Legal dispossession and civil war in Colombia

Abstract

How are institutions that regulate property rights related to the massive coercive dispossession of land that took place during the Colombian conflict? How did the workings of these institutions change during the conflict? We answer these questions through an analysis of a unique data set of rulings on land restitution issued between 2012 and 2015. The paper argues that the exclusionary nature of the institutions that regulate the access and assignment of property rights preceded the onset and escalation of the Colombian conflict, but shows how and why once the conflict began, the set of techniques used to promote coercive dispossession through those institutions could be significantly broadened and escalated. By doing so, it intends to advance the knowledge of how institutions are transformed, in this case in a deeply anti‐egalitarian and violent sense, during war.

Introduction: Land rights, restitution, politics, and war in Colombia

“…The evidence from Colombia presented here (see Peña, Álvarez, Ruiz, Parada, & Zuleta, 2017;also Vargas & Uribe, 2017) helps to refine the recently revived idea of primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation and "accumulation by dispossession" (Harvey, 2009), have been used by a number of political economists and in a variety of ways:…”

Rights in the Time of Populism: Land and Institutional Change Amid the Reemergence of Right-Wing Authoritarianism in Colombia

“…Law and legal institutions played different roles regarding each of the previous interactions between the agrarian problem and the armed conflict in Colombia. In different regional settings, notaries, governmental officials and public authorities legalized land dispossession wielded by armed groups, notably paramilitaries, by issuing land titles ignoring the legal frameworks protecting peasants' tenure rights [57,58].…”

“…The armed conflict impacted and facilitated more land concentration in the already unequal agrarian structure in Colombia. The institutions regulating land rights have changed as a consequence of the land dispossession that took place during the armed conflict, particularly during the years of most intensive victimization against the civilian population [58].…”

Food Security, trade specialization, and violence in Colombia (1916-2016)

“…In the case of Colombia, however, this agribusiness development of tropical agriculture has also been linked to the intensification of the armed conflict. Competition over land and territorial control to maintain cattle-ranching and the illegal economy (Richani, 2002) are closely related to the agrarian elites' direct participation in conflict (Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017) by legal (Peña-Huertas et al, 2017) and illegal means, and together with the active role of the state (Ballvé, 2012;Grajales, 2011Grajales, , 2013. The elites linked to commodity crops such as coffee, banana, or oil palm, who paid for security and fought peasant claims (Gutiérrez-Sanín, 2019), were the direct beneficiaries of land dispossession and the public policies to promote their agribusinesses (Maher, 2015;Vargas and Uribe, 2017).…”

“…In contrast, during the Second Globalization, increasing conflicts, land-grabbing, and expansions of regressive monocultures such as banana, sugarcane, and oil palm took place in the lowlands. These crops, which are intensive in their use of capital and easy to mechanise in large plots, contributed to land concentration and the displacement of family farming by both market and non-market mechanisms (Grajales, 2013(Grajales, , 2021Maher, 2015;Peña-Huertas et al, 2017;Vargas and Uribe, 2017).…”