Violent Extremism and Moral Disengagement: A Study of Colombian Armed Groups

Abstract

Violent extremism is commonly conditioned by a variety of psychological processes and mechanisms that when activated or deactivated aid implication in extreme behavior, including destructive actions with a large dose of cruelty against people and groups. One of those processes is moral disengagement, which was originally postulated by Bandura. To test this relationship, the present research focused on studying these mechanisms in members of Colombian illegal armed groups. Total sample size was 18 (14 males and four females) demobilized members of the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia [AUC]) and guerrilla organizations (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC], National Liberation Army [ELN], among others), which had participated directly or indirectly in violent actions against people and groups, which included murders, tortures, and massacres. Qualitative methodology was used, specifically in-depth interviews and content analysis. This analysis led to the verification in the narratives of the participants of the use of all the mechanisms of moral disengagement described by Bandura aiming to justify their behavior within the armed group. The most noteworthy mechanisms were those that minimized participation (especially, attributing behavior to obeying orders: displacement of responsibility) and moral justification, especially, the context of confrontation. Moral disengagement processes are found in armed group members (such as insurgency, terrorist organizations, or militias). These mechanisms cancel ordinary psychological reactions of rejection, fear, and moral controls that oppose the carrying out of cruelty and extreme violence.

Keywords

war community violence hate crimes homicide violent offenders

Introduction

Trip et al. (2019) use the expression “violent extremism” to refer to the type of behaviors that follow extremist attitudes and beliefs. It is well known that these attitudes and beliefs do not emerge randomly nor are they genetically determined; they arise within the setting of intergroup conflict and they are spread through several processes of violent radicalization taking place during the course of interactions in social networks and personal relationships. In the case of jihadist extremism, research in the last years has offered consistent results in terms of (a) scarce support to individual–psychological variables as predictors of entry into a jihadi terror network, (b) nuanced importance of ideology, and (c) growing weight of social networks and interpersonal links (Blanco & Blanco, 2020).

These processes of radicalization make up the ideological background of a violent extremism in constant search for a justification within the context in which it takes place by trying to politically, socially, and even morally validate its results (Martín-Baró, 1983), with no regard to how ruthless they may be. Article 1 of the Colombian Peasant Self-Defense Forces Statutes, for instance, states that this military group “is born out of the need to defend the life, honor and properties of honest hard-working peasants from the abuse to which they have been subjected to for many years at the hand of subversive groups.” The members of these “subversive groups” (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC-EP) argue that the main goal of their revolutionary armed fight is “national liberation” using “all types of mass fighting” to give the power back to the people. De la Corte (2006) has pointed out three arguments in which the justification of one of the most destructive manifestations of violent extremism, terrorism, can be found: (a) a powerful and depraved enemy that opposes our objectives, our values, and beliefs; (b) the defense and safeguard of those values that require the radical transformation of the established order or of the strategies that have been used in the past to defend them; and (c) taking into account the perverse nature of the enemy and the magnitude of the needed change, violence is the only pathway to reach it. “The way to reach peace,” one of the participants of the present study will say, “is to assassinate people who cause conflicts.”

Moral Disengagement and Violent Extremism

The enemy is a wide gate through which all possible strategies of justification of violent extremism (including jihadi suicide attacks) can easily pass. One of the most common strategies has been proposed by Albert Bandura in his theory of moral disengagement (Bandura, 1990, 1999, 2016; Bandura et al., 1996). Set within the ample context of social cognitive theory, moral disengagement holds a direct relationship with the concept of moral agency, “in the course of socialization, people adopt moral standards that serve as guides and deterrents for conduct. After personal control has developed, people regulate their actions by the sanctions they apply to themselves” (Bandura, 1999, p. 193). Therefore, self-sanctions are at the base of moral reasoning and this turns us into “moral agents” (Bandura, 1999).

The exercise of moral agency has two dimensions: a proactive one and an inhibitory one. The proactive course is rooted on “humanitarian ethics”: compassion for the other’s suffering no matter one’s own costs (Bandura, 2016, pp. 1–2). However, the inhibitive form is embodied in the ability to refrain from behaving inhumanely. The fact that some people can carry out inhumane acts, that is, behaviors directed toward the suffering or death of others, could be considered as evidence that not all people are socialized according to humanitarian ethics criteria.

Many “inhumane behaviors” that have served as a reference to elaborate the theory of moral disengagement (terrorism, war crimes, genocide, and others) have given expression to the different faces of violent extremism. The application of this theory to these extremisms holds the advantage of offering an explanation that eludes pathological approaches, the use of which has been refuted in multiple studies (De la Corte, 2006; Pape, 2005; Sageman, 2004; Victoroff, 2005). Furthermore, the moral disengagement approach identifies up to eight psychological mechanisms: moral justification, euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, displacement of responsibility, diffusion of responsibility, disregarding or misrepresenting injurious consequences, attribution of blame, and dehumanization. The presence or absence of these mechanisms can be explored within specific empirical cases. Finally, the theory of moral disengagement offers an alternative to some of the other theoretical approaches in the psychological explanation of violent extremism, specifically, to those that argue the existence of a strong relationship between beliefs and actions (see, for example, McCauley & Moskalenko, 2008). The main theoretical argument that Bandura poses is that “people do not ordinarily engage in reprehensible conduct until they have justified to themselves the rightness of their actions” (Bandura, 1990, p. 163), because, otherwise, moral self-sanctions would automatically become activated. Following this statement, all the previously mentioned mechanisms of moral disengagement can be found in the arguments used by extremists to justify their participation in severe cruelty and violence a posteriori. In fact, Bandura groups these mechanisms into four categories that are related to many ways of morally legitimizing or excusing participation in inhumane behaviors: (a) offering a moral justification to these behaviors, (b) minimizing responsibility in the injurious consequences of said behaviors, (c) minimizing said consequences, and (d) altering the evaluation of the victims (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Forms of Moral Disengagement and Associated Mechanisms.

