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.

Introduction

Since the beginning of the new century, the scholarly literature on the causes and consequences of civil conflict has grown tremendously (Cederman and Vogt 2017). A significant proportion of these accounts are based on micro-level data, mechanisms linking cause and effect, and, by extension, more and more scholars are now focussing on how individuals react to conflict (Kertzer 2017). In the English-language literature, the Colombian armed conflict – often referred to as the world’s longest active civil war – often features as a single case study in articles on conflict dynamics (Price and Yaylacı 2021, p. 307). This burgeoning output on Colombia represents a microcosm of the general changes that civil war research has undergone over the last two decades, making this an appropriate time to take stock of how work on this Latin American country has developed over time and how these shifts have influenced the wider scholarship.

This piece offers the first review and analysis of English language works on the Colombian civil war (1998–2023), evaluates their impact on the wider discipline and highlights the challenges that remain in the study of Colombia. Using a systematic pattern-mapping process as a two-part methodology, I first characterise the base of publications on the Colombian civil war in scholarly journals, followed by the identification of a smaller subset of articles and books that are reviewed for how the case of Colombia has influenced themes in the broader civil war discipline. I first show that in terms of quantity and methodology, the increasing publications have mostly focussed on economic regulations and demobilisation using quantitative methods to study the Colombian civil war.

However, the quantity of articles published in both general and specialist journals over the past 25 years does not translate into a wider impact on civil war scholarship. In a second step, I argue that the most relevant articles and books on Colombia in particular have influenced debates nested within the broader ‘local turn’ in civil war scholarship on rebel governance and socialisation, civilian victimisation, and local correlates of conflict in broader civil war scholarship. Then, I discuss the continuing need to advance theories that decentralise knowledge production, allow diverse citations and strengthen Colombian voices in the field. This article shows how work on the individual characteristics and local dynamics of war remain under-represented when it comes to Colombia compared to the civil war scholarship as a whole, thereby suggesting some fruitful future avenues of research.

Since 1964 Colombia has been entangled in a bitter conflict between the government and different guerrilla movements (Restrepo and Aponte 2009). The conflict has received increasing international attention since 1998 when President Andrés Pastrana’s attempted to resolve the conflict with the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). In 2012, after months of secret talks, President Juan Manuel Santos initiated formal peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC, who together signed a peace agreement in 2016. However, this protracted period of turmoil had already been long preceded by a number of civil conflicts between elites in the second half of the nineteenth century, later followed by a decade of violence from 1948 to 1958 known as la Violencia as well. Most importantly, violent conflict has continued unabated in the country since the signing of the 2016 peace agreement, as the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional) guerrilla movement, paramilitary and criminal groups, as well as drug gangs all remain active.

This piece offers the first comprehensive review and critical analysis of scholarship on the Colombian case to date. In doing so, this piece highlights how single case studies can have a significant, perhaps even disproportionate bearing on civil wars research, and highlights both the opportunities and challenges associated with that. Also presented are guidelines for improving knowledge production on Colombia, in showing which research topics and research designs in the field of Civil War Studies will play an increasingly important role in the future. Together, these constitute some of the directions that I believe the next generation of ‘Colombian’ peace and conflict studies will take.

Scope of the Review

Using a two-step methodology, I first present a systematic analysis of journal articles published across key journals identifying the trends in work on Colombia’s civil war, and second, a thematic section that builds on these identified trends with reference to a wider corpus of influential works, including key books and articles from beyond the selection criteria.

The literature on civil wars has been dominated by explanatory logics (Cederman and Vogt 2017). Yet, there is one central reason why the literature on civil wars often publishes works on Colombia’s civil war: Specific geographic contexts have increasingly been drawn on to complement cross-country analyses (e.g., Sambanis 2004), so as to better trace the exact causal mechanisms behind the consequences of civil war. Studies on the microfoundations of specific civil wars, namely on their social and political causes as well as consequences, have gradually increased in the last decade (Kertzer 2017, Price and Yaylacı 2021).

This growing interest in case studies to complement civil war research is evidenced in Figure 1, which plots the number of articles making reference to Colombia in the abstracts which were published in five generalist journals (American Political Science Review (APSR), American Journal of Political Science (AJPS), International Organization (IO), British Journal of Political Science (BJPS), Perspectives on Politics (PP)) and five specialist journals on conflict (Journal of Conflict Resolution (JCR), Journal of Peace Research (JPR), Conflict Management and Peace Science (CMPS), Cooperation and Conflict (CoCo), Civil Wars (CW)) between January 1998 and January 2023.¹ A full discussion on the search methods used and articles selected is to be found in the Appendix. Although the number of articles (N = 67) remains small in relative terms, the figure shows an increase occurring over time.

Figure 1. Articles on Colombia in generalist and conflict-related journals, 1998–2023, overlaid with a smoother and 95 per cent confidence intervals. Although the data above aggregate across all nine journals, we see a generally increasing trend at the journal level in this time period for every journal apart from AJPS and BJPS.

