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RETHINKING POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Confronting Peace
Local Peacebuilding in the Wake of
a National Peace Agreement

Edited by Susan H. Allen · Landon E. Hancock

Christopher Mitchell · Cécile Mouly
 Rethinking Political Violence

Series Editor
Roger Mac Ginty
School of Government and International Affairs
Durham University
Durham, UK
This series provides a new space in which to interrogate and challenge
much of the conventional wisdom of political violence. International and
multidisciplinary in scope, this series explores the causes, types and effects
of contemporary violence connecting key debates on terrorism, insur-
gency, civil war and peace-making. The timely Rethinking Political
Violence offers a sustained and refreshing analysis reappraising some of the
fundamental questions facing societies in conflict today and understanding
attempts to ameliorate the effects of political violence.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14499
 Susan H. Allen
Landon E. Hancock
Christopher Mitchell • Cécile Mouly
Editors

Confronting Peace
Local Peacebuilding in the Wake of a National
Peace Agreement
Editors
Susan H. Allen Landon E. Hancock
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for School of Peace and Conflict Studies
Peace and Conflict Resolution Kent State University
George Mason University Kent, OH, USA
Arlington, VA, USA
Cécile Mouly
Christopher Mitchell FLACSO Ecuador
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Quito, Ecuador
Peace and Conflict Resolution
George Mason University
Arlington, VA, USA

ISSN 2752-8588     ISSN 2752-8596 (electronic)

Rethinking Political Violence
ISBN 978-3-030-67287-4    ISBN 978-3-030-67288-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67288-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
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Cover image: © Sean Sprague / Alamy Stock

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Preface and Acknowledgments

We have been heartened by colleagues’ growing interest in local peace and

in the stages of conflict that come after peace agreements. Peace is built
and experienced locally, shaping individual lives. And, conflict continues in
the days and years after peace agreements are signed. Here, we turn our
attention to both the local peace and the post-agreement phase. What is
the experience of local peace communities, after agreements have been
signed? Addressing this and related questions has been a team effort,
involving all the authors whose work appears in this book, as well as many
additional colleagues.
The editors would like to thank the Carter School for Peace and
Conflict Resolution (formerly the School for Conflict Analysis and
Resolution) at George Mason University, and in particular the Center for
Peacemaking Practice, for offering its facilities at Point of View in Virginia
for the initial meeting that led to the idea of writing this book and for
providing us with a small grant to make this meeting possible. Susan
H. Allen would also like to thank the Carter School for her study leave,
which enabled her to work on this edited volume, for funding her partici-
pation in a roundtable on the peace process in Colombia that took place
in Quito, Ecuador, with the participation of various authors of this book,
and for supporting research assistance by Michael Sweigert in the final
stages of the manuscript production. Two members of the editorial team
took advantage of this roundtable, supported by the Latin American
Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Ecuador and the office of the
Friedrich Ebert Foundation in the same country, to organize a meeting
with contributors writing chapters on Colombia and to further discuss the

v
vi Preface and Acknowledgments

book. In addition to hosting the roundtable, Cécile Mouly would also like
to thank FLACSO Ecuador for funding the research on Samaniego and
her travel expenses to meet with other editors and some of the contribu-
tors at the conferences of the International Studies Association in
Baltimore, San Francisco and Toronto.
Needless to say, this volume would not have seen the light of day with-
out the support and contributions of all the authors. We are grateful to
them for their commitment and for accommodating to our requests.
Many of them conducted fieldwork to write their chapter and bring sig-
nificant insights into how local communities and peacebuilding initiatives
have confronted the signing of peace at a national level in their respective
country. Additionally, we would like to express our gratitude to Pedro
Valenzuela for translating Esperanza Hernández’s chapter into English.
Importantly, we would like to thank all the people of the communities
or peacebuilding initiatives studied, who took the time to share their expe-
riences with the authors and made this book possible. We are greatly
indebted to them and hope that this volume can contribute to making
their peacebuilding efforts more visible and helping them to obtain greater
support.
Finally, we would like to thank our families for putting up with us dur-
ing our work on this collection Sarah Roughley and Rebecca Roberts, our
editors at Palgrave Macmillan, for their guidance throughout the process.

Susan H. Allen Arlington, VA

Landon E. Hancock Kent, OH
Christopher Mitchell Arlington, VA
Cécile Mouly Quito, Ecuador
 Praise for Confronting Peace

“The wider field of peace and conflict studies has long confronted the challenge of
ending wars. After thirty years of research tracking negotiations, mediation and
agreements, perhaps nothing is more urgent than better understanding of the
realities captured in this book. The challenge of confronting peace. The authors
and the approach give the volume a deep legitimacy, as the key in this effort
requires us to understand the specific processes and innovations needed to bolster
and face the many faceted developments that emerge in the aftermath of peace
processes and accords. These reflections, research and proposed recommendations
offer empirical evidence and grounded learning for improving the chances that
social and political transitions can offer both the hope of ending war and of solidi-
fying the changes needed to sustain a more robust peace.”
—John Paul Lederach, Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame, USA

“This fourth in a series of studies on the relationship between national and local
level peacebuilding strategies is fundamental reading for scholars interested in
what happens at the local level after a national peace agreement has been signed. A
diverse group of pracademics in the peace sector from around the world reflect on
how the problems that arise from national level peace differ from those confront-
ing local communities. The editors provide a carefully cogent analysis of the case
studies presented in order to give readers a highly applied, thorough and useful
guide to the challenges and possibilities available to local actors in a post-agree-
ment context.”
—Pamina Firchow, Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution and Coexistence at
Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, USA

“This book, with its impressive weaving together of peace practice and research,
points to a potential new wave in conflict analysis and engagement—making peace
with conflict. That is, as the case studies in this book amply illustrate, “post” con-
flict peacemaking is rarely about the end of conflict. Rather, as illustrated in two
main “negative” case studies, where peace agreements have so far failed to hold (in
Colombia and the Philippines) and other cases of failed peace, seeking and pursu-
ing peace in the face of ongoing conflict is about the daily engagement and com-
mitment of local communities. This is a brave text about the benefits and perils
if peace.”
—Jay Rothman, President, the ARIA Group, USA and Israel
 Contents

1 The Problems Peace Can Bring  1

Christopher Mitchell

Part I Local Peacebuilding in Colombia after the Havana

Agreement  29

2 Assuming Peace at the Beginning of the Post-­agreement:

The Case of the “Women Weavers of Life” in Putumayo,
Colombia 31
Esperanza Hernández Delgado

3 Bridges, Paths, or Crossroads? The Magdalena Medio

Development and Peace Program Before and After the
Havana Accord 59
Mery Rodríguez and Fernando Sarmiento Santander

4 Mobilizing to Counter Post-agreement Security

Challenges: The Case of the “Humanitarian Accord Now”
in Chocó 81
Ana Isabel Rodríguez Iglesias, Noah Rosen, and Juan Masullo

ix
x Contents

5 Samaniego After the 2016 Peace Agreement: Between

Hope and Fear111
Cécile Mouly and Karen Bustos

6 The Illusion of Peace: Rural Colombia in the Post-­

agreement—The Case of Policarpa137
Camilo Pardo-Herrera and Raquel Victorino-Cubillos

7 Rural Human Networks in Granada: Challenges of

Sustaining Peace Infrastructures in a Post-agreement
Phase169
Laura Villanueva, Claudia Giraldo, Luis Mario Gómez
Aristizábal, and Didier Giraldo Hernández

Part II Local Post-Agreement Peacebuilding in Africa and

Asia 199

8 Local Peace Committees and How They Relate to

Governments and Peace Agreements: Examples from Five
African Countries201
Paul van Tongeren

9 Whose Peace Agenda First? Unravelling the Tensions

Between National Peace Processes and Local
Peacebuilding in Burundi251
René Claude Niyonkuru and Réginas Ndayiragije

10 Constant Motion: Multi-dimensional Peacebuilding for

Peace Processes279
Wendy Kroeker and Myla Leguro

11 Uneven Peace Infiltration: Two Case Studies of Rebel-Led

Community Peace Initiatives in the Bangsamoro309
Megumi Kagawa
 Contents  xi

Part III Conclusions 339

12 Local Peace Roles in Post-agreement Nominal Peace

and Continuing Conflict341
Landon E. Hancock and Susan H. Allen

Index 373
 Notes on Contributors

Susan H. Allen is Director of the Center for Peacemaking Practice at the

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution,
George Mason University, USA, where she is an associate professor teach-
ing action research, reflective practice, evaluation and other ways of blend-
ing research and practice in the conflict resolution field. Allen holds an
M.S. and Ph.D. from the same institution in Conflict Analysis and
Resolution.
Karen Bustos holds an M.Sc. in International Relations from FLACSO
Ecuador, where she is a member of the research group on peace and con-
flict. By training she is a lawyer, a specialist in human rights with experi-
ence in issues related to peace and conflict, especially regarding victims of
armed conflict. She has taught undergraduate courses on the theory of the
state and undertaken consulting for, among others, the Victims Unit
(Unidad para las Víctimas) in Colombia and for the Inter-­ American
Commission on Human Rights.
Didier Giraldo Hernández holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Basic Education
with a concentration in artistic and cultural education from the University
of Antioquia, Colombia (2010). He was a music advocate at the Granada
Culture House from 1996 to 2015. He is a teacher of Art and Technology
in the Department of Antioquia at the Jorge Alberto Gómez Gómez
Educational Institute in the municipality of Granada.
Claudia Giraldo is a graduate in public accounting. She has worked as a
community manager where she supported projects that guaranteed

xiii
xiv Notes on Contributors

a­ttention to the displaced population in the municipality of Granada,

Department of Antioquia, and, in turn, other municipalities in that depart-
ment. She served as a secretary in the municipal government of Granada
and is a founding member and Director of Tejiendo Territorio para la Paz
(TEJIPAZ).
Luis Mario Gómez Aristizábal is a graduate of the Universidad
Pontificia Bolivariana, Colombia, where he studied philosophy and litera-
ture. He was Director of the Granada House of Culture from 1982 to
2017. He played a role in the creation of the “Union for Granada” move-
ment, served as a councilman and has also been a newspaper columnist. In
light of his work, he was awarded the Father Clemente Giraldo civic merit
medal for his contribution to the development of the municipality of
Granada, Department of Antioquia.
Landon E. Hancock is a professor at Kent State University’s School of
Peace and Conflict Studies, USA, and affiliated faculty at Kyung Hee
University’s Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, South Korea, and the
Program for the Prevention of Mass Violence at George Mason
University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict
Resolution, USA. His research focuses on the role of ethnicity and identity
in conflict generation, dynamics, resolution and post-­conflict efforts in
transitional justice. This is coupled with an interest in grassroots peace-
building, zones of peace and the role of agency in the success or failure of
peacebuilding efforts. He is the co-editor (with Christopher Mitchell) of
Zones of Peace (2007), Local Peacebuilding and National Peace (2012) and
Local Peacebuilding and Legitimacy (2018). His articles have appeared in
numerous journals including Peacebuilding, National Identities,
Ethnopolitics, Peace & Change and Conflict Resolution Quarterly.
Esperanza Hernández Delgado is a peace researcher and professor at
the Universidad de La Salle, Bogotá, Colombia. Her applied research
work and publications have focused on various areas of peacebuilding:
grassroots and locally based peace initiatives, civil resistance, experi-
ences of mediation in the Colombian armed conflict and comparative
peace processes. She has been a facilitator in processes of constructive
dialogue to foster reconciliation and in conflicts associated with land
restitution claims. She holds a Ph.D. in Peace, Conflict and Democracy
from the University of Granada, Spain, and coordinates the “Peace
 Notes on Contributors  xv

