«(…) Earlier this year, on May the 5^th, twenty-six stakeholders and experts got together to discuss drugs, development, and peacebuilding in Colombia. The workshop was co-organised by SOAS’ CIVAD and the Colombian organisation CIPADH (Centro de investigación y acción para la paz y los derechos humanos) and funded by a UKRI Consolidator Grant. It consisted of small group discussions in the morning, followed by a plenary in the afternoon, and was organised around three questions on the tensions and trade-offs between different policies within these three broad areas. More specifically, participants were asked to discuss the application of the trilemma concept to these areas, or the idea that the objectives of peace, drugs and development policies clash and that it is impossible to achieve all three simultaneously. (…)