The signing of the peace agreement in Colombia. Old wine in new skins: Implications for national security and organized crime

Abstract

Recent scholarship has seen the peace agreement between Colombian government and the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) guerrillas a milestone in closing more than 50 years of internal armed conflict. Indeed, the traditional practice of subversive warfare between the two sides ended. However, this did not imply a true path to peacebuilding. The empirical and statistical evidence indicates the worsening of the conflict through the transformation of its practices and representations, into terrorism and transnational organized crime. This article contends that the FARC, as a political party, a new insurgent group, and a criminal actor, continues to have a main role.

“Everything I Have Seen There, That I Know …”: Witnessing the Colombian armed conflict through refugees’ narratives of implication

“…While recent scholarship has recognized the enduring and shifting forms of violence that unfold between armed groups in Colombia (Badrán, 2023;Gómez Triana & Ríos, 2022;Gutiérrez, 2020), the ethnography presented in this article demonstrates that "the conflict" is also reproduced as violence between armed groups and their witnesses, who are drawn into an expansive war as unwilling participants. Members of armed groups often enact violence, recognize their observers in the moment, and interpellate them as witnesses, a process that ignites subsequent violence and contributes to the ongoing reproduction of the armed conflict.…”