Laboratory” for the Doctorate in Education and Society curriculum at

the University of La Salle.
Megumi Kagawa is a former assistant professor at Hiroshima University’s
Graduate School of Social Sciences, Japan, and project coordinator of the
Hiroshima Peacebuilding Human Resource Development Project for the
Bangsamoro Government in Mindanao. She worked as a Programme
Advisor at the Secretariat of the International Peace Cooperation
Headquarters at the Cabinet Office of the Government of Japan and oper-
ated its Peacekeeping Operations (PKO) missions in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Timor-Leste and Nepal. Her recent publications
include “Roles of Rebel Gatekeepers in Mid-­Space Peace-building: A Case
Study of Bangsamoro” in Yugi Uesegi (ed.) Hybrid Peacebuilding in Asia,
published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan.
Wendy Kroeker is an assistant professor in the Department of Peace and
Conflict Transformation Studies (PCTS) at the Canadian Mennonite
University (CMU), Canada, and specializes on community conflict trans-
formation in locations around the globe. She has over 25 years of experi-
ence as a university instructor, community mediator, conflict transformation
trainer, peace program consultant and program manager for international
development projects. Over the past two decades she has worked with
indigenous groups, community and religious leaders, diverse educators
and NGO staff in locations such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar,
Laos, South Korea, Ukraine, India, Bangladesh and Palestine. In addition
to her teaching at PCTS, she is the Academic Director of the Canadian
School of Peacebuilding, CMU’s annual institute, bringing students from
around the globe for credit/professional development courses in the fields
of development, conflict transformation and peacebuilding. Her research
interests involve exploring post-conflict peacebuilding, the role of local
actors in peacebuilding and the role of peace education in conflict areas.
Myla Leguro holds an M.A. in Peace Studies from the Kroc Institute for
International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA. She has
worked for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) since 1991 on peace and devel-
opment projects in Mindanao. As the Program Manager of the Peace and
Reconciliation Program of CRS-Philippines, Leguro organized two major
peacebuilding initiatives: the Mindanao Peacebuilding Institute in 2000
and the Grassroots Peace Learning Course in 2003. She has worked as an
international trainer in Timor-­Leste and Nepal and has served as a resource
xvi Notes on Contributors

person in various peacebuilding conferences in Colombia, Thailand and

the USA. In 2006, she was the first CRS-­Kroc Visiting Fellow. Leguro
holds the distinction as being one of the 1000 women collectively nomi-
nated for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. She recently served as Program
Director of a CRS global program on Advancing Interreligious
Peacebuilding, an initiative that covered four interrelated projects on
interreligious dialogue and cooperation in Egypt, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Niger, Nigeria and the Philippines. She works as the Peacebuilding
Technical Advisor for CRS-Philippines and acts as Justice, Peacebuilding
and Social Cohesion Focal Point for CRS-­Asia region.
Juan Masullo , Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and
International Relations (DPIR) at the University of Oxford, UK, where he
is also affiliated with Nuffield College, the Changing Character of War
Centre (CCW) and the Latin American Centre (LAC). His research
focuses on civilian behavior and civilian attitudes in contexts of political
and criminal violence, especially in Latin America.
Christopher Mitchell has held academic positions at University College,
London, the London School of Economics, and in the Department of
Systems Science at the City University, London, where he became
Professor of International Relations in 1983. He joined George Mason
University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution in 1988 and is
Emeritus Professor of Conflict Research at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter
School for Peace and Conflict Resolution there. He continues to work on
practical and theoretical aspects of peace making, and has written books
and articles on conflict resolution, on the theory of entrapment, on ending
asymmetric conflicts and on a multi-role model of mediation. He has
recently co-edited three books about grassroots peacebuilding with
Landon E. Hancock, the latest of which, Local Peacebuilding and
Legitimacy, was published in Spring 2018. His retrospective text book,
The Nature of Intractable Conflict, was published by Palgrave Macmillan
in December 2014 and in Spanish as La Naturaleza de los Conflictos
Intratables (Edicions Bellaterra) in 2016.
Cécile Mouly is a research professor at FLACSO Ecuador, and coordina-
tor of the research group in peace and conflict there. She is also a practi-
tioner, specializing in peace and conflict studies. She teaches postgraduate
courses and facilitates practitioner trainings on issues related to conflict
analysis, conflict transformation and peacebuilding. She is a resource per-
 Notes on Contributors  xvii

son in “Conflict Prevention: Analysis for Action” for the UN System Staff
College and collaborates with the Colombian truth commission. She
holds a Ph.D. in International Studies from the University of Cambridge,
UK. Her research focuses on the role of civil society in peacebuilding,
peace processes, civil resistance in the context of armed conflict and the
social reintegration of former combatants.
Réginas Ndayiragije has more than ten years of professional experience
in peacebuilding programs. He worked for AGEH (Association for
Development Cooperation), a German peacebuilding organization, as a
regional design, monitoring and evaluation expert for three years. Then,
he worked as a researcher for the Conflict Alert and Prevention Center
(CENAP) in Burundi. He has also worked as a consultant for many orga-
nizations and research institutes, including Global Rights, Impunity
Watch, Sustainable Development Center and the Global Network of
Women Peacebuilders. He holds a B.A. in Psychology and a Master’s
Degree in Human Rights from the University of Burundi, an M.Sc. in
Governance and Development from the University of Antwerp, Belgium,
and is a teaching assistant and Ph.D. researcher at the University of
Antwerp, with a focus on power-sharing and state engineering in contem-
porary Burundian politics.
René Claude Niyonkuru is a researcher with a focus on public policy,
peace and conflict, human rights, governance and development, with
more than 15 years of experience both in Burundi and in many other
African countries (Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Cote
d’Ivoire, Mali and Burkina Faso). He is also a practitioner and has worked
as a trainer of trainers in conflict management and transformation, human
rights education, and served in various projects as a resource person in
project design, monitoring and evaluation. Besides his professional experi-
ence, he has extensively worked with society organizations for 18 years as
a human rights activist. He holds a B.A. in Law from the University of
Ngozi, Burundi, an M.Sc. in Governance and Development from the
University of Antwerp, Belgium, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Political and
Social Science at the Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
Camilo Pardo-Herrera is a proud Colombian. He has worked exten-
sively on humanitarian and land issues in Colombia and other Latin
American countries. Other of his intellectual and research interests include
xviii Notes on Contributors

the political economy of development, corruption and organized crime.

He has worked for governments, for civil society and for international
organizations. He holds a Ph.D. from George Mason University, USA,
and an M.Sc. from University College, London, UK.
Ana Isabel Rodríguez Iglesias holds a Ph.D. in International Politics
and Conflict Resolution from the University of Coimbra, Portugal (2020).
In 2012, as a Fulbright Scholar, she obtained a Master’s Degree in Latin
American Studies from Georgetown University, USA, and in 2010, as a La
Caixa Scholar, a Master’s in International Relations from CEU San Pablo
University, Spain. She is a member of the research group GLOBALCODES
at the School of Communications and International Relations, Ramon
Llull University, Spain, and she teaches at the Universitat Internacional de
Catalunya, Barcelona. Previously, she taught at different universities in
Portugal and Colombia and worked as an international consultant for the
Inter-American Development Bank in Washington D.C. Her research
interests include peace, ethnicity, gender and securitization.
Mery Rodríguez is a Colombian interested in designing and implement-
ing intercultural dialogue, mediation, facilitation and training processes in
various subjects, among them local peacebuilding, community dynamics,
human rights, gender approach, intersectionality, transitional justice, mul-
tiparty dynamics and dialogue. She holds an M.Sc. in Conflict Analysis and
Resolution from George Mason University, USA, and is a Ph.D. candidate
at Ramon Llull—Blanquerna Universitat, Barcelona, Spain. She is part of
the team of the Peace Observatory (Observatorio para la Paz) in Colombia,
as a researcher and facilitator.
Noah Rosen is a Ph.D. candidate at American University School of
International Service, USA. In 2013 he graduated from Macalester
College with a BA in International Studies. His research focuses on non-­
violent social movements in conflict and peacebuilding contexts. He is
completing a dissertation, working with Afro-Colombian organizations in
the Pacific regions of Colombia and focused on grassroots social move-
ments in the context of a national peace process: What kinds of new
opportunities and threats does a peace process create for local social move-
ments? How can movements advance their interests given this complex,
rapidly changing context? His research has been supported by the
U.S. Institute of Peace, as well as the Lewis and Clarke Fund for Exploration
and Field Research.
 Notes on Contributors  xix

Fernando Sarmiento Santander is a philosopher and holds a Master’s

Degree in Political Studies. His professional career in the field of peace-
building spans over 25 years. He is a researcher in social and political sci-
ence, with emphasis on peace research. He has professional experience in
project coordination, teaching, knowledge management, political partici-
pation, conflict analysis and transformation and capacity-building of civil
society organizations. He is acting as the National Coordinator of the
Network of Regional Development and Peace Programs (Redprodepaz)
and Executive Director of the Redprodepaz Foundation.
Paul van Tongeren LL.M., established the European Centre for Conflict
Prevention (ECCP) in 1997, publishing the People Building Peace and
the Searching for Peace volumes. He was the conveyor of the Global
Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC), which orga-
nized a conference on the role of civil society in peacebuilding at the
United Nations Headquarters in New York in 2005 at the invitation of the
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He was Secretary-­General of GPPAC
until 2010. Since then, he has focused his attention on enhancing
Infrastructures for Peace (I4P) and Local Peace Committees (LPC) and
has written many articles about LPC and I4P.
Raquel Victorino-Cubillos is a political scientist with a Master’s Degree
in Rural Development from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia, a
Ph.D. in Environmental Law from Universidad Externado de Colombia,
Colombia, and studies in Culture of Peace from the Autonomous
University of Barcelona, Spain. She has worked as a researcher and human
rights analyst at the Center for Research and Popular Education (CINEP)
and the System of Early Warning of the Office of the Human Rights
Ombudsman of Colombia. She has over 10 years of experience in analyz-
ing the links between armed conflict and land issues, first at the Protection
of Lands and Patrimony Project (initiative of international cooperation
agencies with the Colombian government through the Social Action
Unit), then at the Unit of Land Restitution, where she was Social Director,
and more recently as an advisor of the Colombian truth commission,
working on the drafting of recommendations of non-repetition on the
subject of land and the armed conflict.
Laura Villanueva is affiliated with the Jena Center for Reconciliation
Studies at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in Jena, Germany. She holds
an M.S. and a Ph.D. from the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for
xx Notes on Contributors

Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, USA. She is a

peacebuilder with a hallmark for innovation in transforming conflicts
throughout the world. For over a decade, she has led a people-to-people
harmony-building process co-located in Japan and the Middle East. She is
actively involved in Colombia, where she is a founding member and an
adviser for territorial peace in Tejiendo Territorio para la Paz (TEJIPAZ)
and peace adviser to the Association of Victims United for Life of the
Municipality of Grenada (ASOVIDA). She is also co-founder of Daret
Salam (Peace Circuit) and adviser for the Daret Salam peace office in Syria.
Between 2014 and 2020, she was executive director at the Center for
Peacemaking Practice at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace
and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University.
 List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Timeline about violence and resistance to it in Samaniego in

the museum of historical memory “Recuerdos de mi wayco” 121
Fig. 5.2 Performance by FARC dancing group during the 2018 festival
of musical bands in Samaniego 127
Fig. 5.3 Samaniego residents demonstrating against all forms of
violence after the assassination of the municipal ombudsman
in May 2019 130
Fig. 6.1 Graffiti announce the arrival of illegal armed groups in the
absence of a strong central state presence 161
Fig. 6.2 The isolated effort of local authorities to exercise territorial
control162
Fig. 6.3 Multiple armed groups fight over territorial control after
FARC’s demobilization 162
Fig. 7.1 2019 Citizen Agenda: Granada Building a Dream 193

xxi
 List of Maps

Map 2.1 Map of the department of Putumayo 40

Map 3.1 Map of the municipalities covered by the PDPMM 61
Map 5.1 Geographic location of Samaniego 112
Map 9.1 Map of Burundi 253
Map 10.1 Map of the Philippines 281

xxiii
 Introduction

Our very first foray into examining local peace in the late 1990s revealed a
wide variety of peace “experiences” which could all be seen as a form of
“institutionalized” conflict (see Mitchell and Nan 1997). This conception
seemed to hold good whether local peace zones, communities or organi-
zations were built from the top down, the bottom up or the outside in.
Subsequent research produced three collections of studies seeking to
understand better the creation and survival of local-­level peacebuilding.
The three studies in this series all aimed at dealing with different aspects of
local peacebuilding in what might, paradoxically, be termed “normal”
abnormal circumstances—that is, when people in grassroots communities
and associations were having to deal with an environment characterized by
nation-wide violence, displacement, insecurity and death. The first book
dealt generally with various examples of a local search for sanctuary—for
safety and security in conditions of civil war (see Hancock and Mitchell
2007). The second was more concerned with linkages between local peace
initiatives—what Mary Anderson and her colleagues (2013) refer to as
“peace writ little”—and national-level peacemaking efforts, together with
the manner in which these efforts reinforced (or worked against) one
another (see Mitchell and Hancock 2012). The third set considered vari-
ous ways in which the different actors in intra-state conflicts—insurgents,
incumbents and interveners of various sorts—achieved some level of legit-
imacy that enabled them to carry on with their efforts, constructive or
destructive (see Hancock and Mitchell 2018).
xxvi Introduction

