https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8375-3427
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Violence in post-conflict settings is often attributed to a post-war boom in organized crime, facilitated by the demobilization of armed groups and the persisting weakness of the state. The article argues that this is only one pathway of post-conflict violence. A second causal pathway emerges from the challenges that peace processes can constitute for entrenched local political orders. By fostering political inclusion, the implementation of peace agreements may threaten subnational political elites that have used the context of armed conflict to ally with armed non-state actors. Violence is then used as a means to preserve such de facto authoritarian local orders. We start from the assumption that these two explanations are not exclusive or competing, but grasp different causal processes that may well both be at work behind the assassination of social leaders (líderes sociales) in Colombia since the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrilla. We argue that this specific type of targeted violence can, in fact, be attributed to different, locally specific configurations that resemble the two pathways. The article combines fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis with the case studies of the municipalities of Sardinata and Suárez to empirically establish and illustrate the two pathways.
Acknowledgments
A previous version of this article was presented at the virtual workshop “Fractures and Continuities of Changing Rule in (Post-)Conflict Settings” (31 March-1 April 2021), the 2021 REDESDAL Conference, the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Kroc-Kellogg Workshop at the University of Notre Dame, and the Comparative Politics Workshop at CUNY. We thank the participants of these workshops and, in particular, Ana Arjona, Desmond Arias, André Bank, Abby Córdova, Gary Goertz, Isabel Güiza-Gómez, Thorsten Gromes, Lindsay Mayka, Eduardo Moncada,, Hanna Pfeifer, Regine Schwab, Guillermo Trejo, and Susan Woodward for immensely helpful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Juan Albarracín, upon reasonable request.
Ethics statement
The research was conducted in compliance with Colombian regulations and the Research Ethics Committee of Universidad Icesi (Colombia). To protect informants, oral informed consent was obtained from informants and no information that can reveal their identity is provided.
Supplementary Material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2022.2114244
Notes
1. See Albarracín et al., “Local Competitive Authoritarianism”; Ávila, ¿Por qué los matan?; Gutiérrez Sanín et al., “Paz sin garantías”; Holmes and Pavon-Harr, “Violence after Peace”; International Crisis Group, “Leaders under Fire”; and Prem et al., Selective Civilian Targeting.
2. Suhrke, Astri. “The Peace in Between,” 3.
3. Kurtenbach and Rettberg, “Understanding relation between war economies and post-war crime,” 1–2.
4. International Crisis Group, “Leaders under Fire,” 11–20; Prem et al. Selective Civilian Targeting, 4–8; Salas, Wolff, and Camelo, “Towards violent peace?”, 510–513.
5. Prem et al., Selective Civilian Targeting, 25–26. For the case of Tumaco, see Salas, Wolff, and Camelo, “Towards violent peace?”, 513. On the varying configurations of rebel governance established by the FARC and other armed groups see Arjona, Rebelocracy, 170–201.
6. See Albarracín et al., “Local Competitive Authoritarianism”; Ávila, ¿Por qué los matan?; Gutiérrez Sanín et al., “Paz sin garantías”.
7. See Albarracín et al., “Local Competitive Authoritarianism,” 13–15; Gutiérrez Sanín et al., “Paz sin garantías,” 39.
8. Suhrke, “The Peace in Between,” 6.
9. Kasfir, Frerks, and Terpstra, “Introduction.” See also Staniland, “States, Insurgents, and Wartime Political Orders,” 247.
10. In the current Colombian context, ANSAs that have gained in strength since 2006 include pre-existing guerrilla organizations (in particular, the National Liberal Army – ELN), neo-paramilitary groups that emerged from the demobilization of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) in the early 2000s, more ‘purely’ criminal organizations, as well as a range of so-called FARC dissident groups.
11. The numbers cited come from the Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Paz (Indepaz, www.indepaz.org.co). The precise numbers are contested, but the overall trend is not; the Indepaz data is generally considered relatively reliable. See Albarracín et al., “Local Competitive Authoritarianism.”
12. Kaplan, Resisting War, 2–3.
13. Steele, Democracy and Displacement, 121–143.
14. Carroll, Violent Democratization, 43.
15. Middeldorp and Le Billon, “Deadly Environmental Governance,” 328–329.
16. Barnes, “Criminal politics,” 972; Arias, “How Criminals Govern in Latin America and the Caribbean,” 1–18.
17. Kurtenbach and Rettberg, “Understanding relation between war economies and post-war crime,” 1–4.
18. Steenkamp, “In the shadows of war and peace,” 361.
19. Daly, “The Dark Side of Power-Sharing,” 336–338.
20. Steenkamp, “In the shadows of war and peace,” 367.
21. Ibid, 361.
22. International Crisis Group, “Leaders under Fire,” 11; and Prem et al., Selective Civilian Targeting, 6–7.
23. Arjona, Rebelocracy, 180–192, Gutiérrez D., State, Political Power and Criminality in Civil War, 17.
24. Prem et al., Selective Civilian Targeting, 23.
25. Nussio and Howe, “When Protection Collapses,” 850–851.
26. Prem et al., Selective Civilian Targeting, 11.
27. CINEP et al., ¿Cuáles son los Patrones?; UNHCHR, Situation of human rights in Colombia.
28. The following section and the presented theory draws from Albarracín et al., “Local Competitive Authoritarianism,” 13–19.
29. Eaton and Prieto, “Subnational Authoritarianism and Democratization in Colombia”; Gutiérrez Sanín et al., “Paz sin garantías,” 38–42; González and Otero, “La presencia diferenciada del Estado,” 35–36; Robinson, “Colombia: Another 100 Years of Solitude?”, 44.