Figure 1 reveals that publications on Colombia started to take off at the beginning of the new millennium with three publications in CW on the role of prisons in interstate conflicts; the United States’ ‘Plan Colombia’ (a military and diplomatic initiative (1999–2015) aimed at combatting drug cartels and left-wing insurgent groups in the country); and violence-reduction programmes (Page 2000, Stokes 2001, Alda et al. 2006).

Publications peaked in 2018 with a special issue on ‘Colombia: Democracy, Violence, and the Peacebuilding Challenge’ in CMPS. In 2019, only JPR published a piece on Colombia (Tellez 2019a); in 2022, however, there were again overall 10 articles on the Latin American country’s civil conflict. The journals with the most articles on Colombia so far are JPR and JCR, with 18 each (see Figure A1). IO has not published anything on Colombia, in PP there are two such publications, while the BJPS and the AJPS have only one related publication each.

This trend is fascinating from a ‘Colombianist’ perspective, as well as from the standpoint of the sociology of civil war research. First, it reveals that interest in Colombia among journals in the Global North began when the USA started giving a significant amount of financial and military aid to the Latin American country. Attention grew further in 2012, when it was officially announced that the Colombian government had agreed to formal negotiations with the FARC after months of secret talks. For example, JCR published four articles on Colombia in 2013 (Albertus and Kaplan 2013, Bozzoli et al. 2013, Camacho and Rodriguez 2013, Ugarriza and Craig 2013). Following the signing of the peace agreement in 2016, several publications focussed on the demobilisation of former combatants (Söderström 2016, Daly 2018, Kaplan and Nussio 2018) and on explaining the surprising results of the referendum held in the same year – which was intended to confirm voter support for the peace agreement but was ultimately narrowly rejected (Gallego 2018, Liendo and Braithwaite 2018, Matanock and Garbiras-Díaz 2018, Tellez 2019a, 2019b, 2020). In 2018, Iván Duque became Colombian president; publication numbers for articles now declined, before rising again later.

Second, Figure 1’s findings are consistent with recent developments in the field of civil war research. They underscore the general increase in empirical scholarship since the start of the new century due to the trend towards using quantitative methods (Cederman and Vogt 2017). The particular interest in Colombia can also be explained by a renewed consciousness that conflict stems from the behaviour of individuals, which requires a closer look at micro-level dynamics rather than the macro-level ones which mostly deal with the sovereign state (e.g., electoral reforms and security arrangements) (Verwimp et al. 2009). In this vein, publications on Colombia received a further boost from the greater use of experiments and surveys, reflecting the growing interest in individual-oriented approaches to the microfoundations of civil conflict (Haer et al. 2019). A closer look at the methods used to study the Colombian civil war reveals that articles primarily used statistics and surveys, with 28.4 and 19.4 per cent of them doing so for the two methodologies respectively (see Figure A2).

The shift towards micro-level data drawn from specific cases has had two important consequences for the civil war scholarship. First, single case studies using quantitative methods are now more likely to be presented as generalisable than they were 15 years ago, when many scholars used macro-level approaches and distanced themselves from micro-level data. At the same time, scholars with regional expertise and access to micro-level data have benefitted from greater interest in their research. For example, survey experiments with politicians are easier to conduct if the researcher has personal connections or ties to the case (e.g. Yarhi-Milo et al. 2018), because politicians prefer to interact with their primary audience – in this case, researchers from their own country.

Second, micro- and macro-level data are these days more frequently combined than they were at the start of the new millennium, while researchers are also now more interested in robust mixed-methods approaches (Balcells and Justino 2014). Indeed, three of the five most frequently cited articles on Colombia used a mixed-methods approach (see Figure A3 for an overview). For example, Kreft (2018) illustrated the causal mechanism of collective threats and women’s collective mobilisation based on qualitative interviews conducted in Colombia, as then followed up with cross-national statistical analyses. Yet, many works focus on very specific geographic and historical contexts, tending to create very narrow research parameters than cannot be applied to other settings – not even within Colombia. Much remains to be done to bring disparate findings together into lines of research offering clearly specified causal mechanisms, as I elaborate on later in this article.

This first step of the systematic review is limited to research articles in English-language journals. In a second step, I build on the identified quantitative trends with reference to a wider corpus of influential works, including key books and articles from beyond the selection criteria. There are many relevant books to be found on Colombia: Kline’s (1999) State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 1986–94 on the conflict at the end of the twentieth century, for instance, attracted scholarly attention from around the globe (Boudon 1999). Also books like those by Arjona (2016), Kaplan (2017) and Steele (2018) are highly relevant to understand how the case of Colombia has informed thematic trends in the wider civil war discipline.

