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Scholars of state classification practices have long interrogated how official legal categories are constructed. This paper analyzes the construction of "victimhood" in Colombia as a feat that required negotiation among international human rights organizations, local civil society actors, and politicians across the partisan spectrum. The Victims' Law of 2011, which sought to provide widespread reparations to victims of the civil conflict, originated from the concerns of the human rights community, yet the deliberation process leading up to the law's passage reveals the extent to which elite historical narratives of the conflict unduly narrowed the universe of eligible victims. Using archival evidence from congressional debates from 2007 to 2011, this paper argues that the broad conception of victimhood originally inherited from United Nations guidelines came to be constrained by disproportionate influence from politicians' personal understandings of conflict history, shaped by anecdote and the selective use of historical evidence. These rationales interacted with budgetary constraints to ultimately restrict the victim category according to negotiated temporal boundaries of the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the conceptualizations of organized crime as both an enterprise and a form of governance, borderland as a spatial category, and borders as institutions, this paper looks at the politics of bordering practices by organized crime in the Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands. It posits that contrary to the common assumptions about transnational organized crime, criminal organizations not only blur or erode the border but rather enforce it to their own benefit. In doing so, these groups set norms to regulate socio-spatial practices, informal and illegal economies, and migration flows, creating overlapping social orders and, lastly, (re)shaping the borderland. Theoretically, the analysis brings together insights from political geography, border studies, and organized crime literature, while empirically, it draws on direct observation, criminal justice data, and in-depth interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The signing of the Final Agreement between the Colombian National Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on November 24, 2016, created many expectations. However, key advances that were achieved during the subsequent months gave way to a period of stagnation and even actual backsliding in its implementation. This paper analyzes the difficulties of fulfilling the Final Agreement, in particular as concerns its first point regarding Comprehensive Rural Reform (CRR). The analysis is based on the argument that if the Agreement was focused on generating the conditions necessary to end armed conflict and reestablish democratic conditions in the country, it also contains structural factors which infringe upon the consolidation of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]