Forgotten Peace examines Colombian society’s attempt to move beyond the Western Hemisphere’s worst mid-century conflict and shows how that effort molded notions of belonging and understandings of the past. Robert A. Karl reconstructs encounters between government officials, rural peoples, provincial elites, and urban intellectuals during a crucial conjuncture that saw reformist optimism transform into alienation. In addition to offering a sweeping reinterpretation of Colombian history—including the most detailed account of the origins of the FARC insurgency in any language—Karl provides a Colombian vantage on global processes of democratic transition, development, and memory formation in the 1950s and 1960s. Broad in scope, Forgotten Peace challenges contemporary theories of violence in Latin America.

About the Author

Robert A. Karl is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Peace and Violence in Colombian History
1. Messenger of a New Colombia
2. Encounters with Violence, 1957–1958
3. The Making of the Creole Peace, 1958–1960
4. Peace and Violence, 1959–1960
5. Reformist Paths, 1960–1964
6. Books and Bandits, 1962–1964
7. Confrontation, 1963–1966
Epilogue: The Making of “La Violencia”

A Note on Citations, Institutional Abbreviations, and Archives
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"It’s really a wonderful work, bringing readers back to those post–Cuban Revolution days, when Colombia teetered between promise and peril."
— The Nation

"The pressing relevance of Karl’s book for the present, his explanation of how peace is constructed and then forgotten, is overwhelming. Summing Up: Highly recommended."
— CHOICE

"Engagingly written and peppered with anecdotes, Karl’s book is both a part of and a rejoinder to the new generation of studies of Latin America and the Cold War....Karl’s history celebrates a remarkable effort at peace-making in Colombia while also reminding us of its tremendous challenges."
— International Affairs

"Robert A. Karl’s monograph on the peacemaking project that helped end La Violencia stands as one of the best among them."
— American Historical Review

"Robert A.Karl's remarkable monograph offers an insightful and compelling perspective on this contemporary comment as Colombians work to implement peace after decades of conflict."
— ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America

"...a beautiful and important book..."
— El Espectador

“Karl’s work is intellectual history at its best, a soft telling of the intricate moment-to-moment interplay between ideas and daily life, between daily life and ideas.”
— The Americas

“Robert Karl’s new book is a significant achievement. This fine-grained political history demonstrates that Colombia’s multiple chronologies of violence can only be understood by attending first to the regional.”
— Hispanic American Historical Review

“…a seamless tapestry of interwoven narratives…this is a powerful and beautiful book. A book to be read, and a peace to be rescued from oblivion.”
— Journal of Genocide Research

“The remarkable strength of this book is its lucid, intelligent, artful narratives. Chapter after chapter, Karl takes scattered local and national actors and creates a stunningly integrated and compelling story about what he conceives of as the rise and fall of an effort at forging a national peace in Colombia during the complex period of 1957 to 1964. This is historical storytelling at its best.”—Paul Gootenberg, Stony Brook University

“Forgotten Peace provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the mid-twentieth-century conflicts that became known as La Violencia, with important implications for peace efforts today. In a vivid narrative that traces the interactions of local actors, intellectuals, and the Colombian state, Karl provides an entirely new explanation for the emergence of the FARC guerrillas from an ambivalent and fragmented peace process.”—Nancy P. Appelbaum, author of Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Awards

2018 Arthur P. Whitaker Prize 2018, Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews

Awards