Forms of Moral Disengagement	Mechanisms
1. Justification of inhumane behavior	1. Link to a desirable and just outcome
	2. Euphemistic labeling
	3. Advantageous comparison
2. Minimizing responsibility in injurious consequences	4. Displacement of responsibility
	5. Diffusion of responsibility
	6. Minimization of responsibility
	7. Ignoring or denying injurious consequences
3. Minimizing injurious consequences	8. Minimizing injurious consequences
4. Victim devaluation	9. Attribution of blame
4. Victim devaluation	10. Dehumanization

The main objective of the present study was to audit the theory of moral disengagement through its application to the discourse analysis used by a group of participants who had been involved in acts of violent extremism. Most of the studies carried out in the last years about violent extremism have focused on conflicts that have taken place in Europe and the Middle East (Douglass & Rondeaux, 2017). However, the participants of the present study acted in the setting of one of the most severe and long-lasting conflicts that have taken place in Latin America, specifically, in Colombia. To our knowledge, it is the first study carried out in this context relying on the testimonies of the combatants themselves. Other studies have analyzed the published communications of the FARC-EP website from 1997 to 2001 (Sabucedo et al., 2006), the published speeches of the FARC-EP and Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) throughout 2001 (Sabucedo et al., 2004), or the press releases published by the FARC-EP and the AUC during a period of 55 months (Villegas et al., 2018).

Colombia is the country with the longest unsolved conflict in the world. Therefore, its history has been drenched in violence. To this day (December 16, 2019), the “Registro Único de Víctimas” (the Unified Registry of Victims) has counted 8,920,473 victims, 270.163 of which have been deaths. They have died at the hands of the guerrilla, the paramilitary forces, and the Armed Forces. Each of this group is responsible for massacres, selective assassinations, forced disappearances, torture, sexual violence, kidnapping, pillage, and massive displacement. These actions have been directed against people, freedom, and property, in which the victims belonged mainly to the civilian population. In fact, out of the total deaths, 81.5% were civilians (mainly peasants) and 18.34% were combatants. As the Grupo de Memoria Histórica (GMH) report points out, civilians are used by all armed groups as a source of logistic and economic support, and also as a political and moral alibi of their actions. The support which, in many occasions, civilians are forced to give also turns them into the target of the attacks of the remaining contenders. In the words of the GMH (2013), “this has been a war without limits in which violence against the civil population has prevailed above actions between combatants” (p. 290).

In 2005, the Patriotic Plan (Plan Patriota), the Consolidation Plan (Plan Consolidación), which hold the end of the guerrilla and its influence as its main objective, and the Justice and Peace Law (Ley de Justicia y Paz), aimed toward the demobilization of armed groups, especially the paramilitary, are passed. A reduced group of individuals belonging to these groups who have adhered to these plans and law constitute the sample of the present study.

Objective and Hypothesis

The general objective of the present study has been to analyze whether there are existing conditions and circumstances in the armed group context, and in their construal of the situation, which can explain acts of extreme violence after respondents had already joined the armed group. This was tackled by analyzing the occurrence of processes of moral disengagement in the description of the injuries caused against members of the outgroup and against the population.

This study had two hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Joining an armed group (FARC or AUC) will facilitate the perpetration of violent actions, including extreme violence, due to the presence of processes such as group pressure, obedience to authority, conformity, and so on.

Hypothesis 2: Involvement in extremely violent behavior will be harbored by the activation of the mechanisms of moral disengagement as presented by Bandura.

Method

Data collection was carried out using in-depth interviews with 18 demobilized members of Colombian armed groups: United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) and guerrilla groups (FARC-EP, National Liberation Army [ELN], etc.). All interviewees had participated in, through planning or by personally carrying out, extreme violent behavior against people.

In-depth interviewing is a suitable data collection method to access information that shows the subjective experience of participants, something that is difficult to obtain through standardized questionnaires (e.g., Madill, 2012). This method is especially useful when analyzing the behaviors, experiences, and motivations of perpetrators of violence (e.g., Teymur, 2007; Yilmaz, 2009). In fact, the use of interviews in collective violence research has allowed significant advances in the understanding of this phenomenon (Altier et al., 2012).

A semistructured interview was designed to obtain thorough information from members of Colombian armed groups regarding their experiences before joining the group as well as their time within it and their subsequent demobilization process. The axes of these interviews regarding their entry and the time spent within the group were (a) perceived group image before entry, (b) reasons of entry, (c) first experiences within the group, (d) group structure (hierarchy, norms, roles, ideology), and (e) mechanisms of justification of violent behavior. The data presented here refer exclusively to the last axis, that is, the mechanisms and strategies used by the perpetrators to justify inhumane actions that they have carried out after joining the group.

Sample and Procedure

The interviews were carried out in the city of Barranquilla, Colombia. Contact with the participants was established thanks to the support of the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, the Colombian Reintegration Agency (Agencia Colombiana para la Reintegración [ACR]), and the National Penitentiary and Prison Institute (Instituto Nacional Penitenciario y Carcelario [INPEC]). During the time of the interviews, all participants were held under the Law of Justice and Peace (Law 975, 2005) through which individuals can be included in reintegration programs in exchange for giving up arms.

