To Conform or to Confront? Civil Society and Agrarian Conflict in Post-conflict Guatemala

This article is about the role of civil society after violent conflict. It argues that the transformations that civil society organisations (CSOs) make are more ambiguous than supporting donors and NGOs presume. The article analyses how ten years after the 1996 peace agreements, Guatemalan CSOs deal with agrarian conflict. It discusses in detail the case of a church-related organisation assisting peasants with agrarian conflicts and the challenges it faced in defining its strategies. The article argues that supporting donors and NGOs should stop seeing the difficulties of organisational change in post-conflict situations exclusively in terms of the internal incapacities of civil society. Instead, they should re-politicise their analyses and focus on the importance of broader social and political processes in post-conflict settings for the strategic options open to CSOs