Colombia: Democracy,violence,and the peacebuilding challenge

The Colombian peace process

Since mid-2012, Colombia has witnessed a peace process almost as turbulent as the war that preceded it. Its closure in 2016 was particularly breathtaking. On 23 June 2016, the Colombian government and the FARC announced a bilateral ceasefire and the conditions under which the FARC, the world’s oldest guerrilla group, would lay down its weapons and reincorporate into civilian life. The two sides announced their final agreement only two months later. The accord included provisions for a comprehensive rural development effort, the FARC’s electoral participation, efforts to stamp out drug trafficking, and truth and justice for victims.

Yet movement toward peace would not be smooth. Álvaro Uribe, a popular former president whose “democratic security” policy is largely credited for weakening the FARC, urged Colombians to vote “no” to the peace agreement in a national plebiscite called by President Juan Manuel Santos with the objective of legitimizing the agreement. Uribe’s new political party, Centro Democrático, quickly became Colombia’s largest opposition party. His efforts succeeded: despite polls predicting a landslide in favor of peace, Colombians rejected the agreement on 2 October 2016, even if by a small margin (0.5% of votes). Santos, who had staked his presidency on the peace process, returned with the FARC to the negotiating table. The two sides signed a revised agreement on 24 November 2016, which was approved by Colombia’s legislature only a few days later.

Since then, implementation of the agreement has moved unevenly, in the face of continuing opposition from Uribe, Santos’ low approval ratings, and continuing violence. As of July 2017, the FARC had turned in all its registered arms, Santos had approved amnesties for over 7,000 FARC fighters, and the United Nations had voted to establish a new mission to oversee the FARC’s reintegration, after fielding a mission in early 2016 to oversee disarmament. The reintegration process, however, has proceeded slowly, and hundreds of frustrated former combatants have been reported to have abandoned demobilization camps established as centers for reintegration, in some cases opting to join dissident or criminal groups.

In any case, the transition to implementing the peace accord is no small accomplishment for a country with a long history of civil strife. The country endured nine conflicts in the nineteenth century pitting the country’s two traditional political parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, against each other. A rare period of peace after 1902 was shattered by the assassination of Liberal politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitán in 1948, leading to a new partisan war, simply and accurately named “La Violencia.” Some 200,000 people would die between 1948 and 1966 (Oquist, 1978). The Liberals and Conservatives brought the war to an end with a power-sharing agreement: the National Front guaranteed the parties’ alternation in power every four years and the allocation of all public jobs to party members in equal shares. ³ The National Front cemented peace between the two parties until it ended without strife in 1974. However, this success came at the cost of deep political exclusion that inspired guerrilla groups in the 1960s. The FARC, for instance, was founded in 1964 by peasant-veterans of land conflicts with large landowners, factions of Colombia’s Communist Party, and remnants of Liberal guerillas from La Violencia (Flores, 2014). Large landowners and drug lords, with the acquiescence of factions of the army, responded to the kidnappings and extortion by guerrilla armies by creating private self-defense armies. These paramilitary groups joined forces through an umbrella organization called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) by the mid 1990s. During this same period, the dismantling of drug cartels in Medellín and Cali presaged a takeover of drug trafficking by both guerrillas and paramilitaries, further intensifying the conflict and its costs to civilians.

Colombia’s long history of war, then, warns that violence could easily outlive the formal end of conflict. Other guerrilla groups, most notably the National Liberation Army (ELN), are not parties to the agreement and talks between the Colombian government and the ELN have been mired in a number of impasses. The demobilization of the AUC in the mid-2000s led to a surge in organized crime in areas they formerly controlled, fueled by gangs known as bandas criminales (BACRIM). The BACRIM might be perfectly positioned to assume control over drug-trafficking currently in FARC hands. Deep-seated antipathy to the peace deal remains, meanwhile: Uribe, now a Senator, continues to oppose implementation and the new president, Iván Duque, won the 2018 election in part by echoing Uribe’s calls to substantially rewrite the peace agreement.

Themes of the special issue

The study of peace science allows us to place Colombia’s conflict, one often described as being unique in length and lethality, in a proper context. This long literature, based on evidence from dozens of countries attempting the transition from war to peace, suggests several important challenges to peace implementation. ⁴ First, Walter (1999) argues that negotiated settlements are inherently unstable in the absence of credible guarantees given by a third-party. Second, Collier et al. (2003) posit the existence of a ‘conflict trap,’ in which continuing postwar economic malaise raises the risk of recurrence, which in turn only brings more misery. Third, processes of democratization in postwar countries, especially during elections, can risk further instability, although this may depend on their timing and how electoral provisions are included in peace agreements (Flores and Nooruddin, 2009, 2012; Matanock, 2017; Paris, 2004). Finally, Autesserre (2010) argues that conflicts over local issues threaten the national peace, a dynamic often missed by United Nations peacekeeping missions. Firchow (2018) shows that peacebuilding interventions often fail to improve perceptions of “everyday peace”.

