Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal

ISSN: 2380-2014 (Print) 2379-9978 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtwt20

Decentralisation, security consolidation and

territorial peacebuilding: is Colombia about to
close the loop?

Markus Schultze-Kraft, Oscar Valencia & David Alzate

To cite this article: Markus Schultze-Kraft, Oscar Valencia & David Alzate (2016) Decentralisation,
security consolidation and territorial peacebuilding: is Colombia about to close the loop?, Third
World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 1:6, 837-856

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2016.1338922

Published online: 07 Sep 2017.

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 Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 2016
VOL. 1, NO. 6, 837–856
https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2016.1338922

Decentralisation, security consolidation and territorial

peacebuilding: is Colombia about to close the loop?
Markus Schultze-Krafta , Oscar Valenciab,c and David Alzated
a
Department of Political Studies, Universidad Icesi, Cali, Colombia; bSchool of Human and Social Sciences,
Fundación Universitaria de Popayán (FUP), Popayan, Colombia; cDepartment of Law and Political Science,
Pontifícia Universidad Javeriana, Cali, Colombia; dPolitical Science and Sociology, Universidad Icesi, Cali,
Colombia
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ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In November 2016, the Colombian Government and the insurgent Received 29 December 2016
FARC signed a final peace agreement. Central to the accord is what Accepted 2 June 2017
the parties call ‘territorial peacebuilding’, a long-term strategy to
KEYWORDS
integrate Colombia’s vast (rural) hinterlands into the nation’s legal Decentralisation
political system and economy. ‘Territorial peacebuilding’ follows security consolidation
on from decentralisation and security consolidation, both of which peacebuilding
experienced problems, however, ultimately falling short of integrating local government
Colombia. To be more effective now it is imperative to devise a territory
governance strategy for territorial peacebuilding that includes the Colombia
subnational political and administrative entities, enhances citizen
participation and protects local governments from capture by criminal
interests.

Introduction
Against the backdrop of the challenges faced by post-cold war peace operations, commonly
focused on national-level interventions and top-heavy reforms led by powerful external
agencies, it is increasingly recognised that the inclusion of local actors, arenas and processes
is a necessary condition for building legitimate and durable peace. What has been called
the ‘local turn in peace building’1 comes in several guises and serves distinct interests. For
the international peacebuilding community, it essentially means promoting local ownership
and community-level engagement to enhance the legitimacy and effectiveness of outside
interventions. In this regard, decentralisation has been high on the peacemaking/building
agendas in many parts of the contemporary world, as pointed out by Paul Jackson.2 Critical
scholars and practitioners, in turn, are foregrounding the local to unveil either the flaws and
self-interest of ‘northern’ strategies or the disregard for tough local realities that remain
unaltered by peace deals between government officials and rebel leaders and centrally or
externally designed peacebuilding programmes. Their aim is to open up new perspectives
on how peace could be built in more inclusive fashion from the ‘bottom-up.’3

CONTACT Markus Schultze-Kraft mschultze-kraft@icesi.edu.co, markus.schultze.kraft@gmail.com

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 838  M. SCHULTZE-KRAFT ET AL.

It is significant that critical approaches to peacebuilding do not tend to rely on decen-

tralisation formulas but focus their attention on social and civic actors and organisations at
the local and subnational level. While intuitive enough, the recourse to decentralisation by
the peacebuilding mainstream is indeed astonishing for there is only ‘scant evidence of a
positive correlation between decentralisation and strengthened local development and
governance’ in non-conflict settings4; and likely even less evidence that decentralisation is
an effective tool to ‘institutionalize peace following intra-state conflict.’5 Arguably, the prom-
inent role that decentralisation has been assigned in the reconstruction of governance in
post-conflict contexts is related to the popular belief amongst peacebuilders – and devel-
opment experts - that it carries some kind of intrinsic value which is beyond debate and
doubt. While this is questionable, it would appear equally shortsighted to throw the baby
out with the bathwater and ignore crucial issues related to the institutional design and
practice of what Francisco Gutiérrez refers to as the ‘structure of the state’s territorial power’
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when addressing the challenges entailed in peacebuilding.6