By contrast, this present collection focuses on local peace communities

and organizations when they find themselves in the aftermath of a negoti-
ated national “peace” agreement, when major combatants have—finally—
managed to hammer out an often fragile deal and people at the grassroots
have to try to make many of the terms of that agreement “work” at a local
level. In other words, local communities and organizations find them-
selves confronting “peace” and the aftermath of widespread violence and
destruction. They do this while—theoretically—enjoying the support of,
and resources supplied by, national or regional governments, or by inter-
national supporters. However, more often, local communities have to rely
upon their own efforts, initiative and resources, with the last often being
in very limited supply.
Hence, the chapters in this book are very much focused on the prob-
lems of “peace.” They examine how local peace communities have fared in
the aftermath of an often long drawn-out, intra-state struggle usually
characterized by a ­widespread violence that is difficult to draw to an end.
The context thus involves widespread damage—both physical and psycho-
logical—that is difficult to forget, let alone forgive; widespread mistrust
and an unwillingness to compromise on all sides. Often, the issues in con-
tention underlying the struggle have not been completely resolved and the
danger of a rapid re-ignition of the conflict remains high. New problems
have to be faced, old issues—safety and insecurity—emerge in new forms
and constant dilemmas—development and unemployment—remain to be
faced and even increase in complexity. At the local level these complexities
of peace often seem to be no less than those arising from civil war.
Moreover, the authors of the following chapters have themselves faced
considerable analytical problems in trying to deal with this focus of local
peace communities in times of “national peace” and in trying to suggest
some general lessons by comparing cases of local, post-agreement peace-
building efforts from different countries. However, our shared central
theme was initially rather straightforward: What obstacles and opportuni-
ties confront local peace communities and organizations—and their previ-
ous grassroots initiatives—once some form of national peace has more or
less been achieved?
The book, then, is divided into two main sections, together with this
introductory chapter and a concluding one highlighting any common les-
sons we think we may have discovered from our case studies. In this book
we feel that the term post-­conflict peacebuilding is rather misleading. This
term is largely focused on top-­ down, “partial” peace, arranged (or
 Introduction  xxvii

misarranged) by some kind of a “deal” at the elite level between state

agents and the commanders of at least some of the insurgent organiza-
tions. Moreover, it suggests that the conflict is ended and that it has been
finally resolved, which is often far from the situation on the ground. In
most of the cases discussed in this book, an agreement may have resulted
in diminished violence (or it may not) but the conflict often continues in
some modified form. Hence, in the following chapters, we highlight the
challenges and possibilities of addressing ongoing conflict issues in the
post-agreement phase of conflict.
Following this brief introductory chapter, in the following one (Chap.
1) I begin by outlining some shared analytical dilemmas. These include
asking what exactly is meant by a national “peace” agreement following a
protracted intra-state conflict, and how does the nature of this peace affect
local communities, especially those who may have already established their
own form of peace in their own locality. We then look at the effects of
previous—often failed—peace agreements on local communities and then
at the latter’s actual experience of violence and instability. We then return
to issues likely to arise in a post-­agreement period. Finally, we present the
framework of questions posed to the authors of the chapters.
The chapters that follow in the first major section of the book are all
addressed to the recent peacebuilding experiences of local communities in
Colombia. Since the conclusion of the Havana Agreement at the end of
2016, local communities there have been dealing with and reacting to the
effects of a national peace agreement negotiated between the Colombian
government and the leaders of one major insurgent movement, the
FARC. Some of these peace communities are organized on a regional
basis, while others have arisen to promote local peace, security and devel-
opment in often remote municipalities. Esperanza Hernández Delgado in
Chap. 2 thus describes the impact of the “Women Weavers of Life”
throughout a large swathe of Putumayo in the south west of the country,
while Mery Rodríguez and Fernando Sarmiento’s chapter (Chap. 3) takes
up the study of the Development and Peace Program in the Magdalena
Medio region, and examines the effects of the Havana peace accord on
this longstanding peace organization based in communities along the
River Magdalena. In Chap. 4, Ana Isabel Rodríguez Iglesias, Noah Rosen
and Juan Masullo focus on the impact of the 2016 partial peace agreement
on ethnic communities in Chocó through their study of the “Humanitarian
Agreement Now” movement and its activities, both before and after the
Havana accord.
xxviii Introduction

The next three chapters examine the challenges posed by the

Government-FARC peace deal on three municipalities, and the way in
which local people have had to adapt to new circumstances within those
communities. Cécile Mouly and Karen Bustos in Chap. 5 deal with the
hopes and fears of local dwellers in the municipality of Samaniego in
Nariño, while Camilo Pardo-Herrera and Raquel Victorino in Chap. 6
survey the problems faced by local people in Policarpa, a municipality also
in Nariño, which has suffered from prolonged state neglect and an
extended period of guerrilla presence. In both communities they find
doubts about whether any genuine form of stable peace has been achieved.
Chapter 7 by Laura Villanueva, Claudia Giraldo, Luis Mario Gómez
Aristizábal and Didier Giraldo Hernández is more up-beat. Their study of
Granada in Antioquia focuses on the various initiatives that local groups
and individuals have undertaken to restore infrastructure, education and,
most importantly, relationships in this hard-hit part of the country.
In the second major section of the book, the focus switches from the
effects of national peace on local peacebuilding in Colombia to a wider
consideration of how local communities in other countries have coped
with the demands of peace implementation once an elite agreement has
been concluded. Paul van Tongeren’s comprehensive survey of local peace
committees (LPCs) in five African countries in Chap. 8 sets the scene for
three subsequent case studies on peacebuilding processes in specific coun-
tries. Van Tongeren’s comparative survey involves an examination of LPCs
in South Africa, the DRC, Sudan, Kenya and Burundi, drawing interesting
comparisons from seemingly very diverse examples of connections between
national peacemaking and local peacebuilding. René Claude Niyonkuru
and Réginas Ndayiragije in Chap. 9 extend the analysis by a detailed and
up-to-­date evaluation of local peacebuilding in Burundi, and ask the ques-
tion: Whose version of peace will prevail in that strife-torn country, and
with what result? The last two case studies in the book focus on the long
drawn-out struggle in the south of the Philippines and the impact of the
equally long drawn-out peace process between the government there and
the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Wendy Kroeker and Myla
Leguro in Chap. 10 examine the efforts of local religious leaders in
Mindanao to bring together their followers into a less contentious rela-
tionship. Megumi Kagawa, in contrast, in Chap. 11 focuses directly on the
challenges the National Peace Agreement presents to locally negotiated
deals in two communities where security had previously been in the hands
 Introduction  xxix

of the MILF insurgents, but which at some not-too-distant time would

have to be handed on to the state.
All of these different chapters present a variety of insights and lessons
for scholars and analysts interested in long-term peacebuilding, “from the
ground up.” The book concludes with a chapter (Chap. 12) by Landon
E. Hancock and Susan H. Allen, seeking to distill from very different
experiences guidelines that might emerge for local leaders seeking to cope
with problems of peace. The one thing it initially seems safe to say is that
whatever might be the problems of trying to maintain safety and security
in the midst of an intra-state war involving widespread violence, those
confronting local leaders in the immediate aftermath of any negotiated
peace are equally complex and difficult, if possibly a trifle less dangerous.
The book is an effort to throw light on the nature of such problems and—
hopefully—suggest some practical solutions.

Christopher Mitchell

References

Anderson, Mary B., and Marshall Wallace. 2013. Opting Out of War: Strategies for
Preventing Violent Conflict. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Hancock, Landon, and Christopher Mitchell, eds. 2007. Zones of Peace. Bloomfield,
CT: Kumarian.
Hancock, Landon E., and Christopher Mitchell, eds. 2018. Local Peacebuilding
and Legitimacy: Interactions Between National and Local Levels. London:
Routledge.
Mitchell, Christopher R., and Susan Allen Nan. 1997. Local Peace Zones as
Institutionalized Conflict. Peace Review 9: 159–162.
Mitchell, Christopher, R. and Landon E. Hancock, Eds. (2012). Local
Peacebuilding and National Peace: Interaction Between Grassroots and Elite
Processes. London: Continuum.
 CHAPTER 1

The Problems Peace Can Bring

Christopher Mitchell

“Post-War”
One familiar type of protracted conflict, inter-state or transnational wars,
seldom end neatly on a specified date.1 In many cases, if one examines the
“ending of the conflict” in detail, there is often no clear dividing line
between “during the war” and “after the war”. Often there is a long
“gray” period between the ending of open warfare or organized mass vio-
lence on the one hand, and a widespread, stable “peace”, even if the latter
only exists in the sense that violence, damage, and danger stop being a
serious threat to “getting back to normal”. In this gray area, peace is being
worked out as the various communities deal with the problems and oppor-
tunities presented by the new situation. Those involved must cope with
changed relationships brought about by the conclusion of a peace

1
Even the Second World War did not end neatly on May 6, 1945, in Europe or on August
8 in Asia. In many parts of the world, large-scale fighting continued for some time—in
Greece the civil was lasted until 1948 while in China the violent stage of the Nationalist-­
Communist struggle only ended in 1949 with the collapse of Kuomintang.

C. Mitchell (*)
The Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution,
George Mason University, Arlington, VA, USA
e-mail: cmitchel@gmu.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
S. H. Allen et al. (eds.), Confronting Peace, Rethinking Political
Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67288-1_1
2 C. MITCHELL

agreement, even if the latter is only an armistice, anticipating a later nego-

tiated peace treaty.
If this is true of inter-state wars, it is even more true of protracted intra-­
state wars, the conflicts that typify the post-Cold War world of the late twen-
tieth and early twenty-first centuries.2 Many of these conflicts involve long
struggles over intractable issues that often appear to devolve into questions
of survival. They are also asymmetric in the sense that one side usually con-
trols the apparatus of the state, perhaps with the support of a majority com-
munity, but the other has enough support and resources to keep on with the
struggle, despite setbacks and defeats. Sometimes, the incumbents win, as in
the case of the Sri Lankan Government’s final defeat of the secessionist
LTTE in 2009, and an uneasy, one sided “after the war” descends upon the
country. More rarely, the insurgents succeed in their objectives and face a
complex post-conflict situation. On many other occasions, a national-level
compromise agreement is painfully negotiated by the adversaries and some
kind of peace is achieved at a national level—El Salvador or Guatemala in
the 1990s—or at least throughout the regions that have seen continuing
violence and disruption—Northern Ireland following 30 years of “the
Troubles” terminating in the “Good Friday” 1998 Agreement.

Alternative Forms of National “Peace”

The major question with which we are concerned in this volume is what
effects do the achievement of a negotiated, national peace have upon those
grassroots communities and organizations that have already been working
for some form of peace at a local level. Answering this question clearly
poses some major conceptual difficulties, one of which involves the rather
vague use of the term “national level peace” in describing many recent
conflicts that have come to some kind of ending.
For a start, there is the question of phases. A national “peace” can
describe at least three sets of circumstances which, at different time peri-
ods, can affect local communities in a country that has been suffering from
a protracted civil war, long revolutionary struggle, or protracted secession-
ist movement:

2
According to the UCDP/PRIO data set, during the immediate Post-Cold War period,
which witnessed the most widespread armed conflict of all the post-1945 era, of all the 121
ongoing conflicts between 1989 and 2005, 97 were intra-state struggles (Harbom
et al. 2006).
 1 THE PROBLEMS PEACE CAN BRING 3

• A post-agreement transition phase in which the provisions of the

agreement regarding the central issues in conflict and the behavior of
the adversaries has to be modified in line with the terms of the agree-
ment in the short term and throughout the country.
• A normalization phase during which new relationships have to be
built up and tested, new institutions put into place, trust built up,
and adversaries learn to coexist—or even cooperate—over the
longer term.
• A post-conflict consolidation phase, during which any issues in con-
tention are dealt with peacefully, widespread reconciliation occurs,
and the idea of using violence as a means of attaining goals is not
seen even as a remote possibility.3

While these phases often overlap, I would argue that it is the first of
these—the post-agreement phase, which can, in fact, last a very long
time—during which peace is most fragile and vulnerable, both at the
national and at the local, grassroots level. In such circumstances, mistrust
between erstwhile adversaries is at its height, the terms of the agreement
are most open to alternative interpretation, opportunities for spoilers to
undermine the implementation of key parts of the agreement are most
prevalent, and tensions between the provisions of the national-level agree-
ment and existing peace practices at the local or regional level are most
likely to arise. In practical terms, local communities face huge problems of
reconstruction—of homes, schools, clinics, roads, and bridges—as well as
of livelihoods and relationships. Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons
(IDPs) return and need to be reintegrated in often devastated communi-
ties. Rival combatants need somehow to be reintegrated into civilian life.
Most importantly, minimal safety and security have to be re-established at
both the national and local levels.
A whole range of such factors need to be taken into consideration in
trying to answer questions about interactions between national- and local-­
level peacemaking and peacebuilding and the way in which they reinforce
or undermine one another. At the very least, the basic issue of who is
involved in the peace agreement—and who is left out—seems quite crucial
to the list of problems a national agreement might bring to local

3
This scheme echoes Paul Collier’s three phases of: peace onset (approximately 2 years),
post-conflict I and post-conflict II (4–5 years each), although many authors warn against
assuming that linear progress through—say—a decade is the norm.
4 C. MITCHELL

communities in a post-agreement phase. Does the national-level agree-

ment involve all the combatants or merely some of them? If the “peace”
involves leaving out major players in the conflict, rather than just the inevi-
table fringe “spoilers”, what additional major problems does this impose
at both the national level and upon local peace-seeking and peace imple-
menting communities? Are we confronting a situation resembling the
marginally supported and fairly impotent “Continuity IRA” rejecting the
1998 Good Friday Agreement, or one in which some really major players
in the civil war consistently reject deals worked out with the Interim
Government of National Unity (IGNU) in Monrovia?
Quite apart from the detailed terms of a nationally negotiated peace
agreement, who is not included in the process seems crucial to the imple-
mentation problems likely to face local peace communities and organiza-
tions. We can suggest three alternative models:

