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The collapse of the former peace process between the former government of Andrés Pastrana and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in February of 2002 has contributed to the overall escalation of the Colombian conflict in both the countryside and urban settings. However, throughout the territory, communities have organized themselves to resist violence in a non-violent fashion. As a result, Colombia host a wide range of zones and experiences of peace attempting to build and articulate civilians demands to the peaceful resolution of the conflict. This paper explores the development of two Zones of Peace in Colombia, Mogotes and Samaniego, which is part of a larger research project including many other Zones of Peace in Colombia and other conflict-ridden societies. This article aims at delineating a deeper understanding of what makes a Zone of Peace more durable and successful in conditions of extreme violence. In addition, the paper will discuss to what extent Zones of Peace in Colombia contribute to democratize and revitalize formal negotiation process between the elites of the parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For T. H. Marshall citizenship, the acquisition of rights followed a temporal sequence: civil rights, followed by political and finally social rights. In Latin America the sequence of rights was, however, quite different from that in England. Countries with a populist tradition like Argentina and Brazil first granted social rights, while Colombia and Venezuela, where the populist impulse was weaker, first achieved political rights. In both cases,civil rights were granted in a limited and biased manner. The consequence of this inversion is the presence of a citizenship of ?low intensity?(O?Donnell). In this paper I ask how the institutionalization of the social affects the extension of citizen?s rights? While O?Donnell?s thesis is not without insight, I argue that the best explanation for the appearance of low intensity citizenship is to be found in the social narratives through which elites attempt to forge a sense of community. This approach fits with Marshall?s dynamic view of social citizenship as that which creates ?a horizon of legitimate expectations.? This paper concentrates on the capacity of social languages to create this horizon or, expressed in a negative manner, in the presence of languages that hinder the translation of social benefits into full-fledged rights. The paper illustrates the theoretical argument by the case of Colombia in the 1910-1948 period. In Colombia the social is the result of a matrix of narratives emphasing, hygiene, populism, economic liberalism, Catholic morality and labour. Gender intersects these different narratives. These combinations of narratives precluded the formation of actors with capacity to further citizens? rights. As a result the state lost its capacity to mediate conflicts as the country entered in the period known as La Violencia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with the growing literature on state-failure and nation building. At the present juncture, despite a growing analytical and policy-oriented body of writing, and a renewed commitment to nation- or state-building, the number of collapsing states continues to grow world-wide. These are not isolated problems and any solution needs to take account of the wider crisis of the nation-state system, the de-territorialization of wealth and poverty, rising levels of inequality and the increasingly oligopolistic character of the global order of 'genuinely existing' liberal capitalism. The paper focuses on Colombia and the Congo, both of which represent examples of nation-states that have virtually from their inception been wracked by conflict and civil war to the point where violence has become a key vector of the wider politico-economic struggle for territorial control. The paper also includes a discussion of Iraq. This will complement the overall effort to argue that the way beyond the current crisis of the nation-state system lies in a careful understanding of the specific histories of the nations-that-never-were-nations. The pursuit of development and security can only be successful when we move beyond the current enthusiasm for state building along formal historical and territorial lines (embodied by the current conception of sovereign nation-states). In short there is a need rethink national sovereignty and establish frameworks for the protection of rights and the delivery of basic needs that moves sovereignty both downwards and upwards. There is more than ever a need to formulate approaches to security and development that take 'common humanity' seriously for both practical and altruistic reasons.Acknowledgements and Disclaimers: In relation to my discussion of Colombia, I would like to point out the indirect influence of Brooke Larson and Miguel Angel Centeno. In relation to the Congo, I would like to acknowledge the indirect influence of the ideas of Morten Boas, Kevin C. Dunn, David Moore and William Reno. In the case of Iraq, I am indebted to Toby Dodge. More generally Heloise Weber has over the years, as co-author of various books and articles, and as a friend and colleague, profoundly shaped, my thinking on the issues examined in this article. I also need to emphasize most emphatically, that I bear 100% responsibility for what follows and the above mentioned colleagues, with the possible exception of Heloise, will no doubt shake their heads in disbelief in relation to particular details and/or my overall line of argument. Finally, as the saying goes, it goes without saying that my employer, the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School (both students and colleagues) have also influenced my work, but the views expressed here are mine and mine alone.LAST, BUT NOT LEAST, THIS IS A PENULTIMATE DRAFT AND PLEASE TREAT IT AS SUCH. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the various ways that Colombia’s material power as a regional state, as well as its cultural power during the nineteenth century shaped Panama in ways that many Panamanians today are only vaguely aware. It will also look at Colombia’s resurgent role in Panama as both a material power and a cultural force in the wake the U.S. withdrawal from the isthmus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reparation of victims of armed conflicts ranks high on the list of peacebuilding priorities. Reparations are considered not only just, but also a necessary antidote for future violence. However, as in other domains of the peacebuilding activity and literature, we have little empirical evidence about what the actual victims want and need. In addition, we know little about how social proximity among victims and perpetrators, as is frequent in Colombia, affects what victims feel and need in terms of reparations. In this paper we present data from a survey of Colombian victims designed to find out about victims' needs and expectations in terms of reparation. In addition, we present findings of a more specific study on how social proximity among victims and perpetrators affects these expectations. From a conceptual point of view, the findings provide better understanding of the complex predicaments faced by victims of armed conflicts. In addition, they help us understand how differences in social proximity among domestic armed conflicts may be linked to differences among victims in terms of what they need and expect in terms of reparation. From a practical perspective, findings provide input for policymakers to design violence prevention schemes in Colombian communities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overall goal of this essay is to examine the implications of Colombia's recent decision to the sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) for the human rights situation of indigenous communities in Colombia. While it is clear that the existence of the DRIPS does not imply an immediate remediation for human rights violations against indigenous peoples and communities in Colombia, especially in the face of ruthless state and non-state powers intent on their land and resources, it does provide an important tool in what will inevitably be a struggle. The Spiral Model of Human Rights Change, developed by Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink (1999) suggests that simultaneous pressure from civil societies above and below the state will eventually move it towards human rights compliance. Yet in Colombia, despite over twenty years of sustained efforts there has been no spiralling towards compliance. The liberal constructivist framework of the model fails to account for the difficult realities of power and material interests that cloud indigenous rights cases in Colombia and elsewhere. Using an explicitly realist interpretation, this paper will look for alternative sources of power that might help indigenous pueblos guarantee their rights and security. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its creation in 1951, the ILO s Committee on Freedom of Association (CFA) has been the highest international body to investigate complaints against governments regarding their violations of freedom of association rights. Examining the CFA s strengths and weaknesses in today s world can reveal important lessons about the role of the ILO in the labor rights arena. Since freedom of association underpins the international labor rights regime, and the ILO s 1998 Declaration has caused a change within this regime toward turning back to ILO s Constitutional principles, the CFA s level of commitment to the ILO principles after 1998, including its distance to the ideal scope of freedom of association as originally intended by the ILO, should reflect this change. To assess this, this paper examines the patterns in selected CFA cases filed against two of the ILO member States with the world s worst records of respect for freedom of association as defined by the ILO, the U.S. and Colombia, before and after the ILO s 1998 Declaration. The question is timely in both academic and policy terms, and findings will contribute to both spheres. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colombia has been classified "a paradoxical state, one of stable instability and unstable stability". This is because, while its democratic institutions are far from being dysfunctional and the state effectively regulates a large part of the territory, the country "has the largest war, the biggest narcotics problem, the worst human rights abuses, and the greatest number of displaced persons in the Western Hemisphere." In this paper we argue that the crimes that occur in Colombia do constitute crimes against humanity thus placing the situation in the R2P radar. Yet, an adequate response does not entail measures contained in pillar 3 that make reference to timely and decisive action. Instead, pillars 1 and 2 are the framework for analysis. Colombia's situation should encourage international players to assist the state in better protecting its population from atrocities that accompany the protracted and complex violent conflict and in preventing more serious ones from happening. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As is traditional in leftist Latin American rebel organizations, the main Colombian guerrilla movements - the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) - have important rates of female members. Estimated to between thirty and forty percent of the membership of these armed non-state actors (ANSAs), women have reached the level of commanders, but failed to reach the top. In spite of this important participation, women and gender issues are often excluded from the analysis of armed conflict and ANSAs. Existing studies that do include women combatants often portray the issue in a dichotomous way, suggesting that they are either more 'empowered' than women in Colombian society in general, or that they are as oppressed - or more - than the average Colombian woman. Using a combination of field research and literature review, this paper outlines a way out of this binary understanding, by illustrating the complex and contradictory realities of women combatants in Colombia. Through a gender analysis of their roles and the reasons for women and girls to join the FARC, as well as of sexuality and relations in