A caveat here is that the first scope of this analysis excludes research articles published in civil war related journals such as Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Small Wars and Insurgencies, and Security Dialogue.² Despite their importance to the field, the quantitative assessment of research on Colombia focusses on the first quartile (Q1) journals – reflecting where most citations are clustered. In the second step, the qualitative section on Colombian themes in civil war research, I included influential works from these journals. The logic of selection (see Appendix) lies, then, in allowing us to hereby better grasp which articles have been accepted as conventional wisdom by the most prestigious and relevant journals in the wider field.

Since this review is limited to English-language works, it does not reflect the wealth of Spanish-language books and book chapters by Colombian authors such as Bejarano Escanilla, Pizarro Leongómez and Gutiérrez Sanín in existence, works which have received significant recognition in Colombia among those seeking to better understand the conflict (Bejarano and Pizarro Leongómez 2005, Pizarro Leongómez 2006, 2017, 2018, Gutiérrez-Sanín 2015, Gutiérrez Sanín 2020). Acknowledging the relevance specifically of books for the Colombian context, the APSR published three book reviews with ‘Colombia’ in the abstract in the early 2000s which focussed on the conflict (Boudon 1999, 2002, Premo 2001). This first overview shows that civil war research on Colombia has rapidly evolved in the 25 years since. Prior to 1998, there were very few articles on the Colombian conflict.

Colombian Themes in Civil War Research

Interest in Colombia’s civil conflict has increased of late, but it remains unclear which exact themes the majority of researchers are interested in and how their related works have influenced the broader civil war scholarship. I begin with an overview of the key themes covered in articles published between January 1998 and January 2023. Then, four concrete research trends which those contributions specifically on Colombia have engaged with are identified. In this last step, I build on the identified quantitative trends with reference to a wider corpus of influential works, including key books and articles from beyond the selection criteria.

The sample articles were grouped according to the main themes addressed (see Appendix). Figure 2 maps these themes. Overall, it indicates that publications on Colombia became more prominent at the end of the first decade of the new century. It shows that wartime dynamics have been a constant feature of these journal publications since 2011. A total of 11 articles focussed on wartime dynamics, with a further seven examining the links between the state of the economy and conflict. The latter has been an ongoing research theme since 2001. Demobilisation, rebel socialisation and individual support for peace received greater scholarly attention during the peace process (in total seven, six and six publications, respectively). Regarding demobilisation, one exception is Page’s (2000) seminal work on prisoner release and post-conflict reconciliation, which was published more than a decade before the recent negotiations with the FARC would commence.

Figure 2. Number of articles with specific themes. Main themes are ordered from top to bottom by the overall number of articles with this theme.

Social cohesion and political participation have also gained in prominence in the last decade, with six and five related publications, respectively. This is consistent with the general increase in interest in psychological questions about the role of identity and group cohesion in conflict in much of the newer literature on civil wars (Kertzer and Tingley 2018). Studies on migration experienced a boom in 2009, with three publications on internal displacement (Braun 2009, Ibáñez and Velásquez 2009, Steele 2009) – as reflecting scholarly awareness of the significant increase in internally displaced persons in Colombia from the turn of the millennium (Ibáñez and Velásquez 2008). Only four publications each dealt with electoral violence and negotiations, with the number slightly higher after the peace referendum in 2016. Finally, there were only three publications each dealing with drug trafficking and gender issues. No study on drug-trafficking dynamics focussed exclusively on Colombia (Duran-Martinez 2015, Lessing 2015, Kronick 2020); however, works on women explicitly addressed ex-combatants and social movements in the country (Kreft 2018, Gutiérrez and Murphy 2022). Overall, most publications on Colombia of the last 25 years have been on demobilisation as well as wartime and economic dynamics.

However, the number of publications grouped under a certain theme does not directly reflect the degree of scholarly attention given to a particular matter. When considering citations per theme in relation to the number of publications, the order of relevance is as follows: drug trade; wartime dynamics; electoral violence; rebel socialisation; migration/displacement; demobilisation; support for peace; women; economy; social cohesion; political participation; and, negotiations (see Appendix). The three publications on drug trafficking, which mentioned Colombia in their abstracts, were cited an average of 50.7 times, while the four on negotiations were cited only 5.3 times in proportion to the overall number of publications (see Figure A4). A temporal perspective indicates that the boom in citations occurred between 2009 and 2014, which means that articles covering certain topics were cited most often if they were published in those years.

Aggregating articles in terms of citations per theme gives us a first impression of which received significant scholarly attention. Yet, doing so also leads to an over-representation of individual articles, as the high number of citations – on election violence, for example – can be attributed to a single work (Steele 2011). This also sees an under-representation of the timescale, as more recent articles could not have been cited as often (see Figure A5 in the Appendix for an overview). However, some ground-breaking work, such as Gutiérrez-Sanín and Wood’s (2017), has already attracted considerable scholarly attention despite being published only recently.