1. A bilateral national peace agreement involving government incum-

bents and a single, unified insurgent organization and dealing with
compromises on the major issues in contention. (The 1999 Lome
Peace Agreement between the Government of Sierra Leone and the
Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone.)
2. A multilateral national peace agreement between the incumbent gov-
ernment and a coalition of insurgent organizations, sufficiently cohe-
sive so as to be able to negotiate and implement a deal on behalf of all
opposition forces. (The 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement between the
Sudanese Government and the South Sudanese Anyanya.)
3. A partial national peace agreement, involving the incumbent govern-
ment and one—or even several—of the insurgent organizations but
excluding other major adversaries who continue or even escalate the
conflict. (The 2016 Havana Agreement between the Colombian
Government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionaria de Colombia
(FARC), which did not involve the insurgents of the ELN.)4

4
Alternatively, both Stine Hogbladh (Hogbladh 2011) and Christine Bell (2006) distin-
guish between those substantive peace agreement which are “full” and those which are “par-
tial” depending on the scope of the agreement and the range of substantive issues covered by
the terms of the deal.
 1 THE PROBLEMS PEACE CAN BRING 5

A study of the number of peace agreements concluded between 1990

and 2010 by Christine Bell and her colleagues at the Universities of Ulster
and Edinburgh indicates that partial peace agreements involving only
some of the combatants (Model 3 above) are the most frequent type of
national peace agreement concluded in cases of intractable, intra-state
conflict. Hence, many of the chapters in this volume examine aspects of
the national/local interface following the conclusion of this type of agree-
ment, especially “partial” agreements between the Colombian Government
and the FARC (but not the ELN) or between the Philippine Government
and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) (but not the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) or Abu Sayef.)
As we will see, the problems for local peace communities or for regional
peace organizations that result from this kind of partial peace agreement
are particularly difficult. They often center around the whole issue of
diminishing grassroots safety and security, the very factors that are sup-
posed to improve with the conclusion of a national-level peace. In many
cases, local security for civilian populations tends to be adversely affected
by subsequent competition for control of territory and resources among
insurgent organizations that are not part of the peace agreement.5 For
local communities, the persistence of high levels of violence and insecurity
arise from a number of factors, including the continuation of struggle for
control of territory (and other goods) previously firmly held by peacemak-
ing insurgents that become the object of contention between government
security forces and intransigents. In such circumstances, the fighting con-
tinues and even escalates. Hence, there is no country-wide disarmament of
insurgents, accompanied by a diminished role for security forces. Longer
term, this may even involve a redefinition of the role of the military. Add
in to the situation the whole issue of the “security dilemma” for former
combatants, and their likely reversion under threat to armed reaction—or
even possible conversion to organized crime—and the local post-­
agreement security situation can present daunting new problems for local-­
level peacebuilding, even in cases where the national police do return and
the army withdraws.

5
In addition, the security situation is often complicated by the presence of former combat-
ants who only find employment in successor, criminal organizations.
6 C. MITCHELL

Previous Experience of Partial or Failed Peace Agreements

At least two other factors can have a major effect the reactions of local
communities—especially peace communities—to the conclusion of a
national-level peace agreement, especially a partial agreement. The first of
these is the experience these communities may already have had with pre-
viously concluded peace agreements, either (1) those which have pro-
duced only a partial peace, but allowed combat to continue or (2) those
which have collapsed completely and resulted in a resumption of the
struggle.
It seems only reasonable to argue that local lessons learned about prob-
lems that were previously faced at the grassroots level are likely to affect
communities’ responses to later efforts to have the terms of a new national
agreement accepted and implemented at that level. If, for example, a pre-
vious agreement resulted in a return of large number of IDPs who had fled
under threat from then active local combatants, such a return must, surely,
have an impact on contemporary provisions for return and reinsertion. If
disarmed but unemployed combatants resulting from a national agree-
ment failed to be smoothly reintegrated into local economic life—rural or
urban—this hardly makes for a high level of local enthusiasm for imple-
menting a subsequent, nationally negotiated agreement. If, following pre-
vious accords, leaders of armed groups responsible for serious human
rights violations have retired untroubled, local communities affected by
previous violations are unlikely to have much enthusiasm for similar provi-
sions for impunity. At a more modest level, past payments to support ex-­
combatants for giving up violence can have easily aroused long simmering
anger, especially among local communities who have been victims of vio-
lence yet have obtained little recompense. This situation is by no means
uncommon. There may be violent disagreement about whether the 2005
Santa Fe de Ralito Pact between the Colombian Government and the
paramilitary Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) was a genuine,
national “peace agreement”.6 However, it was clearly the case that local
impacts of that agreement presented a variety of major difficulties for local
communities, many associated with reintegration and reparations.7

6
Among many critiques of the Pact, see Maher and Thomson (2011), as well as regular
reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. But see also Restrepo and
Muggah (2009) for a more up-beat assessment.
7
For an account and evaluation of the workings of transitional justice in Colombia follow-
ing the signing of the Santa Fe de Ralito Pact, see Garcia-Godos and Knut Andreas (2010)
 1 THE PROBLEMS PEACE CAN BRING 7

Other problems of déjà vu for local communities can arise when a pre-
vious national peace agreement has collapsed in renewed fighting. Again,
such a situation seems to have been all too common. Studies conducted at
Uppsala University and based upon the Uppsala Conflict Data Program
(UCDP) data set on Peace Agreements between 1989 and 2005 have
shown that many peace agreements broke down and the conflict reignited
in further periods of fighting, even if the violence did cease for a brief
period. Karl Derouen and his colleagues (Derouen et al. 2009), for exam-
ple, found that of the 144 peace agreements contained in the Uppsala data
set, 43 of them were “abrogated”, with one side or the other reneging and
resuming fighting. The average duration of such failed national agree-
ments was 11 months.
Looked at on a case-by-case basis, we can see a similar pattern of repeti-
tive failure in individual countries. For example, the savage civil war in
Sierra Leone went through a four-year period between 1996 and 2000
during which two comprehensive peace agreements—the Abidjan Peace
Agreement and the Lome Peace Agreement—were signed between the
government and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels. Both
were duly and rapidly broken.
The argument in this section is, therefore, based on the assumption
that local communities can and do learn from their experiences of previous
national peace efforts and from the latter’s impacts on local peacebuilding
initiatives. Thus, it becomes necessary to ask whether, at the national level,
there had been any previous peacemaking and peacebuilding agreements
and whether these had succeeded, partially succeeded, or completely failed
to establish even a limited level of peace—“negative” peace in Galtung’s
sense. In many countries, it turns out that there are many examples of
peace agreements that have been partial or incomplete, in the sense that
they involved only some of the major combatants; or ineffective in the
sense that the parties to the agreement returned to fighting after the con-
clusion of what turned out to be a failed accord.

Local Experiences of Combat and Violence

A third major factor affecting local reactions to a new peace agreement
must surely be the often very different experience of combat endured by
local communities, especially given the likely regional variations in levels of
violence. Communities which had developed grassroots peacebuilding
strategies might now be challenged by the provisions of another
8 C. MITCHELL

national-level peace deal. Local reactions are often affected by what went
before—by experiences “during the war”. Conditions while the conflict
continues must provide a kind of a benchmark for local people to compare
post-agreement conditions, for better or worse, and hence to determine
their reactions to new opportunities made available, but also to new bur-
dens imposed.
At its simplest, the question is the extent to which a community’s envi-
ronment was reasonably stable during the period preceding the conclusion
of the peace agreement. Put another way, what was the level of violent
contention surrounding and affecting local people and their day-to-day
lives? On the one hand, many communities in civil wars were fortunate;
combat and violence stayed well away from them and occurred in distant
places—often in peripheral regions distant from centrally located commu-
nities, so such communities were relatively unaffected by the violence.
Other communities find themselves in a region of major contention,
because they command or contain valuable goods—access routes, com-
modities, and resources that generate wealth and income. Hence, they
find themselves constantly fought over and often occupied or re-occupied
by rival forces, incumbent or insurgent. Apart from damage and devasta-
tion to both economic and socio-cultural fabric, the results of this instabil-
ity can include murders, massacres, mass flight, seizure of property by
outside invaders, widespread insecurity, widening intra-communal cleav-
ages, growing mistrust, and a loss of social cohesion within the affected
community.
Casey Ehrlich’s (2016) study of municipios in Eastern Antioquia char-
acterizes this link between instability during the war and local community
reactions in the “after the war” by emphasizing the idea of the stability of
“exogenous control” while the struggle continues. Control can be exer-
cised either by incumbents (state agents or their allies) or by insurgents.
Both sides can supply goods—such as security, governance, social services,
and education—on a regular, stable basis as long as their control is not
challenged by adversaries seeking to wrest domination away from those
supplying such goods.8 We might envisage a local community’s “during
the war” environment as lying somewhere along a notional “continuum of

8
Idler et al. (2018) use the term “shadow citizenship” to describe the relationship between
local communities and controlling insurgent groups, in which locals accept the authority of
insurgents in return for the provision of public goods and services no longer—if ever—pro-
vided by the legitimate government.
 1 THE PROBLEMS PEACE CAN BRING 9

exogenous control”, which begins with stable unilateral control and ends
with a situation of utter instability. The latter can be characterized as a
situation in which physical control passes briefly from first one adversary
then another, or one in which control is constantly being fought over—
inconclusively. The result is the existence of a kind of local political and
social no man’s land over which a national “peace” is then declared and
where combatants and communities need to accept the new relationship
and to implement the details.
To extend Ehrlich’s idea of exogenous control, we note that Annette
Idler (2019) has suggested an alternative way of considering communities’
experience of insurgent-related violence in her innovative study of “bor-
derland” communities in Colombia. Focusing on local inter-insurgent
relationships that establish the environment for local communities, she
examines situations in which rival insurgent organizations struggle for
local control of commodities and communities. She then distinguishes
three basic “clusters” of circumstances that may have confronted local
leaders and communities with very different wartime environments. The
first and most extreme of these she labels “enmity”, in which “violent non-­
state groups have no motivation to co-operate, distrust prevails … groups
do not recognize others’ right to exist and are willing to use unlimited
violence against each other” (Idler 2019, 37). Alternatively, such groups
may simultaneously share short-term or converging interests while remain-
ing fierce rivals, but still be able to agree temporary, tactical deals and
develop a working level of trust. The environment for local communities
is thus rather more stable, but still liable to break down into bouts of fight-
ing. Such an environment of “rivalry” can be replaced by one involving
what Idler terms “friendship” in which groups respect each other, and
stable, long-term relationships avoiding overt violence can become the
wartime norm (Idler 2019, 38–39).
Whichever environment prevails during the time of violence, it still
seems reasonable to assume that the changeover to a condition of national
“peace” will present more complex problems for communities emerging
from that environment, especially so when the peace is a partial one
between the state and one or other but not all of the insurgents.
For example, a variety of recent micro-level studies have focused on the
success of the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of combat-
ants which usually form a central part of a national peace settlement. Some
of these have clearly supported this idea of a strong link between commu-
nities’ experience of combatant violence during the struggle and the level
10 C. MITCHELL

of willingness to accept returning ex-combatants and to reintegrate them

into local life. In the post-agreement phase in Sierra Leone after 2002, for
example, research by Humphreys and Weinstein (2009) found, hardly sur-
prisingly, that returning combatants “who fought in units that were highly
abusive towards civilians … faced a much more difficult path to reintegra-
tion” (59–60). As far as local receptivity was concerned, it seems that the
reputation of the combatant unit involved mattered far more than any
personal characteristics of a returning individual.
To summarize all of the above, we hypothesize that how a particular
local community reacts to and deals with a national-level peace agreement
depends to a large degree upon the following three factors:

1. The peace agreement itself, its nature—whether it is partial or compre-

hensive and whether it deals with the simple ending of violence or with
the form of future relationships between the parties—and its contents,
addressing some or most of the substantive issues in conflict.
2. The community’s experience with the effects of previous national-level
peace agreements, and especially their impact on grassroots arrange-
ments for local security, survival, and development.
3. The community’s experience of violence, combat, damage, and disrup-
tion during the national-level conflict.

The question now becomes: what are some of the problems and dilem-
mas likely to arise for local communities in this post-agreement world, and
to what extent, if any, do they differ from those confronted in time of civil
war? Are the problems of peace wholly new or are they simply an extension
of those already faced during time of war? What follows is an effort to
produce a framework to help answer such questions in detail, particularly
as regards local communities who have already been working on problems
of local peacebuilding.

Post-agreement Problems
With this as background, we move on to what might be “new” for local
people following the conclusion of some form of national peace agree-
ment. Usually, this deal is achieved at the elite level and often without
much input from local people or organizations. In many post-agreement
situations, many “new” things turn out, on examination, to be old prob-
lems in slightly different forms. For many communities, especially those in
 1 THE PROBLEMS PEACE CAN BRING 11

peripheral regions where violence and combat are most likely to have
occurred, economic problems of poverty, inequality, unemployment, lack
of resources, and funding for development have not gone away. Often,
they return with increased urgency once peace has been established, com-
munity security—hopefully—achieved, and former combatants and
returnees added to local labor markets.
These continuing problems are frequently exacerbated by the destruc-
tion of local infra-structure and productive resources during the fighting.
Crops—legal or illegal, but both essential—may have been destroyed,
farms abandoned, bridges destroyed, local markets lost, power lines (if
any) sabotaged, oil pipelines, and related installations wrecked. In addi-
tion, socially important grassroots resources that support economic life—
schools, clinics, community training centers, churches, and roads—are
likely to have been shut down or targeted and destroyed during the fight-
ing. Thus, “post-war reconstruction” remains central to the problems
faced by local communities even though this has been joined at the top of
the list of peace problems by other, newer issues.

