Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín

Criminal Rebels? A Discussion of Civil War and Criminality from the Colombian Experience.

The Colombian conflict seems a typical instantiation of a “greedy war”and exhibits very strong links between criminal economic activities and rebel organizations. On the contrary, the author suggests that not even in Colombia does the “criminal rebels” thesis hold. On the other hand, the Colombian case shows that criminality and war mix in ways that escape a strictly economic interpretation of war.

Telling the Difference: Guerrillas and Paramilitaries in the Colombian War

The effort to build a political economy of war without politics is finding its limits. The question now is what comes next. How to put politics back in? This article compares systematically two non-state armed groups that participate in the Colombian conflict, the main guerrilla (FARC) and the paramilitary. It shows that despite their similar financial bases, they appear to exhibit systematic differences— regarding both their social composition and their internal/external behavior—and claims that the key to understanding them is the set of organizational devices that each group crafts in its process of survival and growth. All this suggests that a main tenet of the early political economy of war, that all non-state armed groups can be understood as being strategically identical, is flawed. It also poses a classificatory challenge.The effort to build a political economy of war without politics is finding its limits. The question now is what comes next. How to put politics back in? This article compares systematically two non-state armed groups that participate in the Colombian conflict, the main guerrilla (FARC) and the paramilitary. It shows that despite their similar financial bases, they appear to exhibit systematic differences— regarding both their social composition and their internal/external behavior—and claims that the key to understanding them is the set of organizational devices that each group crafts in its process of survival and growth. All this suggests that a main tenet of the early political economy of war, that all non-state armed groups can be understood as being strategically identical, is flawed. It also poses a classificatory challenge.

Ideology in civil war

How important is ideology for the analysis of civil war? In contrast to literature that neglects ideology in its emphasis on structural variables or situational incentives, this article argues for the recognition of its essential role in the functioning of armed groups if they are to explain observed variation in armed group behavior. For example, sidelining ideology leaves major phenomena unexplained, including both mass killing and restraint in violence against civilians. Ideology is defined as a set of more or less systematic ideas that identify a constituency, the objectives pursued on behalf of that group, and a program of action (perhaps only vaguely defined). Ideology matters in two ways. First, it has instrumental value for armed groups, socializing combatants with heterogeneous motivations into a coherent group, dampening principal-agent problems, prioritizing competing goals, and coordinating external actors including civilians. Ideologies differ in the kind of institutions and strategies they prescribe for meeting these challenges and in the extent to which they do so. Yet this first approach is incomplete, as ideology has more than instrumental value. Members of some armed groups act on normative commitments in ways not reducible to instrumental reasoning, and some groups constrain their strategic choices for ideological reasons, often normative concerns prescribed by their ideology. Some groups, for example, engage in restraint, declining to use violence though it would have strategic benefit. The conclusion lays out a twin-fold research agenda: a ‘weak program’ that analyzes the instrumental adoption of ideology and a ‘strong program’ that explores normative commitments based on particular ideologies and on social preferences.

Crime, (counter-)insurgency and the privatization of security - the case of Medellín, Colombia:

This paper describes and explains the very high and sustained levels of violence in Medellín, Colombia, over the last 20 years. Even within the turbulent context of Colombia, Medellín has experienced unusually severe violence, and several peace processes undertaken within the city have failed to provide more than temporary relief. The paper argues that this state of affairs has been the product of a “politicization of crime” in the city, a phenomenon that has been linked to global markets and a breakdown in the state’s provision of security. This failure of state provision created the opportunity for various insurgent and counter-insurgent forces to provide security themselves, thereby maintaining an uneasy truce with the authorities, commanding the allegiance of local communities, and establishing an urban base for their activities.

Networks and Armies: Structuring Rebellion in Colombia and Afghanistan

Until recently, the importance of organizational factors in the understanding of the variance of the behavior of state challengers had not been recognized. New studies and theories have underscored its crucial character. This article contends that challengers can be placed in a continuum constituted by two opposed polar types, army like and network associations, and compare the Afghan Talibans and the Colombian Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—FARC)s organizational principles from this point of view. The main claim is that organizationally inspired explanations behave much better than resource inspired ones when accounting for the differences between the Taliban and the FARC.