The aim of the study was explained to the prospective participants, and volunteer anonymous collaboration was requested from them. Explicit consent was also requested to participate as well as to record the interview.

Sampling was intentional. This was achieved by selecting participants who could offer significant contributions about the nature and structure of the researched phenomenon. The final number of participants responds to the iterative nature of this methodology by which participants are added until data saturation, that is, until no new relevant information is being obtained through the incorporation of new individuals to the study.

The final sample was comprised of 18 individuals (14 male and four female). Their legal status at the moment of the interview was as follows: Seven of them (39% of total participants, all male) were imprisoned in the Justice and Peace Unit of the “Cárcel Modelo” (Prison) de Barranquilla serving a sentence for crimes against humanity. The remaining 11 participants (seven male and four female) were ascribed to the reintegration program of the ACR. Most participants (72.2%) had been members of the self-defense forces, 11.1% had been members of guerrilla groups, and 16.7% had belonged to both groups at different moments in their lives. The age of the participants was between 22 and 67 years. Mean age for females was 45 years, and for males, 41 years. Regarding birth and upbringing, approximately half (55.6%) had grown up in an urban setting. Most of them (77.8%; 11 males and three females) had only reached a secondary schooling level. Only three (16.7%) had further continued their education, and one had completed university-level studies. Data on their occupation before entering the group were also collected: Most males (57%, which is 44% of the total sample) had previously belonged to the Colombian Armed Forces, whereas females had worked within the informal economy or were homemakers. Moreover, 22.3% (5.6% of the males and 16.7% of the females) worked as part of the underground economy, and 16.7% (all male) were farmers. A total of 72.2% (n = 13) were of multiethnic background, 22.2% (n = 22.2) were Afro descendants, and 5.6% (n = 1) were Caucasian. Three of the participants were minors at the time of recruitment into the illegal armed group.

Data Analysis

The content of the 18 transcriptions were evaluated by three judges, all experts on collective violence, belonging to the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Each judge carried out an in-depth analysis of the interviews to detect meaning units (“passages of text that typically, but not always, contain a single idea,” Dourdouma & Mörtl, 2012, p. 99), as well as the categories in which these units can be included (following the technique of open categorization described by Elliott & Timulak, 2005). Attending to the recommendations of McLeod (2011), during the process of analysis, detected units and categories were contrasted and compared by each one of the judges until consensus was reached. In addition, a complementary qualitative data analysis tool was used: Atlas.ti v.7. The obtained categories are presented in the “Results” section.

Results

Violent Behavior Justification

As seen in the “Introduction” section, one of the most effective ways for a perpetrator to avoid feelings of guilt is reshaping his or her behavior as acceptable or even desirable. To reach this morally positive perception, individuals usually use three mechanisms: moral justification, euphemistic labeling, and advantageous comparison.

Link to a desirable and just outcome

Participants define the behavior of killing as a necessary action toward a positive goal to end a problem. This is the case of the following participants,¹ who justify their actions as needed to put an end to the excesses of the opposing group or of any other person who put peace at risk.

1M:

When you belong to a group you think that you are the person that brings tranquility or peace to a region, city or neighborhood; and that the way of reaching peace is by killing the people who create conflicts.

2M:

I went to fight them because they were people who were hurtful, bad people. They killed civilians, they killed police officers, they robbed banks, they robbed from bridges,² from pipelines, and the State on its own couldn’t handle it. That’s why they decided to create outlaw groups.

3M:

What we looked for was to have a country under control; for there to be no kidnappings, no attacks against the police or the army, so that they didn’t kill peasants, I mean, all those things that the guerrilla did when they went in somewhere.

In these, as well as in the following statements, there is a “moral obligation” to help the unprotected population.

4M:

We were fighting against the guerrilla so that the people could stop suffering from all the inhumanity the guerrilla commits.

5M:

When we arrived and expelled the guerrilla, we brought investment. Roads were fixed so that peasants could harvest, and we found buyers for those harvests.

6M:

That’s what we fought for, to protect the community . . . You feel like you’re doing the right thing.

Following the participants, the evidence that what they were doing was desirable could be inferred from the support they claim to have received from the peasant population; it is the peasants who are grateful for their efforts in favor of the people.

2M:

They tell you “If it hadn’t been for you who have cleaned this neighborhood we would be living in danger and fret.” Some of them would give us money: “Here you go.”

5M:

We felt accepted by the peasants, there was more freedom for them.

Within the context of a violent conflict, such as is the Colombian one, one of the most common mechanisms of moral justification is referring to the context of confrontation. The morality of the act of killing is described in the narratives of the participants with plenty of war references. There are two opposing sides, and deaths happen in both. Defining this “other” as an enemy is justification enough.

6M:

If the one on the other side is shooting, he/she has no sympathy for my life, so I’m not going to have any sympathy for his/hers.

7M:

We had to shoot each other because it was their life or ours, at any time we clashed we had to kill each other.

8M:

The image we had was that they were our enemies, completely. It was the group, our opposing group which was in conflict with us, and the order was that we had to face them and get them out of the area in whichever way.

In short, according to the stories of our participants, during the time they belonged to the armed group, they carried out actions that were fully justified because of legitimate defense, or to help the people, or because they were pursuing peace for Colombia. Thus, it is possible to execute extremely violent actions without putting their self-concept at risk.

Euphemistic labeling

The second mechanism of justification is the one that uses language to reshape the meaning of the action. Moral categorization of a behavior can change by simply modifying its wording through the use of euphemisms that mask the real meaning of the action. Within these euphemisms, Bandura (2016) includes the use of sanitizing language, specialized jargon, and the passive voice.