This article aims to deepen our knowledge about the relationship between local govern-
ment and peacebuilding, the topic of this collection, by examining the meaning and impli-
cations of ‘territorial peace’ in the context of the current Colombian peace process. We posit
this approach to peacebuilding is interesting because in countries emerging from violent
conflict there is typically not much that can be found by way of local government capable
of exercising political authority in accordance with the established law and constitution. In
such settings, local government institutions are among the first ‘victims’ of conflict inasmuch
as they commonly cannot count on central government protection and are ‘soft’ targets of
insurgents or other armed non-state groups, including organised criminal gangs and net-
works, which may either seek to capture, infiltrate or destroy them.
Of course, this does not mean that ‘the local’ represents some kind of political vacuum, a
reality which international peacebuilders have been slow in realising. To the contrary, using
the case of Colombia as an example this article argues that among the big challenges for
peacebuilding is that the – sometimes vast – territories of states that experience violent
conflict are far from being effectively controlled from the centre but constitute arenas in
which different state and non-state actors vie for dominance and power. In this regard it is
crucial to understand, however, that while these struggles may often be localised or region-
alised they also represent broader patterns of centre-periphery relations or pacts between
national and subnational elites.7 Under such circumstances organised violence – or the threat
thereof – is not the only but often an effective means to establish and uphold local political
orders. In such orders formal government institutions are one among many players that
exercise political authority and decide on how the region is governed and who gets what
in terms of access to revenues and rents that are generated at the local level and/or trans-
ferred from the centre.
In this regard, it is important to recognise that this situation does not change ‘automati-
cally’ with the signing of a peace accord and the implementation of centrally conceived and
steered peacebuilding interventions, something critical peacebuilding scholars are quick to
point out. Furthermore, it may be compounded where the territories in question are per-
meated by organised criminal structures and activities, such as those associated with
drug-trafficking and illegal mining. In such settings, local government institutions and rep-
resentatives are not only impotent but often complicit or implicated in organised crime.
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL  839

Consequently, they have even less incentive to put their (light) weight behind peacebuilding
initiatives that are handed down or delegated to them from the top, particularly where the
reforms are geared towards generating more robust accountability, political inclusion, rural
and other economic reforms and transparency.
Adopting a long-term perspective, this article examines how Colombia’s central state has
sought, in the past three decades and longer, to gain wider and deeper control of the coun-
try’s vast national territory through ambitious decentralisation and territorial security con-
solidation programmes and reforms. We posit that these initiatives have had some positive
effects but have also been hampered by difficulties associated with the particular and his-
torically contingent ways in which the centre of political power in the capital Bogotá has
built its relationships with regional elites. Throughout these complex processes there has
been a tension between the interests of the centre and the periphery, with Bogotá oscillating
between, on the one hand, transferring significant political, fiscal and administrative respon-
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sibilities and powers to subnational entities and reaffirming its central decision-making
prerogatives on the other, particularly in relation to providing security and fighting the
insurgents.
To this day, this tension remains unresolved. In effect, we believe it constitutes the Achilles
heel of the current peace process with Colombia’s largest left-wing insurgent organisation,
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, in Spanish) and the imminent imple-
mentation of the peace accords that were signed in late 2016. In our analysis, it is not clear
how Bogotá, that is, the architect of the peace plan (together with FARC), will be successful
at linking local and regional political and administrative entities, which are only marginally
included in the peace deal, and regional elites and populations to what is designed as a
centrally steered peacebuilding process.
While the notion of territorial peace figures prominently in the accord as well as in gov-
ernment and – with different emphases – also insurgent rhetoric, the reality is that in the
regions the authority of the centre is at best tenuous or at worst openly contested, including
by social and grassroots organisations that do not feel part of the overall effort. Thus ques-
tions about the governance of territorial peacebuilding in Colombia acquire central impor-
tance. In this regard, it is appropriate to state at the outset that in this article we identify the
lack of a robust and legitimate governance strategy for building territorial peace in Colombia
but do not pretend to offer any in-depth analysis about what such a strategy ought to entail.
This issue must be addressed in a separate and subsequent piece of research.
The remainder of this article is organised in the following way. First, we provide a succinct
account of the challenges the modern Colombian state has faced with respect to establishing
its presence and reach across the national territory since gaining independence from Spain
in the early nineteenth century. This is followed by a brief discussion of the efforts that suc-
cessive Colombian Governments have undertaken in the past three decades to increase the
‘infrastructural power’8 of the central state through strategies of both decentralisation and
territorial security consolidation. Third, we zero in on the peace process between the admin-
istration of President Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018) and FARC’s leadership and examine
the core features of the strategy of territorial peacebuilding. Drawing on our analysis of
decentralisation and security consolidation, the conclusion offers an outlook on the chal-
lenges territorial peacebuilding in Colombia is likely to face and what should be done to
avert early failure.
 840  M. SCHULTZE-KRAFT ET AL.

