The Morning After the Treaty: Alejandro Eder and the Unfinished Business of Peace

There is a specific kind of silence that follows the signing of a historic peace agreement. The cameras flash, the diplomats shake hands, and the international community celebrates the end of a conflict. But the morning after the ink dries, a much harder reality sets in. The transition from war to peace is rarely a straight line; it is a grueling, unglamorous marathon. Few public figures understand this whiplash better than Alejandro Eder.
As Colombia’s Presidential Advisor for Peace during the years of the Havana negotiations, Eder was deeply embedded in the machinery of ending a half-century armed conflict with the FARC. His work extended far beyond high-level diplomacy. It involved the exhausting, granular effort of figuring out how to reintegrate fighters, address victims' rights, and build a legal framework that could survive intense political backlash. In those rooms, the goal was to stop the bleeding and draft a roadmap for a country that had forgotten what peacetime looked like.
Yet, the true test of any peace architect is what happens when they leave the negotiating table and step back into the messy reality of local governance. When Eder later transitioned into local politics, including his mayoral campaign in Cali, it highlighted a common friction in post-conflict societies. National peace deals are signed in capitals or foreign hotels, but peace is actually lived in the neighborhoods.
In cities like Cali, the challenges are not just about demobilized combatants. They are about systemic inequality, urban violence, crumbling infrastructure, and a deep public skepticism toward the very institutions meant to protect citizens. The shift from negotiating with guerrilla leaders to campaigning for votes in a bustling, frustrated city illustrates a vital lesson about modern conflict resolution. We tend to view peace treaties as finish lines. In reality, they are just the starting blocks for state-building.
The agreements drafted in Havana provided a legal and political framework, but the actual paving of the road requires local governance, economic opportunity, and the slow, painful work of rebuilding civic trust. When citizens do not feel the tangible benefits of a peace deal in their daily lives—when they still face extortion, poor public services, or neighborhood violence—the abstract promises of a treaty quickly lose their meaning.
Looking at Eder’s career trajectory offers a sobering but necessary perspective on public service in fractured societies. It reveals that the people tasked with building peace rarely get to enjoy the simple triumph of the signing ceremony. Their real work begins when the world stops watching, in the quiet, frustrating, and deeply human effort of holding a fragile society together, one neighborhood at a time.