The narratives of our participants include examples of these three modalities of euphemisms. In fact, it is possible to observe them in many of the statements that have already been presented and they can be found constantly in all interviews.

Regarding sanitizing language, probably the most used euphemism by the members of these armed groups was “social cleansing.” This refers to the need to disinfect society from social viruses that can endanger the social order: low-level drug dealers, pickpockets, prostitutes, and so on. All of them are considered disposable products.

7M:

Social cleansing is done with people that are hurting neighborhoods. I agree with it because there are people that just don’t understand . . . Drug addicts and thieves, they are an evil.

1M:

What you saw as bad was eradicated, such as junkies, disposables, pickpockets . . . It was all social cleansing.

The second example of sanitizing language that was used to indicate behaviors that are hurtful is the use of the term “vaccination” to refer to extortions, which were also called “collaborations.”

7M:

A vaccination, what we also called war tax.

9M:

The person who didn’t pay the vaccination had to leave the area. If he/she didn’t leave, his/her life could be at risk, he/she could lose it.

These stories make it clear that the use of euphemisms speaks about the behavior of killing: euphemisms that, on occasion, are part of the specific jargon that these groups use, such as “cleaning an area” to allude to attacking the enemy, or “canceling,” “hitting,” “disappearing,” or “getting out of the way” instead of killing someone.

5M:

Many times, we made a mistake, we made the mistake of cancelling people who were doing nothing.

10M:

The goal was to capture (the victim) or to cancel him/her.

It is equally common to speak about these types of behaviors using the passive voice in a way in which the action just happens instead of it being carried out by someone, for example, “an incursion was carried out,” “they were assassinated,” or “massacres were committed.”

11M:

Massacres were committed, it’s true, because, obviously, in order to earn respect, a group has to commit mischief.

7M:

Raids were carried out, there were kidnappings, there were payment collections . . .

5M:

Money was produced through extortions.

Advantageous comparison

Finally, advantageous comparison is also found within the mechanisms of behavior justification. Many of the interviewees elaborate a moral assessment of the murders by comparing them with the much more inhumane actions carried out by the opposing group, or to the consequences of doing nothing.

10M:

You came and, well, their death (civilians’) was more dignified. You didn’t mistreat them like you would do when you caught a guerrilla fighter. You killed them normally; one or two shots, at most three or four. You caught them, and killed them, and that’s it.

12M:

We always said that a man must not be humiliated, only killed.

Minimizing Participation in Injurious Consequences

Even when the action can be partially justified through the use of the previously mentioned mechanisms, perpetrators of violence feel the need to minimize the effect of their behavior or their participation. Minimizing participation in the damage caused can be achieved by displacing responsibility (to point at the need to obey), and by diffusion of responsibility (alluding to the “insignificant” personal participation in the final action). Therefore, these are mechanisms that require the existence of a bureaucratic structure within the group. Our present cases include both conditions.

Displacement of responsibility

The mechanism of displacement of responsibility is widely known in many social activities; this is attributing the individual’s own actions to the dictates of authority in a way in which he or she may avoid personal responsibility regarding execution and consequences. Once in the group, the need to obey is clearly perceived by all interviewees. They all declare it to be their first learning, and they allude to obedience as the main justification for their actions. Their narratives include expressions such as “I had to do it” or “it was an order from above.” This is, without doubt, the most used mechanism of justification. If the violent behavior is perceived as the consequence of imposed orders by a figure of authority, the individual is no longer the real responsible agent, nor would he or she have any reason to self-censor.

13M:

The commander would say: “It’s your turn, you have to do it.” So that’s something which is very hard because you’re there and they tell you: “You have to do it. Kill him.” You didn’t want to do it, but you did it, because if you didn’t, they would do it to you.

10M:

They put me between a rock and a hard place. They told me that if I didn’t kill him, they would kill me. They ordered me to kill him.

Even among those who show some doubts regarding the guilt of the people they had to kill, orders are perceived as justification enough.

12M:

As was my case several times, the self-defense forces received wrong information and they told me: “Go there and murder him.” In obeying the order, you didn’t know the amount of mistakes you were making, you went there and killed without realizing it (the information given by informants) was a lie.

4M:

Sometimes we knew we had done things which we shouldn’t have done. Like that person that, for whatever reason, was not investigated . . . They quickly went and bang: we had to kill because, like I said, when they give you an order, you had to obey.

Diffusion of responsibility

Task division is present in both armed groups and it is frequently included in the participants’ stories when they speak about their participation in group actions by referring to the very specific task they carried out at each point. This is what allowed them to avoid responsibility toward the result (death) due to the fact that (in many cases) they did not personally execute the victims.

1F:

I haven’t killed, I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t . . . When an injured person came and left everything dirty, I cleaned it, I fixed the drugs, I washed the uniforms. I washed, I never carried a weapon.

11M:

I didn’t bear arms in the self-defense forces, instead, I was at their service.

However, the participants who admit having committed violent actions insist on how limited their personal participation was. Several participants explain how “disappearing” was done (killing and hiding the remains). This action was carried out in phases and by different people: One person was in charge of gaining information on the victim, another one (the commander) gave the order to kidnap, another did so and handed the victim in, someone else was in charge of killing, others were in charge of dismembering the body, and finally, there was a different person in charge of digging the ditch to bury the victim and effectively “disappear” him or her.

9M:

We went out following the commander’s orders. We took who we had to take and brought them to them, and then they proceeded as they had to proceed.

