Collective Protection as Nonviolent Resistance: Indigenous Models in Post-Accord Colombia

Indigenous communities in Colombia are waging a powerful form of nonviolent resistance. Their struggle is taking place in what remains the world’s deadliest country for human rights and environmental defenders. Despite the 2016 peace agreement, in 2025 alone, 187 human rights defenders and social leaders were assassinated. 29 of them were Indigenous. Rural and ethnic communities face particularly high risk. As armed groups seek control over territories, they block Indigenous, Afro-descendent and campesino communities from exercising rights to land, cultural preservation, and self-governance. The threats extend beyond direct violence to displacement from ancestral lands, cultural extermination, and the destruction of political autonomy. In this study, I explore the question of how Indigenous communities conceive of and practice collective protection as nonviolent resistance to armed conflict, state violence, and structural exclusion. My research draws on fieldwork conducted in Colombia in 2025 in partnership with Comunidades Construyendo Paz en Colombia (ConPazCol), a multiethnic victim's rights organization, and on in-depth interviews with three Indigenous communities: the Wounaan Phobor, the Wounaan Nonam, and the Nasa Kwesx Kiwe. Seven interrelated approaches emerge from the data: Collective versus Individual protection, Protection as Territorial Integrity, Spiritual and Ancestral Protection, Autonomous Governance, the Guardia Indigena, Nonviolent Protection, and Differential Approaches. Across all seven, these communities insist that physical safety cannot be separated from territory, from tradition, and from the right to govern themselves. I analyze the encounter between these frameworks and the National Protection Unit (UNP). This is the state institution which until 2017 operated exclusively through individualized measures: armed escorts, bulletproof vests, and armored vehicles. Decree 2078 established the Collective Protection Route, opening a legal pathway for unarmed, comprehensive, and culturally differentiated responses. My research examines the tension between where this institution accommodates what communities demand and where it structurally fails. These findings offer resistance studies a grounded account of what most protection frameworks do not attempt: comprehensive, nonviolent, collective self-defense that operates against armed groups, state violence, and cultural erasure. For organized communities worldwide confronting the same convergence of threats, this research demonstrates that protection, when rooted in territory, culture, and collective governance, is itself a practice of resistance.