Written by Anna Ligezowska

‘Peace’ is often imagined as an endpoint. A signature on a treaty, a ceremony, a moment of relief. When Colombia signed the Havana Peace Accord in 2016, the world celebrated. After more than fifty years of armed conflict, the agreement promised justice, reconciliation, and, crucially, the protection of children.

Nearly a decade later, that promise feels far more fragile than many expected.

In Colombia, child recruitment declined briefly after the accord, only to surge again in recent years. Nearly a decade on, children continue to be recruited into armed groups – in some regions at new high levels. This raises a troubling question: how can such practices persist in a country that is officially ‘at peace’?

My dissertation, Fragile Peace, Persistent Systems: Child Recruitment through the Lens of the Transformative Justice Cube, grew out of this contradiction. I wanted to understand why child recruitment persists not during war, but after peace, and what this tells us about the limits of how peace is usually imagined and implemented.

At first glance, this appears to be a problem of implementation. Peace agreements look good on paper but fall apart in practice – a familiar story. But the more I read, the more interviews and reports I analysed, the clearer it became that this explanation was not enough. Child recruitment in Colombia is not a leftover from the past. It is not an accident. It is a feature of the present – a symptom of much deeper, persistent systems of violence.

This insight became the core argument of my research: child recruitment is not simply a consequence of armed conflict but a systemic practice, sustained by deeper structures of inequality. To explore this, I developed what I call the Transformative Justice Cube – a conceptual framework that brings together three dimensions: level of explanations, the levels of systemic violence and logics of capitalism, coloniality and patriarchy, and the different levels at which peacebuilding responses operate.

Using this framework, a sobering picture emerged. Many children do not join armed groups because they believe in a cause, but because armed groups offer something the state does not: income, protection, belonging, and sometimes even a sense of purpose. In regions marked by poverty, racialised exclusion and weak public institutions, armed groups often function as employers of last resort. From this perspective, recruitment is not a deviation from social order but an expression of it.

This also helps explain why Transitional Justice, despite its achievements, has struggled to prevent recruitment. The 2016 peace accord strongly recognised children as victims and established ambitious justice mechanisms. Yet Transitional Justice largely operates within the same economic, political and social systems that produced violence in the first place. As long as capitalism continues to generate extreme precarity, colonial legacies shape who is marginalised, and patriarchy structures violence and opportunity, children remain structurally vulnerable – peace agreement or not.

This is where Transformative Justice becomes essential. Rather than focusing only on accountability or reconciliation, it asks deeper questions: What systems make violence profitable? Whose knowledge and experiences are ignored in peace processes? And what would justice look like if it aimed not to stabilise inequality, but to dismantle it?

My argument is not that Transformative Justice has all the answers – far from it. Instead, I see it as an unfinished project that needs clearer tools, stronger grounding, and greater attention to context. The Transformative Justice Cube is my attempt to contribute to that conversation.

Writing this dissertation taught me something humbling: without transformation, peace risks becoming a thin layer of stability over persistent harm. Or, as my research ultimately suggests, peace without transformation does not end violence, it reorganises it.

That insight may be uncomfortable, but it is also an invitation. If we are serious about protecting children and marginalised communities, and about building lasting peace, we need to look beyond agreements and ask harder questions about the systems we leave untouched.