10M:

Generally, I simply took them and handed them in to the group commanders and it was they who were in charge of committing homicide and burying. I never killed anyone in the jungle. Of all the ones I took, I never killed them; I handed them in alive.

13M:

Thank God I wasn’t ordered to “Kill so-and-so,” thank God. But they did give me the order: “Dig the ditch,” and I knew that that ditch I was digging was to bury a human being. I did have to do that.

The second strategy that allows diffusion of responsibility is collective decision making. Frequently, before killing a person, they were court-martialed: There was a meeting in which all group members and, occasionally, the civilian population participated to collectively decide upon the fate of the victim.

2F:

There was a person who was selected to be killed. I mean, there was a meeting and there they decided if they killed him/her, how they would do it. If there were more votes to not kill, they didn’t kill him/her, they sanctioned him/her. But if there were more votes to kill, they killed him/her.

12M:

They sort of court-martialed him. Sometimes they included the community (civilian population), the community decided what was to be done to that person. The people decided to kill.

Minimizing, Ignoring, or Denying

Denying the behavior or making light of it is a mechanism that helps avoid feelings of guilt. This denial of damage is evident in those who declare to not have killed, and therefore, to not have done anything reproachable.

Interviewer:

Do you feel you need to ask for forgiveness for anything you have done?

2F:

No, no. Why? I never did anything wrong.

3F:

I feel I never killed anyone and that’s why I feel like I do. I mean, I feel God is not going to punish me.

Others deny the behaviors attributed to the group and deny their overall existence, or they simply state they never witnessed such actions.

11M:

There are people who say that they raped, that they did this and that. I can’t say that . . . In the villages I was in with the self-defense forces I never saw that. I never saw those rapes, I never saw those things. No. I never saw them. That’s all I can say.

4F:

Nothing really, no. Until you see something for yourself you can’t determine anything. You need to see to be able to determine. In the group I was in I never saw anyone getting kidnapped or killed. I never saw that; and I wouldn’t have liked to see it either . . .

Regarding the denial of facts, some commanders state that they were not aware of how their orders were carried out or that they were unaware of the abuses committed by their men against civilians.

8M:

Those things happened in parts of the country where the self-defense forces were, but those were things that happened behind our backs. If we had been aware of these actions at the time, or someone had told us, we would have obviously corrected it.

Denying or Devaluating the Victim

Finally, as we have seen in the “Introduction” section, justifying participation in acts of extreme violence against others is possible if they are not defined as victims. This can be because they are blamed for what is done against them, or because they are denied the condition of human beings.

Attribution of blame

Blaming the adversary is another way of self-exoneration. The act of violence can be considered as being the victim’s fault because he or she deserves it, or it can be construed as a legitimate reaction to a provocation. Examples of this are found in all statements in which the participants declare they were just defending themselves. We can also include testimonies that allude to the fact that the victim was not collaborating or changing or was told to leave the area and did not do so. Furthermore, those who did not flee from their land and become victims of displacement were considered guilty of the violence that was committed against them. However, when they did leave, they were immediately considered guilty by implying that the person who has not done anything wrong has nothing to fear and, therefore, would not run away.

8M:

An incursion was carried out in that area but when we arrived there was nothing there; the whole village had left; everyone. It had become a ghost town. So, if you don’t owe anything you don’t need to leave, you stay there, but when we arrived, they had all left.

Dehumanizing the victim

Dehumanizing another person implies stripping the individual of the qualities that define him or her as a human being, to be perceived as an animal or worse, thus removing any empathic reaction toward the victim’s suffering. Dehumanization is explicitly promoted within armed groups. Dehumanizing epithets are learned and reinforced within the group context. We see examples of this dehumanization in the stories of participants in which members of the opposing group are classified as monsters, animals, or as dirty.

7M:

Guerrilla fighters were thieves, they were rapists, they were a plague that had to be eliminated.

1M:

I saw those people as monsters. As a consequence of the training you receive, they brainwash you, they indoctrinate you and they make you see that person as the worst thing that can exist. With that mentality, when you see that person, you detect him/her as prey, just like when an animal attacks its favorite prey. They were like parasites.

12M:

Sometimes we said, “the vultures are coming.”

7M:

We called them “the plague”; the plague is coming. For the self-defense forces, the guerrilla was a plague.

It is probably in 1M’s story in which dehumanization becomes more explicit and thus, empathy and feelings of guilt disappear completely:

1M:

If someone died in a certain way . . . What I cared about was that person being killed because he/she belonged to the opposing group. One looked at that person and felt no feelings to help, no human feelings towards him/her.

As evidenced above, the gathered testimonies attest that moral disengagement allows the individual to participate in evil actions without having to deal with feelings of guilt or self-censorship. Graph 1 has been included to offer a visual summary of the dynamics of these mechanisms.

Graph 1.

Semantic network of the mechanisms of moral disengagement in a sample of 18 demobilized members of Colombian illegal armed groups.