Territory and the state in Colombia

Ever since General Simón Bolívar, the Caracas-born South American independence hero,
succeeded – on 7 August 1819 – in overwhelming division-strong Spanish royalist forces in
the surroundings of a small bridge crossing River Teatinos in what today is the department
of Boyacá in Colombia’s central highland region, the modern Colombian state has been
under construction. Over the course of two centuries, this process has been punctuated by
violent conflict, which, however, has been of much lower intensity and scale than in other
parts of the world, particularly in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe.9 These conflicts,
the majority of which were domestic and did not involve neighbouring countries and foreign
powers, did not result in the institution of a ‘strong’ Colombian state in a Weberian sense. To
the contrary, as other scholars have shown in detail,10 to this day Colombia remains trapped
in the quest to overcome entrenched problems of weak stateness.11
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Not unlike other Latin American countries, in Colombia modern and progressive political
institutions exist on the pages of the country’s constitution, adopted in 1991.12 But in practice
the state has consistently been unprepared and/or unwilling to exercise its authority in
legitimate and effective manner across key sectors of public life and large swaths of the
nation’s territory. Instead, as Daniel Pécaut points out, alongside the Catholic Church it was
the two traditional political parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, which fomented a sense
of nationhood and ‘served to establish the links between the regions, but their clientelistic
functioning promoted the fragmentation of the political scene’.13
The Colombian state’s feeble territorial control and presence, both in physical and insti-
tutional-organisational terms, is arguably one of the main reasons why South America’s
third-largest country continues to face serious problems of illegally organised violence,
human rights violations and social inequality. Colombia, among other Latin American coun-
tries, appears to corroborate Charles Tilly’s dictum that ‘war made the state, and the state
made war’, but in the negative.14 As has been pointed out by Miguel Centeno, most of the
territorial boundaries of the modern Latin American states almost perfectly match those of
the previous Spanish and Portuguese colonial-administrative divisions.15 In other words,
while throughout the modern age states in other parts of the world, especially in continental
Europe, witnessed significant modifications to their territorial extension due to international
warfare, in Colombia and other Latin American countries this has not been the case. With
the exception of two relatively short border wars with Peru (1828–1829; 1932–1933) and
one with Ecuador (1832), the post-colonial Colombian state never fought a foreign foe to
preserve its territorial integrity or invade a neighbouring country. In territorial terms, it basi-
cally assumed what was handed down to it from the erstwhile Spanish colonial masters.
By the same token, the case of Colombia puts into doubt other conceptions of modern
statehood, such as that of Michael Mann, and they prompt us to critically engage with notions
of ‘state failure’ but also alternative propositions like the ‘differentiated presence of the state’16
and ‘areas of limited statehood.’17 According to Mann,
the state does not possess a distinctive means of power independent of, and analogous to,
economic, military and ideological power. The means used by states are only a combination of
these, which are also the means of power used in all social relationships. However, the power
of the state is irreducible in quite a different socio-spatial and organizational sense. Only the
state is inherently centralized over a delimitated territory over which it has authoritative power.
Unlike economic, ideological or military groups in civil society, the state elites’ resources radiate
authoritatively outwards from a center but stop at defined territorial boundaries. The state is,
indeed, a place – both a central place and a unified territorial reach.18
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL  841