The Search for Security

One of the most pressing issues following a negotiated agreement involv-
ing a national cease fire, the surrender of arms and the ostensible ending
of violence, is what has become known as the “security dilemma” for for-
mer combatants. Who is to provide safety and security for former insur-
gents who

a. have given up their “defenses of last resort”—their weapons

b. need protection—from their own intransigents, their former enemies,
the security forces—and
c. require some equivalent assurances from the other side—self-policing,
safe areas, security forces’ withdrawal to barracks, and international
supervision?

The problem for former guerrillas remains acute while they remain
physically grouped together in initial assembly areas, but once they dis-
perse, they become even more vulnerable to retaliatory assaults or planned
campaigns of assassinations. They also have to resist serious efforts to
tempt them back into lives of violence, whether in emerging but lucrative
12 C. MITCHELL

criminal gangs or—should key aspects of the peace process prove danger-
ous or disappointing—re-emerging insurgent organizations.
From the perspective of local communities, the initial problem is
whether they have to confront the presence of an assembly area nearby,
while subsequent problems involve absorbing former combatants into the
community in some peaceful manner. As Sam Gibson and others have
argued, there is a strong tendency within local “receiving” communities to
regard resettled ex-combatants as inherently violent and a continuing
threat to local safety and stability (Gibson 2018; Prieto 2012). This may
not be an unreasonable fear.
Quite apart from the question of providing safety for ex-combatants,
another aspect of this overall dilemma over “security” is that, in some
post-agreement situations, there also arises the question of who can pro-
vide security for local communities, especially those in remote areas previ-
ously controlled by one or other of the armed actors. Before the peace,
many local communities will have relied upon protection from an armed
insurgent group that has now withdrawn or is in the process of being
demobilized. Who, subsequently, is likely to be able to fill this vacuum in
“community security”? In many cases, the state authorities simply lack the
resources to take over grassroots security functions throughout the coun-
try. Even when policing resources are available, the local community often
does not trust state agencies, who in turn are likely to regard some grass-
roots communities as guerrilla supporters and return that mistrust. In the
first case, the state simply lacks the resources to take over the provision of
local security from the former insurgents, who at least provided a modi-
cum of safety and stability to grassroots communities. If, in the absence of
the state, this function is not to be usurped by armed self-defense forces,
criminal gangs, local mafias, or—in the case of a merely partial peace
agreement—members of unreconstructed insurgent groups, then local
communities face a more complicated task of ensuring their own safety as
best they can.
However, as we argued above, this is not an entirely new problem for
many local communities who have established themselves in the past as a
peace zone or community. For such entities, the organization of sanctuary
for members of the community has been a constant problem. Hence, mak-
ing arrangements for individual and family safety and protection, as well as
for community security, is usually nothing unfamiliar. What is new is hav-
ing to develop new strategies and structures to deal with threats of revenge
or retaliation. Safety now might have to be sought from criminal gangs or
 1 THE PROBLEMS PEACE CAN BRING 13

mafias, as well as from combatant organizations excluded from the peace

process.
Moreover, in the new post-agreement world, while the mechanisms for
achieving security for community members will still involve informal
negotiations with local power holders, security can now also involve using
newly available legal channels for redress as well as for security. There
might be still further problems for those local communities that have in
the past used local or indigenous conflict resolution processes when these
informal and locally developed processes come into conflict with the
returning state-based institutions and processes.

Conflict Resolution and Dispute Settlement

Another major change during the post-agreement stage often involves the
re-establishment of processes for settling local disputes and grass roots
conflicts, which can range from domestic issues to long-standing feuds
between families or whole communities (Chopra 2009). These often
revolve around complex issues of past wrongs, revenge and recompense,
land ownership, access to common local resources, occupancy of local
political office and leadership roles, or competing issues of local power and
influence. In many protracted intra-state conflicts, dealing with such grass-
roots issues and disputes has often fallen into the hands of combatant
organizations in control of the local environment. Alternatively, local con-
flicts can become the business of informal grassroots organizations set up
to deal locally with domestic disputes or local conflict.
In the aftermath of a national peace agreement, a key result in many
regions has been the return of the state and its agencies. Admittedly, the
first of these often takes the form of a local security force, but this is usually
followed by the re-establishment of a local administration charged with
governance, together with a legal system and formal procedures for set-
tling disputes and enforcing the law—the “return to law and order” which
is a central part of any national peace agreement.
In many parts of conflict-afflicted countries, “law and order” has never
been absent—especially so in cities and urban areas. However, in remote
regions—and even in some outlying districts of major cities—the absence
of the state has often left a void in which state functions have been notable
for their absence. Such functions can range from issues of taxation—some-
times replaced by “revolutionary taxes” in some form or other—to the
provision of services to the local community—education, health care, and
14 C. MITCHELL

economic development. During the armed struggle, such tasks have often
been taken up by combatants or by informal grassroots organizations. In
some local communities, indigenous forms of conflict resolution have
been able to replace state-based judicial and administrative processes for
settling local disputes. In others, an alternatives system for settling dis-
putes has been established by the controlling combatant organization. In
many self-declared peace communities, peace committees have been set up
specifically to deal with intra-community disputes between individuals,
families, and rival groups.
However, it seems not unlikely that in the immediate post-agreement
stage of any national accord, one new set of problems to be dealt with at
the local level will be conflicts likely to arise between organizations estab-
lished by the local community during the absence of the state and the
returning state agencies.9

Coping with Return

Closely linked to the whole issue of post-agreement security, and the
expectation that places previously seen as highly dangerous are now safe,
is the whole issue of post-agreement return. Basically, this can involve
peasants, farmers, local bureaucrats and politicians, teachers, medical
workers, property owners, and former combatants. Many will be going
back to from where they were driven, either by widespread violence, by
being directly threatened, or by being physically driven away by one or
other of the armed actors.
This whole process of “return” can involve a variety of challenges for
local communities depending on the nature of the returnees and their
needs and expectations. The first challenge can arise as part of the
Disarmament, Demobilisation, Rehabilitation & Reinsertion (D.D.R.R.)
provisions typically built into a peace agreement and concerned with
demobilization and reinsertion of now disarmed combatants. In some
cases, the reintegration process is carried out gradually, on an individual
basis, but this is difficult to implement when dealing with large numbers.
Hence, a peace agreement will often call for former guerrillas or former

9
Note here on the way in which feuds (“rido”) have been dealt with in local peace com-
munities on Mindanao (Torres 2014) and also the work of local peace commissions in South
Africa between 1991 and 1994 (Midgeley 2000; Odendaal 2013).
 1 THE PROBLEMS PEACE CAN BRING 15

paramilitaries to be returned to civilian life via temporary camps or com-

munities, deliberately kept separate from existing towns and villages.10
“New settlement” strategies11 obviously have enormous problems of
their own. However, they do avoid—at least temporarily—others which
arise from former combatants—and sometimes rival combatants—return-
ing to or being settled within existing communities. Local communities
will often retain vivid collective memories of past harassment, violence,
destruction, and death by those very former combatants, or at least by
members of other units from their organization. This is another aspect of
“the security problem” but it overlaps with dilemmas concerned with rep-
aration and reconciliation.
For local people, the challenge of returning or resettled combatants can
be further complicated by the varied nature of these combatants and their
very different needs. Young men, who have known very little in their lives
save the hardships and dangers of being guerrillas, at the least need retrain-
ing for non-combatant life. In the absence of some local scheme for
smooth reinsertion of male combatants, at least some of the latter are
likely to return to any available roles that can use the lethal skills that they
already possess—security guards or local protection for businesses—or to
rewarding, if illegal activities. Further pressure will be put on the resources
of local communities if many of the returning former fighters are disabled
and in need of specialized care for physical and psychological handicaps.
Quite different needs can be displayed by women ex-combatants,
whose life away from usually traditional homes frequently stigmatizes
them in the eyes of their own and other communities. This “cultural gap”
can make their return extremely hard—unless this is carefully arranged on
an individual basis via their original family.12 In some cases, one local
answer is for them to organize as a group to learn skills or to establish

10
See the strategy used in El Salvador of resettling former—rival—combatants (former
Faribundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMNL) fighters and demobilized military) in
communities in Usulután.
11
The Havana Agreement arranged for FARC combatants to be demobilized in 23 Zonas
Veredales Transitorias de Normilizaciones and 8 Campamentos scattered throughout
Colombia where FARC frentes had been operating.
12
This strategy of reunification with families is rarely possible, due to the difficulty of trac-
ing parents in circumstances of massive displacement. Moreover, one of the reasons for some
minors joining insurgent organizations involves domestic abuse and tensions at home
(Human Rights Watch 2003).
16 C. MITCHELL

some successful economic enterprise with local women’s groups, but lim-
ited resources often prevent success.
Finally, there is the problem of minors, or child soldiers, who may have
volunteered to join combatant groups or been forcibly recruited. These
“returnees” may not have participated directly in violence, but have
undertaken roles as guards, collecting information from local communi-
ties; carrying out patrols; acting as nurses; burying or removing landmines;
carrying arms, ammunition, and other burdens; providing sexual services;
or undertaking any number of organizational tasks to keep combat con-
tinuing. Whatever their experience, like other combatants their successful
reinsertion requires them first to leave their military identity behind and
acquire a new identity as a civilian. This process is most difficult with for-
mer child soldiers who often know no other identity, and it requires them
to abandon their familiar military networks and become part of new civil-
ian social networks in a new community. This, of course, puts another
burden on local communities who can be required to provide services
such as education, security, peer group support, psychological help, health
care, and financial support—all necessary if young returnees are not to
revert and rejoin an armed group.
Apart from problems for local communities arising from returning ex-­
combatants, a second major challenge arising from the whole issue of
people coming back to their previous homes is simply a matter of num-
bers. How does a community cope with large-scale, rapid return arising
from the conclusion of a peace agreement and the perception, however
temporary, that it is safe to go back home? Regarding any possible “peace
dividend”, how are promised post-agreement services to be provided if
the returnees do not include in their number the necessary schoolteachers,
para-medics, nurses, and craftsmen—often the very people who have been
targeted by armed groups and thus less likely to return?
Lastly, post-agreement communities frequently face dilemmas arising
from conflicts between returnees and those who stayed—or those who
arrived later from elsewhere and occupied vacant places left behind when
the original owners fled. Such problems of ownership can be particularly
acute when the local conflict has been going on a long time and the origi-
nal community members absent for a considerable period. Disputes over
titles to land and dwellings between returnees and stayers or acquirers
seem to be particularly common in many communities, especially when an
original if long absent landowner has owned large areas of productive land
and returned to find peasant farmers displaced from elsewhere using parts
 1 THE PROBLEMS PEACE CAN BRING 17

of the property for subsistence farming. The situation can be further com-
plicated when land has been sold several times and passed through the
hands of a variety of “legitimate” owners, even if the first seller simply
acquired the property by chasing off the original owners through the
threat or use of force.