30. Arjona, Rebelocracy, 84–110.
31. Duncan, Más que plata o plomo.
32. Albarracín et al., “Local Competitive Authoritarianism,” 14.
33. Kasfir, Frerks, and Terpstra, “Introduction”.
34. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 5–13.
35. See also Gibson, Boundary Control, 9–34.
36. Roessler, “Donor-Induced Democratization and the Privatization of State Violence,” 209.
37. Carroll, Violent Democratization, 1–49.
38. Albarracín et al., “Local Competitive Authoritarianism,” 18–19.
39. Gutiérrez Sanín et al., “Paz sin garantías”, 37–42.
40. Albarracín et al., “Local Competitive Authoritarianism,” 19.
41. Albarracín et al., “Local Competitive Authoritarianism”; Prem et al., Selective Civilian Targeting.
42. Berg-Schlosser et al., “Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) as an approach”; Schneider and Wagemann, Set-theoretic methods for the social sciences, 3.
43. Ragin, Redesigning social inquiry, 23; Schneider and Wagemann, Set-theoretic methods for the social sciences, 8–9.
44. Ibid, 13–14.
45. Basurto and Speer, “Structuring the Calibration of Qualitative Data”, 159; Ragin, Redesigning social inquiry, 29–42.
46. Although 0.9 is factually an impossible threshold, this decision was also necessary for methodological purposes. Given that one assassination is a very frequent outcome. It also indicates the presence of some level of violence, qualitatively different from its total absence. Yet having 1 as the indifference threshold would result in a high number of cases precisely on this threshold, presenting difficulties as a state of complete blurriness cannot exist empirically. Using the 0.9 threshold enables us to indicate that cases with one assassination tend more towards full inclusion than exclusion.
47. Carroll, Violent Democratization, 43.
48. According to Gallagher and Mitchell (2008, 607), about 6.8% of the votes are necessary for a party to win a seat in a collegiate body with a total of eleven seats. Eleven seats are the closest whole number to the average district magnitude of the electoral districts in the municipal councils’ elections in Colombia, 10.7.
49. In the Colombian case, ANSAs have tended to depress political participation in comparison with areas without their presence. More specifically, studies found that pro-government militias were more likely to promote ‘differentiated’ electoral turnout, violently repressing voters associated with leftist parties, including using forced displacement to reshape entire electorates, while encouraging turnout from voters close to allied politicians (Garcia, “Sobre balas y votos”; Steele, Democracy and Displacement). Insurgent groups, like the FARC, discouraged electoral participation, for example, by hindering the opening of polling stations.
50. Gutiérrez Sanín et al., “Paz sin garantías”, 25–31.
51. The median was selected and not the mean because the distribution of the data is not normal (most of the cases have values very close to zero).
52. This appreciation can be reinforced by reviewing the location of the points in the XY graphs (see appendix).
53. For this analysis of sufficiency, we chose the intermediate solution, which allowed us to achieve a result that balances parsimony (i.e. it includes fewer conditions for a given solution) and reliability. In contrast, the parsimonious solution did not reach a sufficiently high coverage measure (0.65), while the complex solution would have meant using difficult counterfactuals, which we find unconvincing in this case (see results of the complex and parsimonious solutions in the appendix).
54. The appendix also documents the results of the non-outcome, that is to say, the combinations of conditions that are associated with the absence of assassinations of social leaders. It is important to note that these combinations are consistent with the analysis presented in this article (even if the coverage of all solutions tends to be low).
55. Gutiérrez and Thomson, “Rebels-Turned-Narcos?”, 8.
56. CNMH, Catatumbo, 114.
57. UNODC, “Colombia”.
58. Gutiérrez Sanín, “Fumigaciones, incumplimientos, coaliciones y resistencias”, 476.
59. CNMH, Con licencia para desplazar.
60. Álvarez, Pardo, and Cajiao, “Trayectorias y dinámicas territoriales”, 12.
61. Garzón et al., La Segunda Marquetalia, 14–22.
62. Cuesta, Las Garantías de Seguridad, 17–18.
63. Carrascal, “El desplazamiento forzado interno,” 98.
64. CNMH, Con licencia para desplazar, 19.
65. Ibid, 24.
66. Garzón, Cuesta, and Zárate, El Catatumbo.
67. Escobar, Entre la incertidumbre y el acomodo, 16.
68. This claim is based on informal interviews with people who must remain anonymous for safety reasons. As part of the investigation into Garcia’s assassination, evidence has surfaced that corroborates the account that members of ANSAs were hired by a person whose identity has not been revealed, to eliminate a political rival (El Espectador, 5 September 2020).
69. Staniland, “States, Insurgents, and Wartime Political Orders”; Kasfir et al., “Introduction”; Arjona, Rebelocracy.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Juan Albarracín
Juan Albarracín is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Illinois, Chicago (IL, USA).
Juan Corredor-Garcia
Juan Corredor-Garcia is PhD Student at the Graduate Center, City University New York (CUNY, New York, USA).
Juan Pablo Milanese
Juan Pablo Milanese is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Department of Political Studies at Universidad Icesi (Cali, Colombia).
Inge H. Valencia
Inge H. Valencia is Associate Professor and Director of the Department of Social Studies at Universidad Icesi (Cali, Colombia).
Jonas Wolff
Jonas Wolff is Professor of Political Science at Goethe University Frankfurt and Head of the Research Department ‘Intrastate Conflict’ at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF, Germany).