In addition, to visualise the Colombian themes in civil war research in quantitative terms, it is important to identify the key themes for the wider civil war discipline that articles and books on Colombia have contributed to. In this final step, I build on the identified quantitative thematic trends with reference to a wider corpus of influential articles and books. I listed the 10 most-cited articles and books on Colombia’s civil war and examined how they influenced the wider civil war scholarship. I argue that the most frequently cited works on the Colombian conflict have primarily influenced research nested within the broader ‘local turn’ in civil war scholarship on rebel governance and socialisation, civilian victimisation, and local correlates of conflict.

Rebels Governance and Socialisation

The most frequently cited works on Colombia's civil conflict have contributed to research on rebel governance and socialisation. Three of the 10 most-cited articles and the most cited book on the Colombian conflict (Arjona 2016) advance our understanding of rebels in civil wars. Overall, the most-cited article to date in the sample is Arjona’s (2014) one in JCR on ‘Wartime Institutions: A Research Agenda’. In this seminal piece, Arjona combines micro- and macro-level data with original empirical evidence from Colombia. She argues that civil war research lacks understanding about the ways in which civilians and combatants make choices in the local context. She shows that local wartime institutions exist and that these vary greatly within and across armed groups, localities and over time.

Her paper contributes to our understanding of the habitats rebel groups exist within and teaches us about the importance of rebel – civilian interactions. Rebel groups become resilient by creating local wartime institutions through strong ties with civilian populations. Building on Arjona’s work, including her highly influential book on rebel governance (Arjona 2016), others have based their work on the assumption that rebel groups cultivate strong ties to local communities to secure long-term support for their rebellions. Furlan (2020) used the Colombian case to create a typology for investigating how rebels govern. Hegre et al. (2017) developed a cross-national dataset on possible conflict outbreaks using Arjona’s concept of social ties and wartime institutions. Similarly, Parreira (2021) uses the Colombian case as an example of how rebels create order in post-invasion Baghdad.

Other studies on rebels in Colombia have addressed rebel-group characteristics and processes of socialisation. Ugarriza and Craig (2013) argue in their piece on armed groups that rebels can be distinguished by their ideological characteristics. This statistical inquiry has been used by other works on ideological and political demands during civil wars (Leader Maynard 2019, Vogt et al. 2021) to conceptualise and code ideology in armed groups. Tokdemir et al. (2021) base their work on rebel alliances on Ugarriza and Craig’s (2013) research on ideologies in Colombian rebel groups to show that ideology functions as a shortcut to communicate with supporters and enemies.

Moreover, the case of Colombia – with its many rebel groups and different processes of demobilisation – has facilitated research on combatants’ socialisation and their individual motivations to return to violence after the FARC’s demobilisation. Kaplan and Nussio’s (2018) investigation has been an influential work in the realm of ex-combatants’ reintegration into society (Martin 2021, Peña and Dorussen 2021) showing that personality traits, family ties, education, and the presence of criminal groups are factors that influence individual decisions to return to violence in post-conflict settings. Krakowski (2022) uses the idea that exposure to criminal gangs is responsible for a return to violence to explore antisocial behaviour in adolescents.

In sum, research on rebels in Colombia has demonstrated to the broader civil war community that rebel groups do not just interact with civilians but create local wartime institutions. Studies on ideology in Colombia have been pioneers in conceptualising rebel group ideology in civil wars. Research on rebel socialisation in Colombia has shown that it is not only socialisation during participation in rebel groups that is important but also socialisation as a youth and after demobilisation that explains a (re)turn to violent behaviour.

Civilian Victimization

The Colombia-related scholarship has also contributed to the ‘local turn’ towards civilian exposure to violence. The second-most cited article in the sample shows that elections can facilitate the displacement of civilians during civil wars (Steele 2011). This micro-level quantitative and qualitative article aids our understanding of the relationship between fighting, voting and violence. It demonstrates that armed groups displace disloyal civilians through electoral politics at the local level. Steele’s (2018) book shows that armed groups try to cleanse territories of disloyal civilians to gain territorial control. Her work has been widely cited by others examining electoral violence (Dunning 2011, Daxecker et al. 2019), voting behaviour in civil wars (Liendo and Braithwaite 2018, Tellez 2019b) as well as different forms of lethal and non-lethal violence in civil wars (Balcells and Justino 2014). It has been shown herewith that armed groups use many different forms of violence to intimidate citizens.

The focus on civilian victimisation has also driven research on the logics of forced migration during times of civil war. Drawing on fieldwork in Colombia’s north-west region of Urabá, Steele’s (2009) article shows that armed groups target citizens collectively which force larger groups to flee. This awareness of collective targeting in civil wars through displacement has been used to conceptualise collective targeting through ethnic affiliations (Fjelde and Hultman 2014) and operationalise targeted and untargeted violence in a study on Internet accessibility and state violence (Gohdes 2020). The concept of collective targeting has also been used to explain refugees’ decision to leave or return (Adhikari 2013, Ghosn et al. 2021).

