100 Years of Solitude Revisited: A Critical Analysis of 25 Years of Scholarship on Colombia’s Civil Conflict

ABSTRACT

Over the last 25 years, Colombia has emerged as a highly influential case study in the civil wars literature. This article takes stock of the English-speaking literature on civil conflict in Colombia, discussing the quantity, impact, and challenges of scholarship on Colombia vis-à-vis the wider civil wars field. It shows that work on Colombia has particularly influenced debates on rebel governance and socialisation, civilian victimisation, and local correlates of conflict in broader civil wars studies. The article then highlights challenges in the study of Colombia to date, calling particularly for greater attention to the decentralisation of knowledge production and tackling widening discrepancies between micro- and macro-level data.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank fellow Colombianists Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín, José Antonio Gutiérrez, Oliver Kaplan, and Sabine Kurtenbach for their detailed feedback. I would also like to thank the Editors and the reviewers, particularly reviewer 2, for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This selection is well balanced between specialist and generalist journals.

2. In an additional analysis, I show how the results differ when including more ‘niche’ journals such as Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Small Wars and Insurgencies, and Security Dialogue (Figures A10 and A11).

3. We also need to better understand which products actually cause violence, as not all regions that are home to coca cultivation see high levels of armed conflict.

4. The differences in distribution are mapped in Figure A6 in the Appendix per the first author’s nationality. Most first authors writing on Colombia are from the USA. Figures A7 and A8 compare author nationalities and research institutions, respectively.

5. Author nationalities and home institutions are not the only factors that should be considered when decentralising knowledge and knowledge production. The percentage of women publishing on Colombia is considerably lower than for men in CW and JCR (see Figure A9). Overall, in 38.5 per cent of the cases in the sample, the first author is a woman. Considering the general gender imbalance in peace and conflict studies, the numbers in the sample show that women are having quite some success with publications on Colombia.

6. For a general overview of the civil war literature, see Cederman and Vogt (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juliana Tappe Ortiz

Juliana Tappe Ortiz is a research fellow at the GIGA Institute and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen. Her research interests concern individuals in civil wars, including the role of rebel and state leaders in civil war negotiations and the effect of violence on the lives of local women and men.