However, does this apply to a state such as Colombia? As mentioned above, the Colombian
state’s territorial reach and control remains tenuous at best. As James Robinson argues, in
Colombia the state is characterised by a deep rift between the centre in the highland regions
and the periphery in the lowlands and the country’s Atlantic and Pacific seaboards.19 Applying
the mathematical concept of the fractal, Robinson shows that within the areas of the periph-
ery there are sub-centres and sub-peripheries – a situation in which the notions of ‘centralised
political authority’ and ‘defined territorial boundaries’ are rendered inoperative. Does this
then mean that there is no such thing as a Colombian state? It does not, of course. But is it
a ‘fragile state’, that is, a state with relatively significant authority, capacity and legitimacy
deficits? Is it a strong state in the centre and a fragile or absent one in the periphery? Is
Colombia a patchwork of areas of ‘limited [and less limited] statehood’, to use Thomas Risse’s
terminology? Or, following Fernán González, is the country rather characterised by a ‘differ-
entiated presence of the state’?
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To begin to address these questions, it is crucial to pay attention to some of the key ter-
ritorial characteristics of the Colombian state. By territory, Colombia is South America’s fourth
largest nation (after Brazil, Argentina and Peru) with an extension of more than one million
and one-hundred-thousand square kilometres. This roughly equals the combined landmass
of France, Germany and the United Kingdom. In the south-west, where the departments of
Nariño, Cauca and Huila meet, the High Andes Mountains separate out into three different
ranges, providing Colombia its unique geography among the nations of South America.
While the climate in the highlands is temperate, in the lowlands it is tropical and humid. The
country’s population, an estimated 48 million today, is concentrated in the inter-Andean
highland regions and the Atlantic-Caribbean seaboard. Huge swaths of territory in the east
and south-east, particularly the Orinoco and Amazon River basins, and the Pacific coast are
sparsely populated. A range of armed non-state groups, including criminal gangs, paramil-
itary outfits, drug-trafficking groups and left-wing insurgents, have a notorious record of
roaming large parts of rural Colombia and exercising relatively tight control over some local
populations.
There are marked differences between the regions with respect to their cultural, economic
and social identities. With the megacity of Bogotá as the undisputed seat of the national
government and central state, elites headquartered in Medellin, Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena
and Santa Marta, amongst other departmental capitals, retain significant influence over
regional affairs. The country is ethnically diverse and socially highly stratified. A relatively
small upper class of European descent holds the reins of political and economic power, the
mostly mestizo middle class is rapidly growing in number and a sizeable Afro-Colombian
population as well as dozens of indigenous peoples are to be found at the bottom of the
social ladder. According to the United Nations Development Programme, in 2013 Colombia
was one of the most unequal countries in Latin America and the world, with a Gini coefficient
of 55.9.20 Not surprisingly, Colombia is a country that is difficult to govern and integrate, as
British Colombia expert Malcolm Deas already pointed out almost fifty years ago.21
Yet, when compared to other Latin American countries, such as Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador,
Guatemala and Venezuela, Colombia’s recent political history has actually been marked by
a measure of stability in the midst of instability.22 One of the distinguishing features of the
Colombian body politic is its demonstrated propensity to seek reforms. In the past decades,
there have been considerable efforts to modernise the state, strengthen its relations with
citizens and local communities and extend its reach across the territory. Among the most
 842  M. SCHULTZE-KRAFT ET AL.

salient initiatives in this regard in the past 30 plus years have been fiscal, political and admin-
istrative decentralisation, which started in the early 1980s and subsequently became
enshrined in the 1991 constitution, and the strategy of ‘territorial security consolidation and
reconstruction’. The latter was rolled out during the two administrations of President Álvaro
Uribe (2002–2010) and carried over into the government of President Juan Manuel Santos
(2010–2018). In the following section we show that these two complex and ongoing pro-
cesses represent two sides of the same coin, despite the fact that they are rooted in very
different historic and political circumstances and to our knowledge were never explicitly
conceived as complementary policies.

Decentralisation and security consolidation: an overview

For 100 years, starting with the enactment of Colombia’s first ‘modern’ constitution in 1886,
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political power in the South American nation was highly centralised and concentrated in
the hands of the executive.23 In a unitary state with a presidentialist system of government,
the president was constitutionally mandated to appoint the authorities in Colombia’s depart-
ments.24 Throughout this period, presidents selected departmental governors at their dis-
cretion from either one of Colombia’s two traditional political parties, that is, the Conservatives
and Liberals. The appointed governors, in turn, were granted the power to hand-pick the
municipal mayors.25 In this arrangement, the electorate was entirely excluded from partic-
ipating through elections in the process of selecting local and departmental authorities.
Furthermore, it entrenched the practice of what has been labelled ‘old-style clientelism’ (viejo
clientelismo), in which the Conservative and Liberal parties assumed the role of brokers and
intermediaries between the interests of political elites in the centre and the regions.26
While for a long time relatively stable, this system exhibited shortcomings in terms of
political representation and government effectiveness, and it was not immune to violent
inter-party contestation. In effect, in the late 1940s Colombia witnessed an upsurge of par-
tisan violence between the Conservative and Liberal parties. In an attempt to end what came
to be known as La Violencia, a decade of bloodshed that cost the lives of an estimated 200,000
people (mostly in rural areas), in the late 1950s political leaders agreed on the establishment
of the National Front, a power-sharing arrangement between the Conservative and Liberal
elites. For 20 years (1958–1978), representatives of the two political parties alternated in
holding executive power and placed equal numbers of members of Congress and civil serv-
ants in government office.27
Yet, the National Front deepened tensions between central and regional political elites,
both Conservative and Liberal, by transforming electoral competition from one between
the two parties to one within each one of them. In consequence, the parties became more
vulnerable to internal fracturing and (to different degrees) their national party leaderships
lost influence vis-à-vis their regional counterparts and bases.28 Moreover, amidst renewed
outbreaks of violence in some rural areas, several social groups broke away from the two
traditional political parties. Hard-line members of the Colombian Workers’ Union (UTC), for
example, withdrew from the Liberal party, and groups of craftsmen and peasants began
organising their activities outside of the formal institutional framework (‘riot unionism’).29
Instead of ensuring social inclusion and peace, the elite power-sharing pact deepened social
divisions and promoted political violence, which by the 1980s was not contained anymore
to mostly rural regions but was spreading to Colombia’s large cities.30
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL  843

