This chapter presents the emancipatory and autonomic experience of a small village called San José de Apartadó, located in the region of Urabá, Colombia. Facing an intensification and deterioration of the armed conflict in its territory, this village opted for peace, subscribing to a public pact according to which its inhabitants pledged themselves to not becoming involved with armed parties, to demanding respect from all of them, including the State, and to producing the village's own social organization, with the intent of resisting war, refusing to abandon their plots of land and their homes, and recovering their autonomy in order to decide freely about their lives and assert their self-representation in the public world.

The chapter has four parts: the first draws up the analytic framework that underlies the discussion of this emancipatory and liberatory experience - the counterpoint between fragile sovereignties and political self-determination, which allows us to analyse the social network of war where the inhabitants compose their collective actions and their strategies of resistance and rebellion against conflicting authoritarian powers. It is in this context that the villagers had intended to establish another political order, unarmed, and discovered new forms of production of power.

The second part addresses in a synthetic manner the situation of war in the region of Urabá, and specifically in San José, putting the stress less on its history of rebellion and social organization than on the meaning of the process of subscribing to the pact of the Peace Community.

The third part describes the process of declaration of the Peace Community, the actions and reactions of different social groups and actors or armed parties that are either at war or cooperate in the locale; the strategic alliances that the inhabitants have established with governments and with national and international NGOs, processes through which is represented what might be called the globalization of the local.

The fourth part makes a political reflection on the meaning, the significance, and the reach of the liberatory and emancipatory actions of the inhabitants of San José de Apartadó.