Research on Colombia has also pushed the perspective of ‘agency’; with another oft-cited article (Kaplan 2013) focusing on civilian measures to protect against civil war violence. Based on interviews and archival research, this work and also its related book (Kaplan 2017) have contributed to define non-violent civilian resistance in civil wars as unarmed civilian protest using methods such as protests, strikes, and boycotts (Chenoweth and Cunningham 2013). Also, expanding Kaplan’s work, Schon (2019) shows us that there are forms of civilian resistance for individuals to stay home in the context of forced migration.

Beyond the specific forms of violence experienced by civilians in such conflicts, research on Colombia has demonstrated that political violence should be conceptualised as an organisation’s pattern of violence. In their seminal contribution to the scholarship, Gutiérrez-Sanín and Wood (2017) use a statistical inquiry based on an original database to show that political violence against civilians can be clustered by defining the targets, frequency, and techniques the armed group regularly employs. This is of great importance to the wider field, in noting that contributions on political violence should clarify which forms of violence are related to civil conflict and which are not. Based on this work, others investigating violence against civilians could cluster sexual violence as part of a form of political violence (Johansson and Hultman 2019, Nordås and Cohen 2021).

The wider civil war audience has learned more about collective violence in the presence of armed groups and electoral violence through forced displacement that civilians face in civil wars through the Colombian case. However, civilians have been portrayed not only as victims of armed conflict but also as individuals seeking to protect themselves in a hostile environment. The case of Colombia, in particular, has helped define the concept of political violence, allowing comparisons with other civil wars and a classification of sexual violence as part of political violence.

Local Correlates of Conflict

Next, we move from the individuals, rebels and civilians, to the local correlates of conflict that influence them. The Colombian conflict offers an opportunity to examine three correlates of (civil) war known to influence its duration: the unequal distribution of land, a long-term history of conflict, and drug trafficking, respectively.

Under the term violentologia numerous ‘Colombianists’, researchers on Colombia have been studying the origins of the Colombian conflict for more than half a century. Urrego Ardila (2002) argues in a piece at the beginning of the 2000s that the unequal distribution of land is a main driver behind the ongoing armed conflict. To date, about 80 per cent of the territory belongs to only 1 per cent of the population, many of whom use their territory only for livestock and not for agriculture (CNMH 2018). This disproportionate existence of livestock farms has not been widely studied and should not be underestimated in the future research on local correlates of conflict.

Yet, in line with this Spanish-speaking Colombian canon, Albertus and Kaplan’s (2013) widely cited work addresses land reform as a tactic of war and conflict resolution. Their statistical inquiry underscores that large-scale reforms can indeed reduce violence if carefully implemented. Based on these findings, other scholars have developed predictors of long inequalities in other countries such as Nigeria (Abubakar 2021) and have used Colombia as an example of specific measures to reduce grievances in civil wars (Cederman and Vogt 2017). This fact challenges the civil war literature to understand land ownership and environmental injustices as local correlates of civil wars.

Research on Colombia was also innovative in showing that civil conflicts are influenced by legacies of violence. A frequently cited study by Daly (2012) explains that violence mostly erupts again in regions with a history of armed, organised violence. By using a dataset on the onset of insurgencies in Colombia (1964–1984), this work on Colombia shows that correlates of war such as poverty, difficult terrain, natural resources, and large populations can become less important when a legacy of violence exists. Based on this concept, other works in civil war scholarship have illustrated spatial variations in rebel group fragmentation and militia emergence (Oppenheim et al. 2015, Mosinger 2018).

Finally, since the country is known for its coca cultivation, there is much research on drug trafficking which has been informed by the Colombian case.³ This research has allowed us to classify cartel violence as a distinct form of anti-state violence (Lessing 2015). This conceptualisation has aided a variety of works on criminal violence (Ley 2018) and drug-related violence (Shirk and Wallman 2015, Magaloni and Rodriguez 2020). Similarly, research on Colombia has shown us that drug-related violence increases when cartels compete with one another and the state security apparatus is fragmented (Duran-Martinez 2015). These contributions also challenge the civil war literature to classify drug-related crimes as an insurgency or even as a civil war. Although this conceptualisation is highly debated (Kalyvas 2015), the presence of rebel groups, paramilitary organisations and criminal gangs denotes a country case in which different perpetrators of violence are prevalent – necessitating it being understood under similar frames to insurgency.

The case of Colombia has, therefore, advanced the civil war scholarship by introducing three local correlates of war to a wider audience. It showcased how inequality in land distribution causes violence and how land reforms decrease levels of violence in civil war countries. Colombia’s violent legacy has introduced a long history of conflict as an important correlate of war and explained when and where conflict might erupt again. Finally, the Colombian case has helped classify drug-related cartel violence as part of civil wars and as a form of anti-state violence.