the group, we undertake a mapping of the complex gendered power relations this ANSAs. This analysis could contribute to a basis for gender-sensitive policy-making in the area of conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many conflict-affected countries around the world, there are a multitude of actors who are working to reduce and prevent conflicts, ranging from civil society actors to track I diplomats. Several countries around the world have created government sponsored offices and/or initiatives to facilitate peace negotiations between conflicting parties (including the government). These include institutions such as the High Commissioner for Peace in Colombia and the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process in Sri Lanka. To date there has been little research and writing about the work of government sponsored institutions in facilitating a reduction to conflict. This paper will explore how commissioners or secretariats for peace function within conflict environments, what are their roles and impacts on the conflicts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Colombian state is widely understood to be failed due to its inability to monopolize violence. Yet such an understanding of the state is misleading in that it suggests that the state is entirely ineffective, incapable of any form of territorial control. An analysis of policy mechanisms through which the Colombian state controls territory suggests that the Colombian state is far from impotent. In fact, it is highly successful in regulating access and giving meaning to domestic space. In this paper, I analyze state policies to create, maintain, and recuperate public space and the effects these policies have on citizenship as it is increasingly defined through participation in proper forms of consumption and exchange. The state has focused on ambulant street vendors as the sole impediment to the creation, safe use, and enjoyment of public space by citizens, thus framing street vendors as security threats and non-citizens. The state seeks to ameliorate these problems through the "formalization" of vendors, forcing them into fixed spaces, hours, merchandise, and saving patterns. Based on three months of field work, policy analysis, and extensive interviewing, this paper argues that the state's efforts to create public space for citizens seek to maintain state legitimacy, despite visible "failures". In doing so, it relies upon the framing of certain (citizen) populations as security threats, and thus non-citizens who do not deserve the same rights as the "market citizens" the state embraces as part of its modernizing and legitimizing project. This paper raises salient questions regarding the crafting of policies to improve both the quality of public space as well as the working conditions and prospects of street vendors. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colombia has been engaged in internal insurgencies for forty years. Only recently has the government, with the heavy support of the United States, begun to make headway against the three armed groups - FARC, ELN, and AUC. The ability of the intelligence agencies, especially the civilian - led DAS, has generally been found wanting. The intelligence community in Colombia has been undergoing reform for two decades though the pace has increased recently in response to a series of scandals. This paper will analyze the reforms and seek to assess their impact in terms of transparency, democratic control, and effectiveness. The views expressed here are the author's alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of Navy or the Department of Defense. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on terrorism have traditionally focused on non-state actors who direct violence against liberal states. Such studies have also tended to focus on political motivations and, therefore, have neglected the economic functions of terrorism. This article challenges the divorce of the political and economic spheres by highlighting how states can use terrorism to realise interconnected political and economic goals. To demonstrate this, we take the case of the paramilitary demobilisation process in Colombia and show how it relates to the USColombian free trade agreement (FTA). We argue that the demobilisation process fulfils a dual role. Firstly, the process aims to improve the image of the Colombian government required to pass the controversial FTA through US Congress in order to protect large amounts of US investment in the country. Secondly, the demobilisation process serves to mask clear continuities in paramilitary terror which serve mutually supportive political and economic functions for US investment in Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1920s the Standard Oil Company faced the hostility of the left-wing Mexican Revolutionary government, which eventually expropriated the company's properties in 1938. As nationalist rhetoric increased before 1938 in Mexico, Standard Oil explored new fields in Colombia, a country ruled by the foreign- business-friendly, right-wing Conservative Party. The Colombian Conservative Party had given very generous concessions to foreign multinationals, and Standard wanted to couple this political climate with the potential of the Colombian oil fields. In contrast with Mexico, during the first three decades of the twentieth-century, Colombia had enjoyed remarkable political stability. Escaping from nationalism in Mexico, however, Standard Oil faced a different kind of nationalism in Colombia, as the Conservative government ceded to the pressure of the opposition union-friendly Liberal Party's demands. Finally, the right-wing government of Venezuela showed to be the friendliest one towards Standard. However, the company did not trust the stability of the dictatorship and off-shored its refining activities. The paper compares Standard Oil's reaction to growing nationalism in two different political environments, and the way this affected its corporate strategy in both countries. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast with many of the countries in the Latin American Region, contemporary Colombia has not abandoned its neoliberal premises. As such, the case of Colombia provides a useful corrective to the idea that all of Latin America is turning to the left, and indicates the complexity of current trends in the hemisphere. At the same time, Alvaro Uribe has not continued with neoliberalism in the same manner as his predecessors; as both critics and followers admit, he has transformed the way Colombians are governed with important consequences for the future, not all of which are positive. In the first place, he has transformed the perceived relationship between the economy and politics. Contrary to the belief that changes in the prevailing economic model are necessary to solve the structural conditions of poverty and inequality, Uribe has advanced the idea that conflict was the direct cause, not the consequence, of lack of economic progress. Secondly, Uribe has transformed the dynamic of conflict between the state, guerrilla forces and the paramilitary. After several failed negotiations with guerrilla organizations, he promised a military victory over the guerrilla and a negotiation with the paramilitary. I contend that during Uribe's presidency there has been a transformation in the regime of governance with the state's emphasis on security as the objective of government and the road to economic prosperity. Under this rationality, the government selectively combines freedom with coercion and inclusion with exclusion. While a selected group of citizens see their rights and freedoms guaranteed, others are deprived of their property, means of subsistence and even the right to life. The paramilitary, multinationals and big landowners belong to the first group, while Indigenous groups, Afro-Colombians, peasants, trade unionists and women are over-represented in the second. The regime of governance selectively extends the liberal component of right to protection, as compared to social and economic rights. I characterize this strategy as "securitization by dispossession" where security for some means dispossession for many. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2003, Lutheran World Relief, as an international relief and development NGO, began a peacebuilding initiative in Colombia. They facilitated the formation of a partnership between peace sanctuary churches in Colombia and six communities of faith in the upper Midwest of the United States, coordinated by LWR staff. This partnership, called Sal y Luz (salt and light in Spanish) has the goal of education and advocacy both in Colombia and in the U.S.. Sal y Luz represents a powerful example of transnational solidarity for peace, which may find precursors in past solidarity movements like those in Central America in the 1980s. There are also implications and lessons of this case study for the broader field of NGO peacebuilding work. How should peacebuilding NGOs most effectively help their constituencies in the U.S. understand and become invested in their peacebuilding work? What benefits does this partnership bring in terms of accountability and effectiveness in peacebuilding? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since his first electoral campaign, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2006; 2006-2010) announced his intention to engage in a process of negotiation with armed groups. He uses extensive measures of exception to incorporate these groups, mainly paramilitary, into civic life as an important component of his 'democratic security policy'. Unlike the 1950s and 1970s when states of exception were used to curtail civil and political rights to the country's population, Uribe uses the exception to produce 'mutations in citizenship'; they refer to changes in the criteria for including groups previously excluded from citizenship, to the granting of additional benefits to groups already included, and to criteria for excluding from benefits to groups declared unworthy of state protection either by disqualifying their life as not worth living or by classifying them as dangerous to the security of the country. The analysis of the Colombian case calls into question premises of contemporary discussions on the sovereign use of the exception. The novelty of the Colombian situation is that authoritarian practices are colonizing the structures of democracy as narratives of citizenship are invoked in support of authoritarian technologies of government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human rights literature tends to treat states as simultaneously the primary abusers of human rights and their primary guarantor. This tension reflects real differences within and between states with respect to their commitment to human rights, but it raises the question of whether strong states are on balance better or worse for human rights conditions. This essay examines that question through a case study of Colombia, a state with a particularly bad human rights record, and through a large-N statistical analysis. Both approaches yield similar conclusions, that weak, low capacity states are dangerous for human rights and strong high capacity states tend to be better. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than a symptom of recent trends in state-failure or weakness, I argue for an understanding of paramilitaries and militias as representing informal institutions of state violence, known in the literature of Latin American studies as parainstitutions (and their proliferation as parainstutionalism). Parainstitutions are a long-standing feature in Third World politics. I show that there are many different pathways by which states adopt parainstitutions, including material constraints on states which prevent the building of centralized militaries, changes in norms and ideology about the use and organization of violence in society, and functional concerns about internal security. Then, I suggest how the dynamics of the contemporary international state-system fosters the persistence of parainstitutions in certain circumstances and their destruction in others. This leads to the conclusion that parainstitutionalism is a viable and stable model of coercion under conditions of diminished external threat. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]