Discussion

The results of our study clearly confirm the existence of an ideological background in which the exercise of violence finds its own way of reasoning, its own social and moral arguments of validation. According to the data offered, the three most common mechanisms are in the following order: displacement of responsibility, diffusion of responsibility, and link to a desirable and just outcome. The strength and need of these arguments are proportional to the intensity of the injurious consequences and the innocence of the victims. On this point, it is to be recalled that 81.5% of the victims of the Colombian conflicts were civilians that were unconnected to the opposing groups, and in most cases were peasants of low means. According to the narratives of the interviewees, their actions as members of the armed group were fully justified as legitimate defense, the idea of helping defenseless peasants (who would later become their victims), or the pursuit of peace. The group taught its members the idea that all their violent actions were a means to a supreme end of peace and that physically eliminating individuals who opposed this was needed and legitimate. It is within this ideological scenario in which the mechanisms of moral disengagement can be found with the clarity exposed by our 18 participants. Most of them use almost all the mechanisms of justification that Bandura’s (1999) model proposes. In fact, some of the interviews could be labeled as a complete exercise of justification. In these narratives, participants try to hide the severity of their actions by using sanitized language and the passive voice; they try to minimize the brutality carried out by the ingroup (“us”) by comparing it with the atrocities committed by the outgroup (“them”); they elude responsibility of injurious consequences by pointing out the need to obey authority, collective decision making, or merely carrying out tasks in a precise manner; they blame the victims of the damage that has befallen them or they qualify them as deserving of such actions due to their depravity and cruelty. Each one of these mechanisms is present in the testimonies of the people who have participated in the present study.

Despite their diversity, their apparent complexity, and their alleged argumentative richness, all these legitimizing strategies circle around the idea of the enemy and the meanings surrounding it. The enemy belongs to a context under the control of an intergroup logic: “under some circumstances lying on one side of a categorical boundary or the other becomes a matter of life and death” (Tilly, 2003, p. 11). The construction of this image paves the cognitive way to dehumanization, that is, “stripping others of human qualities” to stop perceiving them “as persons with feelings, hopes, and concerns” and to consider them “savages, degenerates, and other despicable wretches” (Bandura, 2016, p. 84).

The image of the enemy and dehumanization go hand in hand. Dehumanizing the enemy (deprivation of identity and community) “is a common phenomenon in any war situation” (Kelman & Hamilton, 1989, p. 19). The enemy exists within a setting dominated by intergroup logic (Tilly, 2003). Dehumanization has reached the highest forms of cruelty in the Colombian conflict (Uribe, 2004). Throughout the statements of our participants, it becomes clear that killing a person turns into an easy action from a moral and emotional point of view if the victim is perceived as “a plague that deserves to be exterminated.” The Historical Memory Group (GMH) devotes special attention to torture and brutality as evidence of the abasement of war: “among the documented cases of brutality, the GMH has identified how mechanisms of violence such as beheading, dismemberment, decapitation, evisceration, incineration, castration, impaling, and acid and blowtorch burns” (GMH, 2013, p. 55), to which the use of machetes and chainsaws can be added. Simply put, killing people who belong to the social category of “enemy” is part of a set of practical norms of war (Neitzel & Welzer, 2013). These norms are supported by two arguments: indoctrination and military instruction.

Before engaging in criminal actions, the members of the Police Reserve Battalion 101 received twofold training: technical and an ideological, the latter, a 1-week module of ideological workshops that touched upon subjects such as “Understanding of Race as the Basis of Our World View,” “The Jewish Question in Germany,” and “Maintaining the Purity of German Blood” (Browning, 1992). This double training can also be found in Colombian armed groups with a clear preference toward a tactical construal in both the AUC and the FARC-EP (although the latter shows a higher presence of political indoctrination). Within both armed groups, training and military instruction are prevalent. The priority is to prepare group members to kill the enemy; creating ways in which this action will be justified may come afterward. In fact, the AUC had an actual training facility with instructors in calisthenics, body combat, weaponry, military intelligence, and so on. Concretely put in 7M’s words, “they instruct you on how to kill, how to kill someone.” These gathered stories offer poor reasoning. However, they are well supplied with emotional arguments: It is again the image of the enemy that bears the brunt of ideological arguments. This was also the message offered to the American soldiers in Vietnam: “those he confronts in battle are enemies of his nation, and that unless they are destroyed, his own country is endangered” (Milgram, 1975, p. 181); 5M, 8M, 3M, 4M, 9M, all of them agree on the same assessment, which 10M summarizes in one sentence: “the ideology of the paramilitary, as far as I was able to understand, was to finish the guerrilla.” In short, the essence of the ideology is to defend the own life and the life of the group members, and the annihilation of the enemy. It is no longer a simple belief in the superiority of the ingroup (“we are the ones who are on God’s side,” as said by 3M), it is not even disgust against members of the outgroup in the terms of William Sumner and his definition of ethnocentrism (Sumner, 1906), it is about taking the necessary steps toward its extermination: “I remember,” says our participant 12M, “Carlos Castaño³ was there; they told us we had to finish the guerrilla in cold blood or with fire.” And, 1M confirms it: “everything that was not in agreement of us had to be eradicated.”

