Restorative Justice in Colombia's Special Peace Jurisdiction
Colombia's peace process includes a specialised court — the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP), or Special Peace Jurisdiction — created to address crimes committed during the country's armed conflict. Unlike conventional criminal courts focused primarily on punishment, this court requires those who acknowledge responsibility for serious crimes to carry out works, activities and projects that repair the damage caused to victims and communities. These measures are known as TOARs (Trabajos, Obras y Actividades con contenido Restaurador o Reparador) — restorative and reparative works.
This project focuses specifically on two sets of crimes: Case 01, which concerns the systematic kidnapping and unlawful detention of civilians by the former FARC-EP guerrilla, and Case 03, which investigates the killing of civilians by members of the Colombian military and their illegal presentation as combat deaths — a practice widely known as falsos positivos, or false positives.
The research asks: How are these reparation measures designed and implemented in practice? What do they look like on the ground? Who is involved — former combatants, state institutions, local communities, international organisations? And where, exactly, do they take place?
To answer these questions, the project combines three analytical perspectives. The sociojuridical perspective examines how legal norms and court procedures translate — or fail to translate — into actual reparative practice. The ethnographic perspective involves fieldwork in two pilot sites: Viotá, a rural municipality in Cundinamarca, and Ciudad Bolívar, a working-class district of Bogotá. The political-geographic perspective maps the territorial dimension of reparation: where these measures occur, which regions are covered and which are not, and how geography shapes the implementation of justice. Political geography contributes a critical lens here — it shows that reparation is not spatially neutral. The distribution of measures across the country reflects patterns of conflict, state presence, and institutional capacity that cannot be ignored.
The project will produce a structured research database covering all registered reparative measures and a pilot story map — an interactive narrative combining maps, documents and fieldwork accounts — for the two case study sites.
Project Information
Funded by: German- Colombian Peace Institute (CAPAZ)
Participating institutions: ZILAS, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt; Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá
Principal investigators:
- Laura Ordóñez (Universidad del Rosario)
- Luis Peña (KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt) ·
Duration: 11 months
Fieldwork sites: Viotá (Cundinamarca) · Ciudad Bolívar (Bogotá)
Methodology The study combines qualitative research methods — semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis — with spatial analysis and digital cartography. A georeferenced database of restorative measures is being compiled and will serve as the empirical backbone for both academic outputs and a public-facing story map pilot.