The five pieces collected here build on these lessons, but also offer new avenues for peace scholars. Three main themes emerge from this discussion. First, despite Colombia’s relatively positive showing in cross-national datasets of democracy, decades of conflict have hollowed democratic practice ahead of the vital challenge of assimilating the FARC into electoral politics. This issue thus points to an unexplored area in studies of democracy and war by identifying how armed conflict undermines democratic practice, with worrying implications for building both peace and democracy after accords are signed. Steele and Schubiger find that the violent reaction of armed groups to key democratic reforms in Colombia has ultimately offset the objectives of those reforms—namely to broaden the political representation of traditionally excluded groups and promote democratic participation. Gallego makes a similar point by showing that violence in Colombia has shaped the turnout, competition, and outcomes of elections in Colombia. Democratic institutions, then, can have unintended negative consequences in the presence of armed coercion.

Second, the deep unpopularity of the FARC and continuing fragmentation among political elites have limited public support for the peace agreement, as was seen in the surprise rejection of the peace agreement by Colombians in 2016’s plebiscite and the miniscule vote share (0.33%) earned by the FARC in March 2018 legislative elections. Peace scientists have only rarely studied mass support for peace, assuming that civilians invariably wish for the end of violence. This issue offers a needed corrective, showing how political support for peace is tenuous. Liendo and Braithwaite show that in the run-up to the plebiscite, political opposition to the peace process emanated mainly from political followers of Uribe’s new political party and more educated, urban Colombians—precisely the citizens who had largely been insulated from the conflict’s effects. Their findings indicate that further analysis is needed to understand attitudes toward peace for both victims and non-victims, as well as how elite fractures can dent political support for talks. Matanock and Garbiras-Díaz take this analysis a step forward by conducting a survey experiment to examine Colombians’ antipathy for the FARC. They find that the FARC’s endorsement of particular provisions in the peace agreement actually lowers Colombians’ support for those provisions. The authors conclude that the FARC remains deeply unpopular in Colombia, complicating efforts to include it in electoral politics.

Finally, Colombia’s recent history suggests strongly that the success of transitional justice will depend on the local experiences of reintegration by FARC veterans, a lesson seen in the abandonment of reintegration centers by disgruntled former FARC soldiers. Previous analyses of ex-combatants have focused on their links to their old factions and international programs to help them (e.g. Blattman and Annan, 2013; Humphreys and Weinstein, 2007). Daly marries this focus on ex-combatants with a focus on local dynamics by examining survey data on demobilized paramilitaries. She finds that the relationship between ex-combatants and the communities in which they live is perhaps the most important determinant of their attitudes towards transitional justice.

Policy implications

The preceding section argues that Colombia is no outlier: not only do insights from peace science inform this issue’s approach, but the lessons contained therein offer new perspectives that should be applied to other cases of peacebuilding. Yet this special issue also reaches outside of the scholarly world to offer tangible advice to peacebuilders working in Colombia, whether they be found in the Colombian government, the FARC, or the United Nations. It offers three important suggestions.

First, the special issue urges policymakers to attend to local security and socioeconomic development. Steele and Schubiger clearly show that without adequate state protection of citizens and politicians at the local level, political exclusion will endure. Daly, meanwhile, emphasizes that relationships between ex-combatants and the communities they join will prove pivotal in preventing spoilers from emerging. These pieces, as well as recent research into peacebuilding, suggest strongly that the Colombian government must work to provide security and economic opportunity to previously excluded communities. Security sector reform (SSR) could play an important role in this effort, which could emphasize police presence and forestalling local conflicts. On the economic side, donors should work with the Colombian government to provide new economic opportunities in rural areas, which have too often been left in the cold.

Second, the pieces that follow strongly recommend that peacebuilders focus on bolstering social and political support for the peace process. Liendo and Braithwaite’s and Díaz and Matanock and Garbiras-Díaz’s behavioral analyses clearly demonstrate that the FARC’s continuing unpopularity and Uribe’s opposition have severely weakened support for the peace accord. These same forces threaten to block any peace process with the ELN as well. Careful diplomacy by regional organizations to bridge the differences between Uribe and Santos might help to build elite-level consensus behind the agreement. At a mass level, truth and justice mechanisms and national dialogues will be important to build support. Without such support, the risk of further political violence, as Steele and Schubiger detail in the case of the political party Unión Patriótica, will remain.

Finally, the special issue stresses that democracy building must accompany peacebuilding in Colombia. This might seem an odd lesson: few countries emerging from civil war possess a democratic history as long as Colombia’s. Yet pieces by Steele and Schubiger and Gallego strongly argue that violence has undermined democratic practice in Colombia for years, perpetuating exclusion of marginalized groups. The result is weak participation: fewer than 40% of registered voters participated in the 2016 referendum on the peace accord. This will involve building security, structural reforms, and national reconciliation.