What’s Past is Prologue: Civil War Violence and Post-War Criminal Homicides

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the connection between civil war violence and post-war criminal homicides. This paper finds that past civil war violence intensity and presence of armed groups in a community increases the level of criminal homicides three, five, and ten years later. These findings are based on our statistical regression analysis of subnational data from 1,100 municipalities in Colombia drawn from Registro Único de Víctimas, Colombian National Police, Colombian National Administrative Department of Statistics, Colombian National Department of Planning, and Centre for Memory and History.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2196187.

Notes

1. Data culled from this website: http://rni.unidadvictimas.gov.co/.

2. In the case of murder or forced disappearance victims, reporting is my child, parent, grandparent, part of the household, spouse, permanent companion, same-sex partner, or part of the victim’s house.

3. Basta Ya! http://www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/micrositios/informeGeneral/.

4. The data can be found online at https://datoscede.uniandes.edu.co.

5. These data are also obtained from the Registro Único de Víctimas (http://rni.unidadvictimas.gov.co/).

6. These data can also be found online at https://www.dnp.gov.co/programas/desarrollo-territorial/paginas/ejecuciones-presupuestales.aspx#googtrans/gl/en.

7. The data can be found online at https://www.dnp.gov.co/programas/desarrollo-territorial/paginas/ejecuciones-presupuestales.aspx#googtrans/gl/en.

8. These data can be found online at https://www.dane.gov.co/index.php/estadisticas-por-tema/demografia-y-poblacion/nacimientos-y-defunciones.

9. Given heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation, we use the GLS model to address these issues. We also estimated each model using OLS with year dummy variables and municipal-level clustered standard errors as a robustness check. The key results are substantively and statistically considered with the results presented in Table 1. The results are presented in Table A of the Appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diego Esparza

Diego Esparza is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. His research focuses on police, public security reform, and civil-military relations in Latin America. His work has been published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, Social Science Quarterly, Democracy and Security, Defense and Security Analysis, and Comparative Political Studies. In addition, Esparza has a book publication titled “Policing and Politics in Latin America: When Law Enforcement Breaks the Law ” with Lynne Rienner Publishers. He is regularly invited to do presentations for the Department of the Navy and Department of Homeland Security in the areas of intelligence, civil-military relations, national security, and Latin American politics.

James Meernik

James Meernik is Regents Professor of Political Science and Director of the Castleberry Peace Institute at the University of North Texas. He has taught at the University of North Texas since 1991. He specialises in research on post conflict peace building, language endangerment and political instability and international tribunals. Currently, Professor Meernik is working on projects related to the peace process, reconciliation and transitional justice with organisations on projects related to ex combatants and victims in Colombia, victim and witness testimony at international tribunals, and language endangerment in Colombia and northeast India.

Regina Branton

Regina P. Branton is Marshall A. Rauch Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Her research and teaching interests revolve around the behavioural, electoral, and institutional implications of race/ethnicity and gender.