Military training, the most common activity in Colombian armed groups, revolves around three main arguments: hierarchy, discipline, and obedience to authority. This is the focal point of the structure of power, of the bureaucracy that Hilberg (2002) and Bauman (1989) consider having a prevailing role in the development of the Holocaust, and Kelman and Hamilton (1989) in the execution of sanctioned massacres that have not been foreign to the participants of the present study. In the stories of the participants in our study, displacement of responsibility is the most frequent mechanism of moral disengagement. As evidenced in the “Results” section, practically all participants admit that their acts of extreme violence were a consequence of the orders that came from figures of authority: “the mechanism of moral justification that is most used is possibly the one that references the military code; killing is an expected and even desirable behavior because one’s own life is at stake” (Davies-Rubio, 2017, p. 210). The behaviors that lead to the elimination of the enemy are not voluntary and spontaneous actions rooted in ideology, but forced ones that derive from obedience to authority, compliance, and, above all, defending one’s own life. We are facing a form of forced compliance in which the person “engages in behavior inconsistent with his beliefs and feelings” (Festinger, 1957, p. 84) by following orders from a legitimate authority, harassed by group pressure, trying to defend his or her own life (legitimate defense), or trying to respond as effectively as possible to the ordered task. To surpass moral inhibitions, our protagonists use strategies very similar to those used by the “ordinary men” who belonged to the Eisatzgruppen during the Holocaust: a mechanism of repression (as a consequence of disobeying orders) and a system of rationalization (Hilberg, 2002). These mechanisms come especially into play when justifying violent behavior once it has happened; these are mechanisms that are placed next to the results of the action rather than as motivators. In fact, when asked about the reason behind joining the armed group, their responses are unequivocal: The main reason was the influence of family members and/or friends who had already joined the group. The second reason was the pursuit of a better financial status. The belief in the legitimacy of the objectives of the armed group holds a very residual position (Davies-Rubio, 2017). These are not strange uncommon cases, quite the opposite. When Neitzel and Welzer (2013) analyze the conversations of the soldiers who belonged to the Third Reich, which were recorded by the British of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC), the authors conclude: “It is high time to stop overestimating the effects of ideology. Ideology may provide reasons for war, but it does not explain why soldiers kill or commit war crimes” (p. 278). This seems to also occur when joining the group has been voluntary, as is the case of most of the Colombian combatants who have participated in the current study, and it is also the case of the young people who join the jihad: They are not “particularly religious when they join: they are recruited through social networks, and radicalization takes place within the group” (Stern, 2005, p. 36).

In consonance with the results of our research, justifying the rightness of their extreme violent actions does not seem to be essential before carrying them out, as Albert Bandura points out repeatedly (Bandura, 1990, 1996, 1999). On different occasions, our protagonists clearly point to being aware of the damage they caused:

5M:

Many times, we fell into the mistake of “cancelling” people who were doing nothing.

2M:

Well, many times one doesn’t feel anything for a stranger when doing that. It hurts when you recognize someone.

12M:

I found a boy chopped into four pieces. I felt remorse there.

4M:

Sometimes we knew we had done things which we shouldn’t done.

The violence they perpetrated is supported by the rationality of its outcomes, which is tied to a specific action at a given moment. This is the core assumption of the relativity theory of rationality: “all human judgments and behavioral choices are coherent in the restricted, local sense of the term” (Kruglanski & Orehek, 2009, p. 655). Extreme violence, as is the case of that which is perpetrated in war settings, always seeks a justification against the reality to which it applies, trying to validate its results (Martín-Baró, 1983). The results of our study clearly show that we stand before a “post hoc rationalization” (Haidt, 2001), which allows us to speak about “Post-Moral Disengagement” as a strategy to reduce the emotional pressure that follows the consequences of acts of extreme violence (Tillman et al., 2017): “feelings of condemnation or self-censure” can be avoided through the use of moral disengagement, but it is impossible to elude the presence of negative feelings (p. 11). These feelings are present in many of the individuals who have participated in our study; in fact, their first experiences with death are associated to the clinical profile of acute stress disorder: anxiety, extreme distress, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, feelings of remorse and fear. “The first days,” one of the participants of this study (12M) admits,

I did feel a bit bad because I had practically never had to chop a person up into pieces. I didn’t sleep properly, couldn’t get to sleep, I always imagined the way in which I had acted. When I tried to sleep, I felt something was choking me. I had really bad nightmares.

This is the underlying theme among perpetrators that progressively disappears as the act of killing turns into a routine. In his study on Battalion 101, Christopher Browning highlights the importance of both processes: the emotional impact and the normalized habituation of tasks of extreme violence: “when the men arrived at the barracks in Bilgoraj, they were depressed, angered, embittered, and shaken. They ate little but drank heavily. Generous quantities of alcohol were provided, and many of the policemen got quite drunk” (Browning, 1992, p. 69).

All of this gives way for Dahl and Waltzer (2018) to doubt one of Bandura’s main arguments: People do not pause their moral codes to protect their self-concept from being tarnished when they find themselves involved in evil actions; they simply prioritize conflicting moral principles. According to the stance of these authors, it could be said that Colombian combatants “do not ‘turn off’ morality but seek to coordinate competing evaluative concerns, such as honesty and prevention of harm” (p. 241). In the case of these combatants, the act of killing is expected within the context of war and turns into something desirable when one’s life is at stake. The testimonies regarding this point are clear:

7M:

We had to give each other hell because it was their life or ours; at any time, we collided we had to kill each other.

10M:

They put me between a rock and a hard place. They told me that if I didn’t kill him, they would kill me. They ordered me to kill him.

Moreover, as Dahl and Waltzer (2018) argue, the moral conflict inside the person is present in many of the perpetrators who participated in the present study:

4M:

We knew sometimes that we were doing things we weren’t supposed to do.

7M:

I didn’t completely agree with killing guerrilla supporters, but I had to go anyway.

The combatants who participated in this study seem to find themselves facing a situation of forced compliance: They find themselves forced to carry out actions that infringe moral principles; their own included. Furthermore, when this happens, and it does so repeatedly, “there will be a tendency for him to change his opinion so as to bring it into correspondence with what he has done or said” (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959, p. 209).

Following Martín-Baró (1983), we have begun at a first assumption: Just as is the case with any other human behavior, violence has a meaning (e.g., it chases objectives) that reaches its full potential in its reality and context. The morality of this meaning is linked to the legitimacy of its results. However, this argument concludes with an especially revealing nuance: Legitimacy is defined from a place of power. Such is the case of our participants’ behavior: the legitimization of their extreme violence at the hands of the person who holds power, and not so much at the hands of the person who perpetrates it. This is also the standing point of Stanley Milgram (1975) when recalling Nazi crimes: “these inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders” (p. 1).