Truth-Telling, Memorials, and Local Memories

It has become a standard practice that any peace agreement ending an
intra-state conflict will contain some provision for a truth commission,
involving revelation and a record of human rights violations carried out by
all sides during the violence. At the national level, one major objective of
this process is to give those who have suffered—the victims—the opportu-
nity to tell their stories before as wide an audience as possible, to have their
hurt and loss recognized publicly, and to be linked to some form of com-
pensation, usually provided by the incumbent authorities. Another key
aspect of this truth-telling process is for those who have committed all but
the most extreme human rights violations—the perpetrators—to be given
the chance to confront their victims, to acknowledge their deeds publicly,
and to express some level of remorse. Such admitted perpetrators thus
avoid the alternative of facing a retributive procedure in some formal
court, which could result in a long jail sentence.
Given that many intra-state conflicts go on for a very long time and
provide many opportunities for gross human rights violations by all com-
batants, this procedure avoids the necessity of running literally thousands
of accused perpetrators through a lengthy legal procedure and through a
court system ill prepared to deal with a huge number of cases arising from
many years of often vicious rural and urban warfare. National-level truth-­
telling has thus become the post-agreement process for coping with wide-
spread examples of killings, massacres, other physical harm and injury,
kidnapping, arrest and imprisonment, forced recruitment, destruction or
seizure of property, displacement, and all manner of other ills resulting
from the combat. Inevitably, its national-level implementation has been
criticized as simply an extension of impunity for perpetrators, who can use
the truth-telling process as a way of avoiding any form of real punishment
for their past misdeeds, beyond the inadequate “penalty” of social disap-
proval. This seems particularly to apply to those who, while not necessarily
directly involved in throwing people out of helicopters or cutting off peo-
ple’s heads in a local football field, are nonetheless involved in the order-
ing of such acts.
18 C. MITCHELL

What is often neglected in discussions of post-agreement truth-telling,

and the linked issue of memorializing the numerous victims of human
rights violations, involves crucial local-level implications of such processes.
While nationally negotiated peace agreements can establish processes for
truth-telling, it is local communities that have experienced the violations
and the damage. It is often local-level perpetrators—ex-combatants who
used to operate locally and now continue to live locally—who were respon-
sible for the violations. For many local communities, one problem of the
post-agreement period is how their members, including many victims, can
accommodate to the presence of reinserted ex-combatants. What peace-
building reactions are appropriate for members of such a local community,
whether reinserted ex-combatants are themselves perpetrators or simply
members of a perpetrating block or front? A strategy of reinsertion or
resettlement is relatively easy to agree in principle at the national level, but
it is usually local communities and their leaders who have to work out the
details of a peaceful coexistence both with reinserted individuals and with
resettled combatant communities. It is hardly surprising that many subse-
quent analyses of D.D.R.R. processes (Moor 2007; Verkoren et al. 2010)
find that local communities do not trust reinserted ex-combatants, while
the latter feel stigmatized, rejected, and hence isolated by society.
Yet another aspect of this link between peacebuilding and truth-telling
involves the creation of historical memory (Naidu 2006) and the process of
“memorialization”—what local communities might be able to do to com-
memorate their own experience as victims in the struggle. Practically speak-
ing, what might be done to establish some public, local record of what
happened, who bore the brunt of the violence and disruption, and—most
controversially—who was responsible? This last challenge is especially tricky,
given that, in many cases, cleavages within the community remain unhealed,
and often bitter rivalries persist. At the national level, the agreement may
have been signed and “peacemaking” concluded. However, peacebuilding
at local levels still awaits the conclusion of locally negotiated peace deals,
implementing power sharing agreements, accepting conflict resolution pro-
cesses, and—just as importantly—agreeing how a community should recall
significant events from the past. In every protracted and intractable intra-
state conflict, there can be innumerable and often contradictory local “his-
tories” which affect post-agreement phases of a peace process.13

13
However, it is often the case that once dormant counter-narratives can re-emerge to
challenge those firmly set in place in the post-agreement or post-conflict eras. See Harris
(2010) and Young (1993) on German memories and memorialization of the Holocaust.
 1 THE PROBLEMS PEACE CAN BRING 19

At first sight, it might seem fairly straightforward to “memorialize”—to

fulfill what seems to be an almost universal “urge to remember” (Barsalou
and Baxter 2007), to put on record the harms people in the community
have suffered, and to pay tribute to those who have been victims of vio-
lence. At the national level, actions and strategies have often included a
wide variety of physical artifacts—plaques, statues, memorial gardens and
graveyards, murals, museums, anthems—or symbolic actions—national
days of remembrance, scholarships, renaming of towns, venues, official
positions, and streets. All of these can be echoed at grassroots levels.
However, at both levels such actions or symbols can also contribute to
the perpetuation of hostility and division just as much as they can contrib-
ute to peacebuilding. A number of authors have emphasized that some
efforts at memorializing victims can perpetuate in others (who are identi-
fied as being the responsible “perpetrators”) a strong a sense of having
been wronged in the past conflict and now being neglected. This may well
reinforce a feeling that “our” sufferings have been ignored while other’s
narrative of past events is the only one likely to be recalled in future times
(Hite 2007). The overarching dilemma arises acutely in Annie Coombes’
(Coombs 2003) study of post-apartheid South Africa. How does a society
remember a violent past without reigniting the tensions that initially led to
violence? Others have emphasized that all memorializing is always a highly
political issue, and heroes or victims from one era can become villains or
perpetrators in another. Peacebuilding guidelines often argue, for exam-
ple, that memorials should “avoid presenting certain victims as more
deserving that others” (Egbo 2008: 17).14 In many cases, this differentia-
tion between “victims” and “perpetrators” is easier said than done.
Nowhere is this clash of alternative social memory and rival narratives
more important than in the issue of deciding, post-agreement, who owes
what to whom.

Reconciliation: Reparation and Recompense at the Local Level

Given that most intra-state conflicts are both protracted and destructive,
it is hardly surprising that the major, initial task following any peace

14
As Christopher Duncan notes, “the way communities and individuals set memories of
past conflicts in stone, steel or paint has ramifications for inter-group relations and other
post-conflict dynamics” (Duncan 2009, p. 453).
Another random document with
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 Her exceeding anxiety was placed to the score of her attachment
to Sainte-Croix; and as she quitted the apartment the others went on
with their duties in silence. Lachaussée seated himself in a recess of
the chamber and watched their proceedings; and Philippe collected
a few things together which belonged to his father, and consisted
principally of some chemical glasses and evaporating dishes, placing
them in a box by themselves to be moved away as soon as it was
permitted.
But scarcely five minutes had elapsed ere another carriage drove
into the court, and Desgrais, the active exempt of the Maréchaussée,
came upstairs to the apartment, followed by one or two agents of the
police. As he entered the room, he cast his eye over the different
pieces of furniture, and perceiving that the judicial seal was already
upon many of them, nodded his head in token of approval. Then
turning to Philippe he said—
‘Monsieur Glazer, there will be no occasion to inconvenience you
by detaining your own goods. Whatever you will describe as yours,
shall be at once made over to you on your signature.’
‘You are very good,’ replied Philippe; ‘but everything belonging to
us, in the care of this poor gentleman, was of little consequence.
There is, however, that little cabinet, which may be returned to its
owner, who is most anxious to have it. It has been earnestly claimed
by the Marchioness of Brinvilliers.’
‘The Marchioness of Brinvilliers!’ exclaimed Desgrais with some
emphasis. ‘And you say she was anxious to carry it away?’
‘Just as I have told you; in fact her solicitude was remarkable.’
Desgrais was silent for a minute.
‘Stop!’ at length he said; ‘we will examine this cabinet that appears
so precious. I have reasons for it.’
By his directions Pierre Frater took down the inlaid box from its
shelf, Maître Picard being too short, and placed it on the table. The
others collected eagerly round, especially Lachaussée, who at the
first mention of it had left his seat. Sainte-Croix’s keys were
discovered in one of the drawers of the table, and Desgrais,
selecting one of curiously-wrought steel, applied it to the lock. The lid
instantly flew open.
 ‘Here is a false top,’ said Desgrais, ‘with a written paper lying open
upon it. Let us see what it says.’
And taking the document, he read as follows:—

‘“I humbly ask of those into whose hands this cabinet may
fall, whoever they may be, to deliver it to the Marchioness of
Brinvilliers, at present living in the Rue Neuve St. Paul; since
its contents are of importance to her alone, and her welfare
apart, cannot be of the slightest interest to any one in the
world. Should she have died before me, let the cabinet be
burnt, exactly as it is, without opening it or disturbing its
contents.”

‘The paper concludes,’ continued Desgrais, ‘with an appeal to God

respecting the sincerity of this request, and a half-implied
malediction upon those who may refuse to grant it.’
‘I presume, monsieur, now that your curiosity is satisfied thus far, I
may take the box with me to Madame de Brinvilliers,’ said
Lachaussée.
‘Stop!’ replied the exempt, as the other stretched forth his hand,
‘here is another paper. It is a receipt for a sum of money delivered on
account of work performed, and signed “Lachaussée.”’
As his name was pronounced, Lachaussée fell back from the
table, and, muttering a few indistinct words, approached the door;
but Desgrais cried out—
‘You appear interested in this affair, monsieur, and cannot yet
leave us. Guards, place yourselves at the doorway, and let no one
pass but with my orders.’
Two of the patrol who had entered with the exempt took up their
station at the door, crossing their halberds before it. A dead silence
reigned, and the curiosity of all was raised to the most painful
intensity. Lachaussée leant back against the bureau, and folding his
arms gazed steadily at the proceedings, but no visible token
betrayed his emotion.
‘This affair requires some little extra investigation,’ said Desgrais.
‘This false lid must open with a spring, as there is neither lock nor
handle to it.’ He held the cabinet up, and turning it round, discovered
one of the studs that ornamented it of a darker colour than the rest,
as if from constant handling. His experienced eye told him that this
should be the one; he pressed it accordingly, and the partition turned
up with a jerk against the side. A single and hurried expiration
escaped his lips. He inverted the cabinet, and turned its contents on
the table; they consisted of a number of little packets, boxes, and
phials, mostly sealed up, and distinguished by various inscriptions.
‘“Sublimate!” “Vitrol!” “Opium!”’ exclaimed Desgrais, as he read
each aloud. ‘Mort bleu! messieurs, we are about to make some
strange discoveries!’
‘Will you allow me to pass,’ said Philippe Glazer to Desgrais, ‘I
think there is no one below, and I fancied I heard the bell sound?’
‘Of course,’ replied the exempt; ‘but return as soon as you
conveniently may. We shall, perhaps, hereafter need you as a
witness to these revelations.’
Philippe hastily promised compliance, and then quitting the
apartment, hastily flew downstairs to his father’s shop. The old man
had retired to rest early, but his man Panurge was fast asleep upon
one of the tables—so soundly that it required no very gentle
treatment from Philippe to waken him.
‘Ho! Panurge!’ cried his young master, in a sharp but low voice,
‘awake, man, unless you wish every wretched bone in your
miserable carcase broken. Do you hear me?’
‘Hippocrates sayeth that erysipelas upon the baring of a bone is
evil,’ muttered Panurge, who mixed up his sleeping studies with his
waking faculties.
‘Pshaw!’ cried Philippe, ‘I will give you cause for it, all over you, if
you do not attend. Rouse up, I tell you.’
And he gave Panurge such a mighty shake as would have
aroused him had he been in a trance. As it was, it immediately
restored the assistant to the full exhibition of what faculties he
possessed, and he awaited Glazer’s further orders.
‘You know the house of Monsieur Artus, the Commissary of Police,
in the Rue des Noyers?’
‘I do,’ replied Panurge; ‘he hath been ill of a choleric gout, for
which we gave him the juice of danewort——’
 ‘The pest on what you gave him!’ said Philippe, ‘so long as you
know where he is to be found. Now look you; go off there directly,
and if you lose no time on the way you will probably find the
Marchioness of Brinvilliers at his house. Give this note to her, and
only to her, as you value your useless life.’
He hastily wrote on a scrap of paper:—

‘The police have found some articles in a cabinet belonging

to M. de Sainte-Croix, which may cause you much
embarrassment from the publicity it will give to your
acquaintance. Be careful how you proceed.
‘P. G.’

‘Now, off!’ said Philippe, hastily folding the note; ‘and return here
as soon as you leave this in her own hands. Poor lady!’ he
continued, half speaking to himself; ‘it would be sorrow indeed if
mere gallantry should link her with the deeds of which her cavalier
appears to have been the perpetrator.’
Without another syllable Panurge set off, and Glazer was returning
to the room when he met Desgrais descending the stairs, carrying
the cabinet and followed by two of the police, who had Lachaussée
in custody between them. He addressed him—
‘We shall require the services of your father and yourself to-
morrow, M. Glazer, to analyse these different articles. I have put a
seal upon them, and must hold you answerable for their safe
keeping.’
‘I denounce my being kept a prisoner,’ exclaimed Lachaussée, ‘as
informal and unjust. You have no right to detain me upon the mere
circumstance of my name appearing on that piece of paper.’
‘I will make ample reparation for any wrong I may do you,’
answered Desgrais, coolly. Then, turning to the guards, he added—
‘You will conduct this person to the Châtelet. And now, M. Frater,
you can accompany me, with Maître Picard, to the Rue des Noyers
without loss of time. We shall probably there light upon the
Marchioness of Brinvilliers.’
Philippe’s heart was in his throat as he heard the name
pronounced. He immediately endeavoured to contrive some delay in
Desgrais’s departure, offering him refreshment, begging him to stop
whilst the cressets of the watch were retrimmed, and pressing
articles of outer wear upon him, by reason of the cold, which he
pretended he could not find. A few minutes were gained in this
manner, and then the guard departed across the Place Maubert,
Philippe’s only hope being that Panurge had already got there.
Whilst this scene of fearful interest was being enacted at Glazer’s,
Marie had reached the house of the Commissary of Police. Some of
the domestics were sitting up for further orders from Desgrais, and
by them she was informed that M. Artus could not be disturbed. By
dint, however, of heavy bribes, giving them all the money she had
about her, which was no inconsiderable sum, she was ushered into
the apartment of the Commissary, and to him, in a few hurried
words, she made known the object of her visit. But her earnestness
was so strange that M. Artus requested she would wait until the next
day, when he should have received the report of the proceedings
from his agents. Had she shown less anxiety, he would doubtless
have granted what she so urgently desired.
Finding there was no chance of assistance from this quarter, she
left the room in an agony of terror, and, scarcely knowing what
course to pursue, was about to return to the Place Maubert, when
Panurge arrived with Glazer’s note. She hastily read it, and the
contents struck her like a thunderbolt. ‘Then all is over!’ she
exclaimed; and without exchanging another word with the assistant,
or any of the officials, she flew through the streets, half clad as she
was, with the snow deep on the ground, and the thoroughfares
wrapped in the obscurity of a winter night, in the direction of her hôtel
in the Rue St. Paul.
 CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE FLIGHT OF MARIE TO LIÉGE—PARIS—THE GIBBET OF MONTFAUCON

