Peace through Peace Parks. Critical Revision of the Santiago Comaina Reserved Zone through the Positive-Negative Peace Concept.

Nowadays, Peace Parks are suggested as the best way to end conflicts and build peaceful relations between neighboring countries, through the establishment of a conservation park in the territories at dispute. Nevertheless, as it was described in this reaserch paper, Peace Parks are not the best measures to reach peace because are based on erroneous concepts which lead to erroneous practices, for instance, the idea of unmanaged lands or pristine nature justify that governments and conservation organizations delimit areas without human presence, prohibiting anthropogenic activities, relocating communities, ignoring communities’ practices and institutions, and so on. Moreover, considering Galtung’s peace concept, these parks are just focused on ending international conflicts but not on creating equitable structures, i.e. respectful relations, dialogue, access to own, administrate and explode resources, and so on. Furthermore, when new inequitable structures are imposed to the communities living in those lands, new social conflicts arise, which means that neither negative peace nor positive peace is achieved by Peace Parks.