Violence, however, was not the only concern. The delivery of basic services and goods,
such as education and health as well as citizen security, was patchy and overall not effective.
In response, a multi-class civic movement mobilised, particularly in ‘midsized municipalities
(with 10–50 thousand people) in the country’s peripheral regions’, clamouring for better
social conditions.31 One of the most notable examples of a series of mobilisations, which
numbered more than 200 in the period 1971–1985,32 was the ‘civic strike’ (paro cívico) of
1977 in which trade unions, informal workers, students and peasants came together to
demand improvements in public services.33 Similarly, multilateral agencies such as the World
Bank suggested to the Colombian Government to prioritise the modernisation of the coun-
try’s social welfare system in order to narrow the gap between the state and large sectors
of society, and improve the effectiveness and reach of public policies.34
In sum, by the late 1970s a combination of limited political representation, the transfor-
mation of the traditional two party-dominated clientelist system, rekindled violence and
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widespread social discontent due to ineffective or absent public services all fed into a com-
plex political process that ultimately would lead to the adoption of a decentralised system
of government. While this article is not the place to analyse this process in any depth, in
what follows we highlight some of its key moments and features.35
The first significant reform came underway in the period 1983–1986, when during the
administration of Conservative President Belisario Betancur (1982–1986) the Colombian
congress passed a series of laws establishing elements of fiscal decentralisation and the
popular election of municipal mayors.36 Politically, this represented a watershed moment in
the country’s history for the drive for decentralisation sought to include citizens in deci-
sion-making processes in a way that had never existed before. The executive was no longer
empowered to select local authorities according to its own preferences, and democratic
elections provided the means to challenge the power wielded by local and regional elites
operating within an entrenched political party-dominated clientelistic system.
The second landmark regarding decentralisation was the constitution of 1991. Putting
regularly elected municipal mayors and departmental governors in charge of managing
resources and levying taxes according to their needs and functions, it formally established
political, administrative and fiscal decentralisation.37 Politically, it was crucial for strength-
ening democracy and the legitimisation of mayors and governors as local leaders.
Administratively, these authorities were empowered to manage resources and invest them
mainly in health and education services. Fiscally, the reform was supported by the taxes
autonomously levied and collected by the local and departmental authorities, as well as
large transfers from the central government.38 Here it is important to note, however, that
since the turn of the last century the expenses of municipalities and departments have
tended to exceed their local tax mobilisation capacity. Consequently, these administrative
units (except for the largest cities, such as Bogotá and Medellín) have continued to depend
on direct transfers from the central government, amounting on average to more than 50%
of their budgets.39
However, in a context marked by institutional weaknesses at the local and regional level
decentralisation also provided opportunities and incentives for the rise of a variety of new
(illegal) regional powers. Landlords, cattle ranchers, drug traffickers, paramilitary groups and
insurgent organisations banded together in different and dynamically evolving constella-
tions and grew richer by influencing the public offices’ performance and engaging in all
manner of illicit activities.40 In the past 15–20 years this situation has reached national-level
 844  M. SCHULTZE-KRAFT ET AL.