Midnight was sounded upon the heavy bell of the Bastille by the
sentinel on guard but a few minutes before the Marchioness of
Brinvilliers—terrified, breathless, and, in spite of her hurry, shivering
in her light dress beneath the intense cold—arrived at the Hôtel
d’Aubray. There were no signs of life in that quarter of Paris, for the
inhabitants had long retired to rest; a faint light, gleaming from the
front windows of Marie’s residence upon the snow that covered the
thoroughfare, alone served to guide her to the door. The drowsy
concierge admitted her, and she hurried across the inner court and
upstairs to her own apartment.
Françoise Roussel, her servant, was waiting up for her. Her
mistress had left in such an extreme of anxiety, and half-undressed,
that Françoise saw at once an affair of great moment had disturbed
her; and now, as Marie returned, the girl was frightened by her
almost ghastly look. As she entered the room she fell panting on one
of the causeuses, and then her servant perceived that she had lost
one of her shoes, and had been walking, perhaps nearly the whole
distance from the Place Maubert, with her small naked foot upon the
snow, without discovering it. In her hurried toilet, she had merely
arisen from her bed and drawn her shoes on, without anything else,
and throwing a heavy loose robe about her had thus hurried with
Lachaussée to Glazer’s house; for from Gaudin’s accomplice she
had learned the first tidings of his death and the dangerous position
in which she stood. And now, scarcely knowing in the terror and
agony of the moment what course to adopt, she remained for some
minutes pressing her hands to her forehead, as if to seize and
render available some of the confused and distracting thoughts
which were hurrying through her almost bewildered brain. A few
offers of assistance on the part of her domestic were met with short
and angry refusals; and Françoise, almost as frightened as the
Marchioness herself, remained gazing at her, not knowing what
measures she ought next to adopt.
Meanwhile, Desgrais, with the important casket, and accompanied
by the clerk Frater and Maître Picard, had reached the house of M.
Artus, the Commissary of Police, in the Rue des Noyers, arriving
there not two minutes after Marie had quitted it to regain her own
abode. Philippe Glazer had accompanied them, partly from being in
a measure an implicated party in the affair, but chiefly out of anxiety
for the position of the Marchioness, in whose guilt he had not the
slightest belief. He was aware of her connection with Sainte-Croix;
but this was a matter of simple gallantry, and in the time of Louis
Quatorze much more likely to enlist the sympathies of the many on
the side of the erring party than to excite their indignation.
‘I suppose you have no further occasion for me?’ observed Maître
Picard, as he stood at the foot of M. Artus’s bed, after having
awaited the conclusion of Desgrais’s account of the discovery;
‘because, if you have not, I would fain go home.’
The little bourgeois was thinking of the roast pheasant which he
had abandoned to the voracity of the Gascon. He had a wild hope
that it might be yet untouched.
‘Stop, mon brave,’ said Desgrais. ‘You cannot leave me until we
have found Madame de Brinvilliers. I have only missed her by a few
seconds. You must come on with me to her house, where she most
likely is by this time.’
‘I suppose there is no necessity for me to remain here longer,’ said
Philippe Glazer.
‘None whatever, monsieur,’ replied the exempt. ‘You will take care
of M. de Sainte-Croix’s property; and we may call upon you to-
morrow to analyse the contents of this casket.’
Philippe bowed, and left the room. The moment he was clear of
the house, having borrowed a lighted lantern from one of the guard,
who was at the door, he set off as fast as his legs would carry him
towards the Rue St. Paul, having heard enough to convince him that
the Marchioness was in danger of being arrested. Upon reaching the
Hôtel d’Aubray he clamoured loudly for admission. At the sound of
the first knock he perceived a form, which he directly recognised to
be that of Marie, peep from behind the edge of the curtain and
immediately disappear. Some little delay took place before his
summons was answered, and then the concierge, peering through
the half-opening of the door, told him that Madame de Brinvilliers
was not within. Pushing the menial on one side, with a hurried
expression of disbelief, Philippe forced his way into the court, and
perceived, as he entered, the figure of the Marchioness hurrying
upstairs. He bounded after her, and stood by her side upon the
landing.
‘Philippe!’ exclaimed Marie, as she recognised his features. ‘I was
afraid it was Desgrais, and I had gone down to give orders that no
one might be admitted.’
‘You have not an instant to lose,’ replied young Glazer hurriedly,
‘and must leave the house in reality. I have just now left them with M.
Artus, about to come on and arrest you. You must fly—instantly.’
‘Fly! by what means?’ asked Marie; ‘my horses are at Offemont,
except the one at—at his house in the Rue des Bernardins. O
Philippe!’ she continued, ‘tell me what to do in this fearful extremity. I
know not how to act—I am nearly dead.’
All her self-possession, all her duplicity, gave way beneath the
crushing agony of the moment. She burst into tears, and would have
fallen to the ground had not Philippe caught her in his arms.
‘Is there nothing in the stables that we can depart with?’ asked he
of Françoise, who had been watching this short scene with trembling
attention. ‘It will not do to hire a carriage, as that would give a certain
clue to our route.’
‘A man brought a tumbrel here this afternoon, with some things
from the country. He has left it, with the horse, in the stables, and
sleeps himself at the Croix d’Or, in the Rue St. Antoine.’
‘Bring this light with you, and show me the way,’ said Philippe, as
he placed the Marchioness in a fauteuil, and hurried downstairs,
followed by the femme de chambre.
As soon as the girl had indicated the spot, Glazer told her to return
to her mistress and bid her prepare as quickly as she could to leave
Paris, taking with her only such few things as were immediately
necessary. Next, pulling the drowsy horse from his stall, he
proceeded to harness him, as well as his acquaintance with such
matters allowed him to do, to the rude country vehicle which
Françoise had spoken about. All this was not the work of five
minutes; and he then returned to Marie’s apartment.
But, brief as the interval had been, Marie had in the time
recovered her wonted firmness, and aided by her servant had rapidly
made her toilet, wrapping herself in her warmest garments for
protection against the inclemency of the weather. When Philippe
entered, he found Françoise occupied in making up a small parcel,
half unconscious, however, of what she was doing, from flurry at the
evident emergency of the circumstances; and Marie was standing
before the fire, watching the destruction of a large packet of letters
and other papers, which were blazing on the hearth.
‘I am ready, madame,’ said Philippe; ‘do not delay your departure
an instant longer, or you cannot tell into what perplexities you may
fall. Every moment is of untold value.’
‘Where do you propose to take me?’ asked the Marchioness
earnestly.
‘I see no better refuge for the instant than your château at
Offemont.’
‘Offemont!’ exclaimed Marie; ‘it is twenty leagues from Paris; and
in this dreadful weather we should perish on the route.’
‘It must be attempted,’ said Philippe; ‘you say your horses are
there; and if we can once reach them, your means of getting to the
frontier will be comparatively easy. We must brave everything. Your
enemies I know to be numerous in Paris, and you cannot tell what
charges they might bring against you when in their power, which it
would be next to impossible to refute. Come, come!’
He took her by the hand and led her to the door, the servant
following them closely, and receiving from the Marchioness a
number of hurried directions and commissions, which it was next to
impossible she could remember. As he quitted the room, with some
forethought Philippe blew out the candles and collected the pieces;
for the night would be long and dark; there were seven or eight hours
of obscurity yet before them. When they got to the court where the
horse and tumbrel were, the former evidently in no hurry to depart,
young Glazer fastened the lantern he had borrowed from the guard
to the side of the vehicle, and then assisted the Marchioness to
mount and take her seat upon some straw.
 ‘It is a rude carriage, madame,’ he said; ‘but the journey would be
less pleasant if it was going to the Place de Grêve.’
Marie shuddered as he spoke; but it was unobserved in the
obscurity. As soon as she was seated, Philippe drew a coarse
awning over some bent sticks which spanned the interior, and
making this tight all round, prepared to start.
‘Stop!’ he exclaimed, as if struck by a sudden thought; ‘it will be as
well to see all clear before us.’
And he advanced to the porte-cochère that opened into the street,
when to his dismay he perceived the lighted cressets of the Guet
Royal coming down the Rue Neuve St. Paul. In an instant he closed
the door and barred it; and turning to Françoise, exclaimed—
‘Go up to the window of your mistress’s room, which looks into the
road, and when the guard comes, say she is from home.’
‘There is a court which leads from the stables to the Rue St.
Antoine,’ said the Marchioness from the vehicle. ‘You can get out
that way.’
‘It is lucky,’ said Philippe, ‘or we should otherwise have been
trapped. Françoise! up—up, and detain them every instant that you
can. I will prevent the concierge from replying.’
He took his handkerchief and hurriedly tied it round the clapper of
the bell, which hung within his reach over the porter’s lodge. Then,
turning round the cart, he led the horse through the inner court and
stabling to the passage indicated by the Marchioness. Fortunately
the snow was on the ground, and there was little noise made beyond
the creaking of the vehicle, which in half a minute emerged into the
Rue St. Antoine, and Philippe closed the gate behind him.
The thoroughfare was dark and silent; but the snow was falling
heavily, as its twinkling by the side of the lantern proved. This was so
far lucky, because it would cover the traces of their route almost as
soon as they were made. The fugitives could plainly hear the sound
of voices and the clatter of arms in the Rue Neuve St. Paul; and
aware that the delay could only last for a few minutes, Philippe urged
on the animal as well as he could, and turned up a small street which
ran in a northerly direction from the Rue St. Antoine.
‘You are passing the gate,’ said Marie, who all along had been
looking anxiously from the vehicle, as she pointed towards the
Bastille, where one or two lights could be seen, apparently
suspended in the air, from the windows of the officials and the guard-
room.
‘I know it, madame,’ replied Philippe. ‘It would not be safe for us to
leave the city by that barrier. It is the nearest to your house; and if
they suspect or discover that you have left Paris, they will directly
conclude it is by the Porte St. Antoine there, and follow you. Besides,
we might be challenged by the sentinels.’
‘You are right,’ said the Marchioness; ‘the Porte du Temple will be
better.’
And shrouding herself in her cloak, she withdrew under the rough
shelter of the tilt; whilst Philippe kept on, still leading the horse,
through a labyrinth of small narrow streets, which would have been
cut by a line drawn from the Bastille to the Temple. At last he
emerged upon the new road formed by the destruction of the
fortifications, which we now know as the boulevards, and reached
the gate in question, which he passed through unquestioned by the
gardien, who merely regarded the little party as belonging to one of
the markets. Had he been entering the city instead, he would have
been challenged; but, as the authorities did not care what any one
took out of it, he was allowed to go on his way amidst a few houses
immediately beyond the barrier, forming the commencement of the
faubourg, until he came into the more open country. Here the
reflected light from the white ground in some measure diminished
the obscurity. The snow, too, had drifted into the hollows, leaving the
road pretty clear; and Philippe clambered on to the front of the
tumbrel, taking the reins in his hand, and drove on as he best might
towards the grande route. Not a word was exchanged between these
two solitary travellers. Marie kept in a corner of the vehicle, closely
enveloped in her mantle; and her companion had enough to do to
watch the line they were taking, and keep his hearing on the stretch
to discover the first sounds of pursuit.
‘Peste!’ exclaimed Philippe at length, as one of the wheels jolted
into a deep rut, and the lantern was jerked off and its light
extinguished; ‘this is unlucky. We did not see too well with it, and I
don’t know how we shall fare now.’
 He jumped down as he spoke, and tried to rekindle the light with
his breath; but it was of no use; he entirely extinguished the only
spark remaining. In this dilemma he looked around him, to see if
there was a chance of assistance. Marie also was aroused from her
silence by the accident, and gazed earnestly from the cart with the
same purpose. At last, almost at the same instant, they perceived a
thin line of light, as though it shone through an ill-closed shutter, but
a little way ahead of them; and the stars, which had been slowly
coming out, now faintly showed the outline of a high and broken
ground upon their right. At the top of this some masonry and broken
pillars were just observable, supporting cross-beams, from which, at
certain distances, depended dark, irregularly-shaped objects. It was
a gloomy locality, and Philippe knew it well, as he made out the
crumbling remains of the gibbet at Montfaucon.
‘I should have taken this as a bad omen,’ said he, half joking, ‘if
the fourche had been still in use. It would have looked as though the
beam was meant for our destination.’
As they approached the small cabin from which the light came,
Philippe shouted to awaken the attention of those within; but no
answer being returned, he jumped down, and knocked furiously at
the door. He heard some whispers for a minute or two, and then a
woman’s voice demanded, ‘Who is there?’
‘A traveller, who wants a light,’ cried Philippe, ‘to guide him safely
to Bourget. For pity, madame, don’t keep me here much longer, or I
must be ungallant, and kick in the door.’
There was evidently another conference within, and then the door
was cautiously opened. Philippe entered, and his eyes directly fell
upon Exili, whilst the female proved to be a woman who was
practising fortune-telling in Paris—it was supposed as a cloak for
darker matters—and was known to some of the people, and to the
whole of the police, as La Voisin. The physician and the student
recognised each other immediately, for they had often met on the
carrefours, and each uttered a hurried exclamation of surprise at the
rencontre.
‘Monsieur Glazer,’ said Exili, as Philippe took a light from the fire,
‘you have seen me here, and possibly are acquainted with what has
taken place in the Quartier Latin this evening.’
 ‘I know everything,’ replied Glazer.
‘Then I must ask you, on your faith, to keep my secret,’ said Exili.
‘You have discovered me in coming here to serve yourself; but this
refuge is to me an affair of life and death. You will not betray me?’
‘You may trust me,’ said Philippe carelessly; ‘and in return,
madame,’ he continued, turning to La Voisin, ‘if any others should
come up, let your story be that you have seen no one this night.
Mine also is a case of emergency, and a lady—high-born, rich, and
beautiful—is concerned in it.’
The woman assured Philippe he might depend upon her secrecy;
and he was about to depart with his lantern, when Exili stopped him.
‘Stay!’ he exclaimed earnestly. ‘Who is it you have with you?’ And
as he spoke the strange fire kindled in his falcon eyes that always
bespoke the working of some terrible passion within.
‘It cannot concern you,’ replied Philippe. ‘I have got my light, and
our interview is concluded.’
‘Not yet,’ answered Exili quickly. ‘A woman—rich, high-born, and
beautiful. It is the Marchioness of Brinvilliers!’
And before Philippe could stop him, he rushed forward and threw
open the covering of the cart, discovering Marie still crouching in the
corner of the vehicle.
‘I have you, then, at last,’ he cried, in a voice choking with rage, as
he recognised her. ‘Descend!—fiend! demon! murderess of my son!
Descend! for you are mine—mine!’
He was about to climb up the vehicle, when Marie, to whom part of
the speech was entirely incomprehensible, shrank to the other side
of the tumbrel, and called upon Philippe to defend her. But this was
not needed. The young student had clutched the physician by the
neck, and pulled him back on to the ground.
‘What do you mean by this outrage, monsieur?’ he asked.
‘She is a murderess, I tell you!’ he continued hoarsely. ‘Her
damned arts drove my son—him they called Sainte-Croix—to death!
She killed him, body and soul, and she belongs to me. I will
denounce her to the Chambre Ardente.’
‘Keep back!’ cried Philippe; ‘you are mad! What has the
Marchioness of Brinvilliers in common with yourself?’
 ‘You shall see,’ answered Exili. ‘Look there—in the faubourg—the
guard is coming. They have tracked you.’
And indeed the lights were visible from the cressets carried by the
Guet Royal at the extreme end of the route. Philippe sprung upon
the tumbrel as Exili spoke, and tried to proceed; but the other seized
the horse’s head and endeavoured to arrest his progress.
‘Stand away!’ exclaimed young Glazer, ‘or you are a dead man!’
‘I shall not move,’ was Exili’s reply. ‘I shall be doomed myself, but I
will drag her with me to the scaffold. See! they are coming—she is
mine!’
His further speech was cut short by Philippe, who, raising his
heavy country whip, struck the physician with all his force with the
butt-end upon the temple. Exili staggered back, and then the
student, lashing his horse furiously, drove from the hovel with
tolerable speed, placing the lantern under the covering, that it might
not be seen; whilst Marie, without speaking a word, gazed anxiously
behind upon the advancing patrol. In a minute, however, a turn of the
road shut them from her sight, and the travellers found themselves
approaching the faubourg of La Villette, upon the high-road, without
the Porte St. Martin.
It was, as Exili had said, a party of the guard who were in pursuit,
mounted, and headed by Desgrais. The active exempt had gone to
the Hôtel d’Aubray, as we have seen, and being at last admitted by
Françoise, had seen some traces of a departure on the snow, which
had drifted into the sheltered parts of the court. But in the street the
fall had covered up the wheel-tracks; and, as the fugitives had
conceived, he went directly to the Porte St. Antoine. The sentinel,
however, told him that no one had passed the barrier; and he then
rode briskly along the boulevards to the next gate, near the Temple.
Here he learned a tumbrel had gone out of the city but a few minutes
before his arrival; upon which he divided his troop into two parties,
sending one along the road to La Courtille, whilst with the other he
took the same line that Philippe had chosen, these being the only
two practicable routes for vehicles without the barrier, and
accompanied by the latter escort he soon arrived at the foot of
Montfaucon.
 Exili had been stunned for a few seconds by the heavy blow which
Philippe Glazer had dealt to him; but, recovering himself before the
guard came up, he darted back into the hovel, and seizing a piece of
lighted wood from the hearth, told La Voisin to save herself as she
best might, and then scrambled with singular agility up the steep
mound at the back of the house, until he reached the stone-work of
the gibbet. This was crumbling, and afforded many foot-places by
which he could ascend, until he stood between two of the pillars that
still supported the crosspieces, above the hollow way along which
Desgrais and his troop were progressing.
The exempt knew the physician directly, as his gaunt form
appeared in the lurid light of the cressets, and the rude torch that he
himself carried; and he would have ordered the guard immediately to
capture him, had not Exili arrested the command by speaking.
‘You seek the Marchioness of Brinvilliers,’ he cried. ‘She was here
not an instant back; and you will find her, if you care to hurry, on the
grande route.’
‘I call upon you to surrender yourself my prisoner,’ said Desgrais,
speaking from below; ‘you may then guide us on the track.’
‘If I had meant to give myself up,’ said Exili, ‘I should have
remained below. I have put you on the scent, and that was all I
wanted. Farewell!’
He waved his hand to the officers, and disappeared behind the
foundation of the masonry. On seeing this, Desgrais sprang
 The Arrest of Exili