Looking Ahead: Challenges and Opportunities

Overall, a systematic analysis of journal articles published across key journals showed first that civil war scholars have increasingly been interested in the Colombian case and that many published on demobilisation as well as wartime and economic dynamics when studying Colombia’s conflict over the last 25 years. In a second step, however, which included a broader corpus of the most influential articles and books in terms of citation frequency, it became apparent that the most important contributions on Colombia’s conflict to the broader canon have been made within the ‘local turn’ in civil war scholarship on rebel governance and socialisation, civilian victimisation, and local correlates of conflict. The case has taught the wider civil war community, at the level of local actors, how rebels create local wartime institutions, which pre- and post-demobilisation experience matter for recidivism of ex-combatants, how armed groups collectively target civilians, how displacement can be a form electoral violence, and how civilians defend themselves in civil wars. At the level of local factors that affect individuals, we learned how land reforms can reduce violence, how a legacy of violence perpetuates conflict, and how drug wars take on the scale of conventional civil wars.

Most importantly, in these areas of research, the Colombian case often pioneered the definition and classification of specific terms such as rebel group ideology, collective targeting of civilians, political violence, and drug-related violence. Notwithstanding the increase in the number of related publications appearing and greater scholarly attention paid to these aspects, many challenges remain. I will now discuss certain weaknesses to knowledge production in Colombia, specifically regarding research and publishing practices. Then, methodological and theoretical issues are identified and possible future avenues of research presented.

Knowledge production on the Colombian case has both its advantages and its drawbacks. Although security risks remain, Colombia is increasingly used as a case study because scholars value how doing research there is highly feasible, further to the ease of access vis-à-vis primary sources (Dávila and Doyle 2020). Spanish is often seen as an easy to learn language and Colombia is geographically accessible, particularly for researchers from the USA and Canada. Hence, it is a popular fieldwork destination among both Colombian PhD students who study in the USA and prefer to conduct research in their home country and other PhD students who appreciate Colombia’s academic and social environment. Research cooperation between individuals from Colombia and the USA, such as Gutiérrez-Sanín and Wood (2017), also increasingly has a role to play here. Additionally, many survey firms and institutions offer easy options for data collection or the use of existing datasets without having to conduct research in Colombia per se.

At the same time, it is mostly non-Colombians who have benefitted from this accessibility and feasibility. Native Colombianists often continue to work and publish in a rather closed microcosm, for several reasons. First, many are educated in the tradition of the aforementioned violentologia, as characterised by mostly qualitative methods and a strong focus on very specific within-case studies. These perspectives are often less recognised in high-ranking journals. Second, there is a significant language barrier, as some native Colombianists do not have the resources or training to bring their English up to the level required by international journals. Third, there is a degree of conviction about and pride in the uniqueness of the Colombian conflict which those concerned do not want to see diluted by generalisations and the quantification of knowledge. Fourthly and finally, there is also a reluctance – and at some level, fear – to share local knowledge with an international audience given obvious power imbalances.

Increasingly, however, scholars are calling for the decentralisation of knowledge and knowledge production to improve the quality of research. This is to be achieved by putting inclusion and diversity at the centre of academic practice (Wilson and Knutsen 2020, Njeri 2021, Iroulo and Tappe Ortiz 2022). Simultaneously, native Colombianists have increasingly opened up to the publishing practices of the Global North, leading to reflections on how knowledge and knowledge production about Colombia can be simultaneously generalised to be interesting to the wider civil war discipline and decentralised to honour the long and rich history of local research.

Such decentralisation of knowledge and knowledge production means, first, understanding that research teams exclusively from the Global North, a lack of engagement with local history, culture and language, and the absence of local scholarship will keep reproducing works which increase citations for individual researchers and advance their academic careers but not prevent/reduce violence itself. It is much easier to produce (policy-)relevant research with the inclusion of local actors and with an accurate understanding of the local context. Second, it denotes journals reflecting on whose articles they accept and which sources or research collaborations their potential authors used. As such, International Studies Quarterly asks its authors to check their references to ensure the inclusion of scholars from disadvantaged groups. Authors should reflect on their own knowledge practices, with whom they collaborate, whose works they read and whom they cite.

The sample articles show that in 43.1 per cent of the cases at least one author is of Colombian nationality, in 23.1 per cent at least one author is based at a Colombian research institution and among the top-10 most-cited articles 4 out of 13 authors are Colombian while 9 are from the USA; only 1 author in the top 10 is based in the Latin American country.⁴ These numbers reflect, in part, how scholars from the USA are trained in the quantitative methods often more appreciated by the most prestigious and relevant journals. Authors’ nationalities might also explain the strong thematic focus on conflict, since in the USA both the general public and scientists have had an interest in counterinsurgency tactics. Yet, the numbers also show that there is room for improvement in research collaboration with authors at Colombian institutions and with native Colombianists who know the local context.⁵

Authors should make sure that they acknowledge the long tradition of research on violence in Colombia and that their research designs reflect this diversity in their chosen themes and citations. This is especially true for articles exclusively addressing the Colombian case. For example, Colombian authors who wrote on violentologia have continuously claimed that the unequal distribution of land is at the heart of the conflict; publishing in English-language journals on land issues without acknowledging these contributions is simply ignorant. By reading, understanding and including these contributions, authors can go beyond what has already been written in Spanish. This will also push the general civil war scholarship to produce novel contributions instead of simply replicating existing local knowledge in English for a wider audience.