scenarios where ‘the capture and co-optation of the state’ by illegal actors of diverse prov-
enance has gained ever more importance.41 The case of Casanare department, an oil-bearing
region in the centre-east of Colombia, may serve as an example.42 In the period 1994–2005,
Casanare was the main recipient of oil royalties transferred from the centre, receiving 21.5%
of the total amount from the national account. This boom of natural resource income
prompted the rise and/or strengthening of paramilitary and insurgent groups in the depart-
ment, which were responsible for a significant increase in violence in the period 1998–2003
(with the highest rates in the history of Casanare), particularly in those municipalities that
recorded the highest income from oil royalties.
Decentralisation thus proved to be of significance for the modernisation and democra-
tisation of the Colombian state and political system. But in a context marked by a protracted
armed conflict and pervasive organised crime and corruption, as well as serious institutional
weaknesses at the local and regional but also at the central level of government, the process
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failed to develop its full potential. In numerous parts of the country the decentralised system
became hijacked by regional elites and interest groups working hand-in-glove with criminal
and paramilitary outfits – and at times even with insurgent organisations – and creating
what Francisco Gutiérrez calls structures of ‘extortive intermediation’. In this new type of
arrangement ‘highly criminalised regional coalitions … learned how to engage in national
politics’, progressively taking over the role of intermediary between the centre and the
regions that previously had been played by the Conservative and Liberal parties.43 The effects
have been nothing short of perverse. As Kent Eaton points out, ‘thanks to decentralization,
the state now funds its own destabilization because armed groups on the left and right have
been able to appropriate decentralized public revenues and to use these funds to further
reduce the state’s already limited monopoly over the use of force’.44
In effect, the Colombian state remained structurally handicapped to exercise its authority
and the legitimate use of force across large parts of the national territory. Greatly concerned
about fiscal imbalances and losing out in the armed struggle with the left-wing insurgents,
particularly FARC, in the 1990s there was a push towards recentralising some elements of
decision-making over fiscal affairs and, above all, gaining territorial control by means of
building up the security capability of the state. While decentralisation had included a kind
of ‘division of labour, in which the central state took care of organised crime and the insur-
gents, the municipalities focused their efforts on issues of “citizen security”’,45 in reality ‘formal
control over security policy and public order [was kept] heavily centralised’.46 Of great sig-
nificance in this regard was the launch, in 2000, of Plan Colombia, a multi-billion, multi-year
counter-drug and counter-insurgency programme drawn up by the administrations of
Presidents Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002) and Bill Clinton (1993–2001). This was followed by
the so-called ‘democratic security policy’ and the National Territorial Consolidation Policy
(PCNT, in Spanish), which were designed and implemented by the government of President
Álvaro Uribe (2002–2010) and carried over into the Santos administration.
The PCNT is a government programme geared at addressing one of the greatest problems
of the Colombian state: the continued existence of large areas of the country that remain
to be fully integrated into the constitutional regime and national economy. These regions
are heavily penetrated by interest groups that operate outside of the formal state structures
and are officially perceived as a threat to the development and stability of Colombia as a
whole. The PCNT is explicitly designed as a policy with a territorial focus and as such has
three key components:47
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL  845

(1) Counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN), a political-military strategy designed to confront

asymmetrical wars between the state (and the ‘colonial power’, during the cold war)
and an alternate power (insurgency/paramilitaries/organised crime groups) that
challenges the existing social structure and political order.
(2) Consolidation is targeted on regions with significant areas under illicit crop
cultivation.
(3) Social and regional development and its nexus with security.48

Territorial consolidation is designed as a cycle of three separate phases, each one of which
requires the authorities to undertake different types of efforts. The first phase focuses on
combating and disbanding illegal armed groups in the territories in which they operate and
maintain strongholds (control); the second phase is centred on maintaining stability in the
newly reclaimed areas and provide security and protection to the population (stabilisation);
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and the third phase consists of promoting the entry of state agencies other than the security
forces in the areas in order for them to develop their intended function (consolidation).49
The inclusion of Colombia’s armed forces in this broad process of institution and
state-building, with the overarching aim of guaranteeing the long-term sustainability of the
consolidation interventions in the focus areas, represents a positive break with previous
practice. In the past, the civilian Bogotá-based ministries, the judicial system and the internal
control agencies all sought to keep the military – and on some occasions even the national
police – at arm’s length. This generated a great deal of distrust and lack of coordination
between the security forces and the civilian government. Furthermore, locally focused pro-
grammes have also helped address some government agency limitations at the local and
regional level.50
This notwithstanding, several unforeseen problems have emerged as a result of the dis-
proportionate weight given to the security agencies in respect to territorial consolidation.
There has been an excess of activity by the armed forces in detriment to the greater respon-
sibility of non-military state agencies. Local government entities are side-lined and excluded
from participating in these processes as the military considers them incapable of deci-
sion-making and execution. For example, the pre-eminence of the marines in the consoli-
dation process underway in the Montes de María mountain range in the northern departments
of Bolívar and Sucre is such that there is an institutional anomaly.51 The role played by this
branch of the armed forces clearly exceeds its assigned mission, in detriment to the state’s
political and civil responsibilities. At the operational level, there is a loss of clarity about the
nature of the interventions, and the recovery of territory controlled by illegal armed groups
or exploited for the cultivation of illicit crops carries high human costs. This has generated
protests by peasants against illicit crop eradication policies, for instance, as well as displace-
ments of local populations as a result of armed conflict between the army and the insurgents
and human rights violations committed by the government forces.
Another flaw of the PCNT is that consolidation plans are geared toward areas in which
both the insurgency and illicit crops are present. This has opened the doors to simplistic
analysis and misguided practice based on the questionable assumption that the destruction
of coca crops is synonymous with attacking the insurgents’ finances and therefore will inev-
itably weaken their military capacity. In this regard, Vanda Felbab-Brown points out that
these two struggles may actually be mutually exclusive and contradictory.52 In illustration,
in the Lower Cauca region of Antioquia department the government promoted territorial
consolidation by subjecting illicit crop plantations to aerial spraying. As the planting and
 846  M. SCHULTZE-KRAFT ET AL.

