consciousness. The Peace Community commemorates victims with painted stones and pilgrimages. These performances honor the dead, reiterate a social consciousness that rejects violence against anyone, and rejuvenate communal cohesion essential to organizational survival. To Arreguin Vega's (2026) point about religion, Catholic traditions provide the structure for the commemorations. Fanon (2004) worried that cultural performance mostly served to pacify the colonized to better endure colonialism rather than overthrow it, but San José's memory work fills a gap in his writings by providing concrete ideas for working through trauma during liberation struggles, with religion central to this pending its political inclination.

Finally, as Marston and Mosquera-Camacho (2025) signaled, such radical peace evolves amid a dialectic of state-autonomy relations. San José's autonomous politics persists, but always in constant relation to the state. Upon the election of the leftist Gustavo Petro in 2022, the Peace Community sought dialogue with his administration. This has not led to a cessation of paramilitary attacks in San José, exemplified by the 2024 assassination of two Peace Community members in a Biodiversity Protection Zone. However, new state-community relations led to an official public apology in 2025 from Petro for the Colombian state's human rights violations, as resistance communities continue to demand institutional justice while also maintaining their autonomy. Fanonian peace is one way to interpret and guide these movements, though its fulfillment would entail justice and dignity through the state itself. This looks unlikely at the moment, but still potentially possible through the strengthening of radical sociopolitical consciousness in Colombia and beyond.