Another key methodological issue in Colombianist knowledge production is that most contributions on this case (and others) assume that they are testing a general claim while very few are actually able to do so. How contributions on Colombia can genuinely extend beyond the case itself remains a challenge. Although it is important to gain insights about the Colombian context, there is also value in systematising findings beyond just the setting which provides empirical evidence in the first place. Research designs on the Colombian case should therefore focus carefully on establishing general patterns which can be applied to other civil war dynamics. Cedermann and Vogt (2017) suggest a pragmatic approach between macro-level models and microfoundations, criticising exactly how articles with evidence from a specific case like Colombia fall into the trap of overgeneralising. Future studies on this Latin American country should try to aggregate local data up to the national, regional and possibly even global levels.

To date, a disconnect between macro- and micro-level research has thus endured. Micro-level contributions on themes such as violentologia are still very narrowly focussed and few of them test general claims, while their macro-level counterparts tend to underestimate or ignore local knowledge by simply replicating existing research with the use of quantitative methods in English. In the future, these two strands need to be carefully connected to produce research which is insightful for both the Colombian and wider civil war scholarship audiences.

General trends in the field should also inform thematic diversity. Taking a closer look at a recent review of insights generated thus far on the consequences of civil war, the following themes are deemed to be relevant in the current research: civic attitudes, pro-social behaviours, political participation, and partisanship (Price and Yaylacı 2021).⁶ As discussed, there are now more ‘Colombian’ articles appearing on political participation and civil attitudes (such as support for peace). In future studies, it is suggested to further leverage existing knowledge on violentologia and to examine the micro-effects of violence on people living in conflict settings. This would be in line with the aforementioned broader trend in the civil war field of scrutinising individual actors as well as local dynamics (Hughes et al. 2015, Shesterinina 2022). The topics regarding which research on Colombia has been most influential – rebels, civilians, land and drugs – could also be deepened through this approach.

Although there have been a variety of contributions on exposure to violence and support for peace in Colombia (Branton et al. 2019, Tellez 2019b, Pechenkina and Gamboa 2022), questions remain as to what counts as such exposure to violence and how citizens perceive violence and insecurity. We also lack understanding about violent communities and citizens’ preferences vis-à-vis violence. The civil war scholarship has also shown that gender dynamics (Koos 2017, Davies and True 2019) and environmental issues (von Uexkull and Buhaug 2021) will increasingly play a role in the future – despite being themes less readily apparent in the sample articles.

It would be fruitful, then, to further study how civil wars influence individual characteristics and climate change and vice-versa. In line with this, a recent contribution to gender dynamics and pro-sociality has shown that young women might behave more socially in the presence of gangs, while young men, on the contrary, become more violent (Krakowski 2022). Zulver (2022) also highlights that women mobilise in contexts of threat, which correlates with the suggestion by Price and Yaylacı (2021) to examine individual perceptions of insecurity and how these affect behaviour. Rebel-group fragmentation is also a worthy starting point for future research in the Colombian context, as there are dissident FARC groups (in addition to the ELN) which have significant fighting capacities. While representing key foci for future research, how to aggregate these ‘Colombian’ results to generalisable patterns remains a challenge.

The scope of this review could also be subsequently extended to other civil war journals. It would also be fruitful to know how the Colombian conflict has been studied in the Anglo-Saxon versus Spanish-speaking literature by comparing whether there are significant differences in themes, approaches, interests and methodologies. A review of the literature published in Colombia since 2008 on the armed conflict reveals that most such works have focussed on territorial control (Cuesta-Borja and Rojas-Granada 2021), as then later taken up in the aforementioned English-language scholarship. Others have argued, meanwhile, that Colombian literature on the conflict has been informed by normative goals in mostly providing suggestions for public policy (Nasi and Rettberg 2005). Colombian work has also focussed more intensely on understandings of peace, peacebuilding and peace implementation than is common in the Anglo-Saxon world. Future studies should further explore whether there are other focal points in the Colombian debate on the conflict and whether the international discussion is picking up on themes previously published in the country.