nurturing of coca crops is the most labour intensive stage of narcotics production, forced
eradiation through aerial spraying resulted in the mass mobilisation of peasants.53 The pop-
ulation turned to the rebels who allow and even promote their economic subsistence on
the basis of coca crops.54 This reaction reflects the state’s dwindling political capital with a
corresponding increase for the insurgents.

Territorial peacebuilding: tenets, aims and challenges

On 24 August 2016, President Santos addressed the nation to break the news that a final
peace deal with FARC had been achieved. His announcement came almost exactly four years
after the government and the insurgents had released a framework accord that would serve
as the roadmap for negotiations to be launched in Oslo in the autumn of 2012 and henceforth
to be conducted in Havana, Cuba.55 As the talks progressed, the government and FARC
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released a string of joint communiqués and provisional accords on each of the items con-
tained in the framework agreement. Although on several occasions the flow of the negoti-
ations was interrupted for shorter periods of time, both sides stuck with remarkable
perseverance to the original six-point agenda: (1) integrated rural development; (2) political
participation; (3) ending the conflict; (4) resolving the problem of illicit drugs; (5) victims;
and (6) implementation of the final accord, verification and submission to popular approval.
The conclusion of the talks was promptly followed by the proclamation of a bilateral
ceasefire, which entered into effect at midnight on 29 August. Just under a month later, on
26 September, President Santos and FARC commander ‘Timochenko’ solemnly signed the
final peace agreement in the city of Cartagena in a ceremony attended by a number of
foreign dignitaries, including UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. As foreseen in the accord,
on 2 October the peace deal was subjected to a popular referendum or plebiscite,56 which,
however, resulted in it being narrowly voted down.57 Faced with a potential political disaster,
Santos invited the ‘no’ camp and its leader, former President Álvaro Uribe, to submit proposals
for amending the peace deal. During several rounds of frantic around-the-clock talks in
Havana, the government and rebel negotiators managed to accommodate a number of the
many demands made by the opposition.58
On 24 November, the two parties signed a new version of the final accord, this time in
Bogotá, taking good care that it would not have to be ratified again by popular vote but would
instead be approved by Congress or other mechanisms vetted by the Constitutional Court.
Other changes of substance include the accord’s constitutional status and provisions on tran-
sitional justice, FARC’s political participation, the obligation of the rebels to disclose all income
and assets, and victim reparation, as well as some issues related to illicit crop substitution and
drug trafficking. However, overall the negotiators maintained the spirit and most of the letter
of the original agreement, particularly with regards to the centrality of the territorial approach
to building peace. Following the landslide ratification of the amended accord by Congress in
early December, Colombia moved into the third and last stage of the peace process.
In the words of Sergio Jaramillo, President Santos’ High Counsellor for Peace,59 this phase
is broadly conceived in the following terms:
The war ends and peacebuilding starts. Peace is built among all Colombians after the signature
of a final agreement. Peace in Colombia will be a territorial peace where all citizens and com-
munities will participate in building it; it will have a positive effect on the satisfaction of victims’
rights; and it will have to ensure guarantees for everyone.60
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL  847