This difference between the reasons of those who lead the conflict and those who are ordered to execute it on the field is also found in the Colombian scenario. The results of the analysis of the 49 speeches and communiqués of the FARC-EP and of 46 of the AUC that were published on the websites of both groups throughout 2001 (Sabucedo et al., 2004) offer legitimization categories that coincide with the ones that members from both groups who have participated in the present study used. Furthermore, they circle around the image of the enemy: For the FARC-EP, the AUC is a group of assassins, criminals, and terrorists (Sabucedo et al., 2004), a copy of the speculative image of the enemy (Bronfenbrenner, 1961). However, together with these categories, other legitimizing and noticeably political ones appear—such as fascists, imperialists, exploiters, oligarchs, all applied to the AUC; and leftists, messianic, and totalitarian applied to the FARC-EP (Sabucedo et al., 2004)—which are generally absent in the statements of the individuals who have participated in our study. The speeches and communiqués of the FARC-EP between 1997 and 2001 explicitly evidence the difference between the legitimizing discourse of the leaders and the foot soldiers (Sabucedo et al., 2006). However, the analysis of press releases published by FARC-EP and AUC during 51 months points out that displacement of responsibility, which is the most common strategy among the participants of the present study, was used in only 0.48% of the FARC-EP press releases and in 1.2% of AUC press releases (Villegas et al., 2018).

Following these results, it seems obvious that there are reasons to understand that the weakness of moral inhibitions that gives way to moral disengagement is not a unique and transverse phenomenon. It manifests in accordance to the role that people play in the execution of violent extremism. Following Tillman et al. (2017), in some cases, we can talk about premoral disengagement, which would faithfully answer the assumptions of Bandura’s theory. In many other cases, such as the ones described in the present article, we should talk about postmoral disengagement, which, contrary to what Bandura proposes, allows participation in the perpetration of inhumanities without needing to justify the rightness of the action. Therefore, we agree that there is a selective activation conditioned by circumstances and context as pointed out by Bandura (1999), but that to carry out extremely violent behavior, it is not necessary “to strip morality from their actions or invest them with worthy purposes” (Bandura, 2016, p. 2); compliance and obedience are enough justification, as is the case of our participants. Belonging to a violent group allows the individual to act against his or her own moral standards, that is, to engage in harmful actions without previous moral justification and searching for a justification after the fact.

Following Bandura’s theory (1991), the present study offers empirical evidence of the convenience of identifying the arguments used in intergroup conflict settings to justify violent action, especially when the victims are also nonfighting civilians. Identifying these arguments and the underlying psychological mechanisms can help devise useful counternarratives for delegitimizing violence against innocent victims and the creation of deradicalization and prevention programs. These programs hold an advantage: knowing that in many cases, and particularly in cases such as the Colombian conflict, radicalization processes culminate after entering the violent group and as a consequence of indoctrination that follows.

From our point of view, the research we have carried out contributes to the literature. As we have previously stated and to our knowledge, it is the first study carried out in this context relying on the testimonies of the Colombian combatants themselves. Moreover, the importance of the enemy is confirmed as well as its relationship to dehumanization. Furthermore, the enemy appears as the main ideological argument of the group. The behaviors leading to the extermination of the enemy are not spontaneous actions rooted in ideology; they are justified as obedience to authority. We, therefore, reassert the power of obedience to authority as an engine toward action against armed groups and, thus, as the main argument for moral disengagement. Finally, the results of our study clearly allow us to also speak about “Post-Moral Disengagement,” that is, justifying the rightness of their extreme violent actions does not seem to be essential before carrying them out.

This study has some limitations, the first being a small sample size from a quantitative perspective (N = 18). This was due to diffculty to access samples with these characteristics, their low availability to speak about their criminal behavior, and their wish to hide their past because of the social stigma to which they are subjected by the rest of the population. Furthermore, free access to demobilized populations is not advisable for security reasons. The safest procedure was followed by counting with the support of governmental institutions. However, as stated previously and from a qualitative perspective, sample size was adequate as saturation was reached. The second limitation affects the balance among participants as most of them had belonged to the AUC. Furthermore, the number of females in the sample is very much below the number of males, which responds to the fact that these groups (especially the AUC) have more men than women in their ranks. However, a larger number of females would have allowed better comparative analyses. A third limitation is that the information collected from the interviews was after the fact. It would have been very interesting to interview our participants while they were still active members of the armed group, but this option was obviously out of our reach due to security reasons. Despite this, the information provided is of the greatest interest and as reliable as is possible; confidentiality was guaranteed, and no information was sought by or offered to the authorities.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Amanda Davies-Rubio

Notes

Author Biographies

Amalio Blanco, PhD, is professor in the Department of Psychology at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain). His research focuses on roots of collective violence as well as on community intervention programs as a tool to deal with the psychosocial consequences (psychosocial trauma) of collective violence.

Amanda Davies-Rubio, PhD, holds a doctorate in social psychology and a master’s degree in methodology from the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain). Her research focuses on the roots of collective violence through the study of perpetrators.

Luis De la Corte, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain). He is also director of strategic studies and intelligence at the Institute of Forensic and Security Sciences of the Autonomous University of Madrid. His research focuses on terrorism, political violence and security, strategic and intelligences studies, from a multidisciplinary perspective. He has collaborated as advisor, researcher, and analyst with several public institutions and different media companies

Lourdes Mirón, PhD, is a full professor in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Her research focuses on intergroup violence, as well as gender and aggression.

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