To conclude, this first review and analysis of the English-language scholarship on Colombia’s civil conflict shows how work on the country to date has been nested within the broader ‘local turn’ in civil war scholarship. I have argued that beyond numerous publications on economic and military dynamics, research on Colombia has mostly advanced debates on rebel governance and socialisation, civilian victimisation, as well as local correlates of war. Most importantly, the Colombian case has provided novel classifications and definitions of terms such as political violence for future analyses and comparisons in the broader discipline. Research on this has added immeasurably to our understanding of civil wars’ social and political origins, as well as legacies. Yet, there are novel trends in the scholarship as a whole that remain under-represented: some contributions on Colombia have not managed to pin down general patterns. Future studies should examine individual actors and local dynamics, while striving also for a balance between decentralised knowledge production and the creation of research output which has real relevance for preventing and reducing violence both in Colombia and around the globe. Scholars studying the Colombian case should carefully combine micro-level data which allows diverse citations and strengthen Colombian voices in research with macro-level data which yields generalisable findings.

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).

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.

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).

Appendix

I. Logic of Article Selection

In identifying articles for inclusion in this piece, I used a deliberate method that I felt would be replicable and provide a representative sample of work on the subject. First, I did a conscious search through what I regard as a representative sample of mainstream generalist (American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, British Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics) and specialist journals looking at conflict (Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Cooperation and Conflict, Civil Wars), covering the period from January 1998 to January 2023. I checked all abstracts for the use of ‘Colombia’. Selecting from this body of journals gives a sample of 75 recent and well-regarded works on Colombia. In a second step, I excluded here from the articles that did not focus on Colombia’s civil conflict – reducing the overall number to 67.

I grouped the articles along 12 themes. These themes were identified through the keywords, the abstract and the main argument of each article. Most articles were easily grouped; however, some themes such as, political participation, support for peace, and electoral violence are closely intertwined. If the article explicitly dealt with support for the peace agreement in 2016, I grouped it under ‘support for peace’. If the article dealt explicitly with violence against voters, I grouped it under ‘electoral violence’. All other articles that did not match these two criteria were subsumed under ‘political participation’.

To consider citations, I used information from Web of Science and CrossRef and used the lowest number of citations for the sample. Based on these citation counts, I then identified the top 10 most-cited articles on the Colombia conflict. One caveat is that older articles have more citations than more recent ones, but the number of citations gives us a first indication of influential works. I also mapped the articles in Connected Papers to understand how they influenced each other and the wider civil war scholarship. To understand which literature streams were influenced by these top 10 most-cited articles, I checked through GoogleScholar which articles from the 10 journals used for the review cited these papers and grouped them again by theme. This allowed me to understand how a paper on, for example, political violence contributed to a research strand on sexual violence during civil wars.

II. Further Figures and Tables

Figure A1. Articles, by journal. Shows the distribution by journal of publication.

Figure A2. Number of articles with specific methods per year. Methods are ordered from top to bottom by the overall number of articles with this method.

Figure A3. Number of citations for articles using specific methods per year. Methods are ordered from top to bottom by the overall number of articles using this method.

Figure A4. Average number of citations per theme in relation to the number of publications in total.

Figure A5. Number of citations for articles with specific themes per year. Main themes are ordered from top to bottom by the overall number of articles with this theme.

Figure A6. Number of articles by first author’s nationality. NA = No information found.

Figure A7. Number of articles with all authors from the Global North versus one or more authors from Colombia. NA = No information found.

Figure A8. Number of articles with all authors based in the Global North versus one or more authors based at a Colombia institution. NA=No information found.

Figure A9. Number of articles published by journal indicating the first author’ s gender.

III. Widening the dataset to 5 generalist and 8 specialist journals (N = 136)

The following two figures depict the same figures as in the main analysis but with articles on Colombia’s civil conflict in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Small Wars and Insurgencies, and Security Dialogue. The overall trend of more publications on Colombia holds (see Figure A10). As can be expected, the inclusion of more specialist journals increases the number of articles on Colombia (in total to 136 articles), as these outlets typically publish case studies. Due to this increase, the peak caused by the special issue in CMPS becomes less prominent. In a second step, again, I clustered the articles along main themes and identified the number of articles covering those themes per year. Figure A11 shows that by including articles from more Q2 journals on Colombia’s civil conflict some themes appear that were not on the list beforehand, as such works specifically on state building, gangs, historical dynamics, and USA–Colombia relations. In comparison to the balanced set of articles in specialist and generalist journals, this dataset shows that many articles are published in the area of rebel socialisation and social cohesion and there are fewer economic related publications. In terms of contributing to the wider civil war scholarship, none of the included articles was in the top 10 most-cited articles on the Colombia conflict. However, taking these publications into consideration contributes to the main argument by visualising that works on rebels and civilians have become very common in articles on Colombia’s conflict even if this trend is not yet reflected in number of citations.

Figure A10. Articles on Colombia in 5 generalist and 8 conflict-related journals, 1998–2023, overlaid with a smoother and 95 per cent confidence intervals. Although the data above aggregate across all nine journals, we see a generally increasing trend at the journal level in this time period for every journal apart from AJPS and BJPS.

Figure A11. Number of articles with specific themes. Main themes are ordered from top to bottom by the overall number of articles with this themes.