from his horse, and, seizing a cresset from the guard, told one or two
of the others to follow him, as he rapidly ascended the mound. He
was active, his limbs were well-knit, and a few seconds sufficed to
bring him to the spot from whence Exili had spoken; but as he looked
over the area of masonry, not a trace of the physician was visible,
except the smouldering brand which he had flung down upon the
ground.
The others had arrived at the platform, and by the additional light
from their cressets Desgrais perceived an opening in the stone-work,
conducting below by ragged jutting angles of masonry, and down this
he boldly proceeded to venture. It conducted to a terrible spot—the
cemetery of those unfortunates who had perished on the gibbet, into
which the bodies were thrown in former times, to make room for
fresh victims on the fourche. But now the dry bones were all that
remained, crushing and rattling beneath the feet of the exempt as he
proceeded; for nearly a century had elapsed since the last execution
—that of the wise and just Coligni, during the fiendish massacre of
St. Bartholomew. But the place had been undisturbed, time alone
having altered its features; the only intruders upon its dreary
loneliness being the dogs, and the sorcerers, who came thither for
materials to give a horrid interest to their calling and frighten the
vulgar who came to consult them.
By the flaring light of the cressets Desgrais beheld Exili cowering
at the end of the vault. His object had evidently been to betray the
Marchioness, whilst he eluded capture himself; but he had under-
rated the keen vigilance of the exempt. He had been taken in a trap;
and as one or two of the Guet Royal followed Desgrais, he saw that
further resistance was useless. He held up his hand to prevent the
threatened attack which the others seemed inclined to make; and
then, advancing to the exempt, muttered—
‘I am your prisoner; take me where you please. The game is up at
last.’
The party retraced their steps, and descended once more to the
byway of the faubourgs. Bidding two of the patrol watch Exili,
Desgrais next went into the hovel, and ordered the woman to come
forth. She immediately obeyed, and made a haughty reverence to
the authorities.
‘Madame Catherine Deshayes,’ said Desgrais, ‘by your name of
La Voisin you are already under the surveillance of the police. You
will please to accompany them at present, until your connection with
the Signor Exili can be explained.’
Some of the patrol directly took their places on either side of the
woman, and then Desgrais turned to Exili.
‘You will stay for to-night,’ he said, ‘in the Châtelet; to-morrow
other arrangements will be made for your sojourn until the opening of
the next chamber at the Arsenal. Two of you,’ he continued,
addressing the guard, ‘will take charge of the prisoner to Paris.’
‘Then you will not want me to follow Madame de Brinvilliers?’ said
Exili.
 ‘We do not now require your aid,’ was the reply. ‘Messieurs,—en
route!’
The guard prepared to mount, when one of them rode, apparently
in a great feeling of insecurity, through the little knot of patrol, and
approached Desgrais. The lights revealed the form and features of
Maître Picard.
‘Monsieur,’ said the little bourgeois, ‘I fear my horse is tired. I will
therefore form one of the escort to take the prisoner to the Châtelet.’
‘I fear we cannot spare you just yet, mon brave,’ said Desgrais.
‘You are the only member of the Garde Bourgeois with us, and we
may need your authority after mine. You must come on at present.’
Maître Picard groaned as he turned his horse’s bridle back again.
He was evidently ill at ease in the saddle. He could just touch the
stirrups—the leathers of which were much too long for him—with the
tips of his toes; and as he had not crossed a horse since his grand
progress to Versailles, he complained that the action of the present
steed was somewhat too vigorous for him. But he was obliged to
obey the orders of the exempt, and fell into the rear accordingly.
‘A country cart, drawn by one horse, and covered with a tilt, is the
object of our chase,’ said Desgrais. ‘It cannot be ten minutes before
us. Forward!’
The majority of the guard set off at a smart trot along the hollow
way, whilst those who remained placed their prisoners between
them, and prepared to return by the Porte du Temple to Paris.
 CHAPTER XXIX.
PHILIPPE AVAILS HIMSELF OF MAÎTRE PICARD’S HORSE FOR THE
MARCHIONESS

Philippe Glazer made the best use of the time taken up in the
enactment of this hurried scene. Urging the horse on, he had already
left the scattered houses of La Villette behind them, and was now in
the open country, hastening as fast as the snow would permit
towards Le Bourget, at which village he had an acquaintance who
would give him and his companion temporary shelter, and lend him a
fresh horse, if requisite. The road was long and straight, and any
light could be seen at a great distance. As they proceeded, still in
silence, Marie kept watching from the back of the tumbrel, to give the
student the first alarm of any indications of pursuit.
‘Philippe,’ at length she exclaimed in a low voice, as though she
thought it would be heard in the extreme distance, ‘they are coming!
I can see the lights at La Villette moving. Exili has betrayed us; what
must be done?’
Her conductor jumped down to the ground as she spoke, and
looked towards the hamlet, where the cressets were indeed visible.
Every moment of advance was now most precious. He applied the
lash with renewed activity to the flanks and legs of the horse, but
with little effect. The animal was tired when he started; and the snow
was now clogging round the wheels, rendering any material progress
beyond his strength. At last, on coming to a deep drift, after a few
attempts to drag the tumbrel through, he stopped altogether.
‘Malediction!’ muttered Philippe through his teeth; ‘everything is
against us.’
‘They appear to be coming on at a fast trot,’ exclaimed Marie, as
she hastily descended from the vehicle and stood at the side of the
student. ‘We cannot possibly escape them.’
‘I am not foiled yet,’ replied Philippe. ‘We cannot outrun them, so
we must try stratagem.’
 Fortunately there was a small by-road running into a species of
copse at the wayside, upon which was stored large stacks of
firewood. Giving the Marchioness his whip, he directed her to flog
the horse, whilst he himself with all his power turned one of the
wheels. Marie complied—it was no time to hesitate; and by their
united efforts they urged the animal forward, turning him off the road
towards the copse, behind one of whose wood piles the vehicle was
soon concealed.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘if they do not see us, we are safe.’
A few minutes of terrible anxiety supervened as the patrol came
on at a rapid pace, their arms clanking and shining in the light of the
cressets which one or two of them still carried, blazing brightly as the
quick passage through the air fanned up their flames. Sure of the
object of their pursuit, as they imagined, they did not pause to
examine any of the tracks upon the ground, but were pushing hastily
forward towards Le Bourget, where they either expected to come up
with the fugitive, or receive information that would speedily place her
in their hands. They came on, and were close to the spot where the
others had turned off the road. Marie held her breath, and clasped
Philippe’s arm convulsively; but neither uttered a syllable as they
heard them pass, and could distinctly recognise Desgrais’s voice.
‘They have gone on!’ exclaimed the Marchioness as the sounds
diminished.
‘Stop!’ said Philippe drawing her back, for she had advanced
beyond their concealment to look after the patrol; ‘do not move; there
are more to come.’
As he spoke a horseman came slowly up, who appeared to be
lagging behind the rest as a sentinel. The starlight was sufficient to
show Philippe that he was alone; and in the stillness the student
could hear the rider muttering words of displeasure, and abusing the
horse, as he rolled uneasily about on his saddle. He stopped exactly
opposite the copse, and for a moment Philippe imagined they were
discovered. But he was soon undeceived. The patrol, after vainly
endeavouring to tighten his saddle-girths as he sat on the horse,
attempted to dismount; but being short and round in figure, he could
not well reach the ground from the stirrup, and the consequence
was, he rolled down, and over and over in the snow like a ball.