The notion of ‘territorial peace’ is central to the agreement.61 Throughout the document, the
parties to the accord make reference to a territorially based approach to building peace. Yet
territorial peace is not an established term in the peacebuilding lexicon and therefore needs
explanation. What is it the parties have in mind when they speak of ‘territorial peace’ and
why do they assign it such importance? Furthermore, is territorial peacebuilding different
from conventional as well as critical peacebuilding approaches? What would be the
difference?
To begin with, the accord is based on the premise that the primary cause of the armed
conflict is the historical absence and/or weakness of the state in large parts of Colombia’s
national territory, particularly in rural areas. All through the agreement runs the recognition
– sometimes more implicit than explicit – that the central state and government have his-
torically not exercised lawful political authority across the country’s highly diverse regions,
leaving vast swaths of the territory to its own devices and/or at the mercy of the powers that
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be. In this respect, organised crime and criminal-political networks operating in Colombia’s
regions are identified as especially serious threats to peacebuilding.62 Judging by the letter
of the accord, the two parties are agreed that it is this situation which in the past half-century
has promoted deep structural inequalities and has given rise to many grievances among
significant parts of the population.63 Pursuant to this conception of the conflict and its causes,
the task of building peace is defined as
promoting the presence and effective operation of the state across the whole national terri-
tory, especially in those regions that are affected by abandonment, a lack of effective public
intervention, and by the effects of the internal armed conflict; it is a principal goal of national
reconciliation to build a new paradigm for territorial development and wellbeing that includes
large sectors of the population that hitherto have been the victims of exclusion and despair.64
To achieve this fundamental goal – which at heart is developmental, not radical – the accord
details a series of reforms with respect to rural development, including illicit crop substitution
and alternative development; the political participation of groups hitherto not (sufficiently)
represented in the country’s political institutions, including FARC’s future political party or
movement; and the protection of the victims of the conflict and of their fundamental rights
to truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition. In all these key peacebuilding areas, there
is a focus on ‘territoriality’.
In our interpretation, the parties resolved to frame peacebuilding in Colombia as ‘terri-
torial’ because both believe that the country’s armed conflict has been intimately related to
a disconnect and/or an extractive and unequal relationship between the centre and the
periphery, between rural and urban Colombia, between the elites and the common people,
including the country’s indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian communities. In essence,
the peace agreement aims to address this disconnect by strengthening and ‘bringing in’ the
periphery. It is not a roadmap for changing Colombia’s liberal-democratic political system
and free market economy.
In the final analysis this means that the Santos administration accepted that peace with
FARC comes at the price of fomenting more inclusive and equitable development and the
insurgents accepted that they will desist from challenging Colombia’s political and economic
system by force of arms and from outside of the established institutions and law. Embedded
in the notion of territorial peace is the recognition that there is not one-size-fits-all peace-
building intervention. Rather the parties to the agreement highlight that it is crucial to
 848  M. SCHULTZE-KRAFT ET AL.

respond in differentiated ways to the challenges faced by the different regions and their
populations, including in coca growing regions.
Arguably, this is the basic political understanding that underpins the peace accord
between the Santos administration and FARC. However, we posit that the key issue the
parties to the talks did not resolve convincingly in the accord is how to move forward with
territorial peacebuilding in institutional and governance terms. There is a tension in the
document between a top-down, central government-led approach to peacebuilding and
the explicit proposition that the process needs to be supported and sustained by broad
citizen participation. Putting the onus on the leadership – and financial muscle – of the
central government, the agreement fails to integrate the proposed peacebuilding interven-
tions with Colombia’s existing decentralised system, which does not receive nearly as much
attention as it should. While there is some token recognition in the accord that subnational
administrative-political entities, particularly local and community councils and municipal
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and departmental governments, ought to play a role in building peace, in fact the agreement
provides for the creation of a parallel set of organisations charged with executing most of
the stipulated peacebuilding tasks. It is therefore not clear how citizen participation in peace-
building is meant to materialise in practice.
In our view, this constitutes a serious problem because the concept of territorial peace-
building rests on the pillar of active citizen participation in Colombia’s regions, especially in
those that in the past suffered the brunt of the armed conflict and are in dire need of social,
economic and political reconstruction. Yet, social, civic and grassroots organisations, includ-
ing those representing the interests of (landless) peasants, Afro-Colombians, indigenous
peoples, women and victims of the armed conflict, were not granted any formal role in peace
talks in Havana. While the government and FARC invited delegations of their leaders to state
their cases and voice their concerns during the negotiations, the reality is that the peace
accord is essentially the outcome of a ‘closed-door’ bargain between the Santos administra-
tion and the insurgent high command.
Consequently, it must not come as a surprise that many social leaders and activists from
across Colombia’s vast periphery are critical of the peace process and doubtful about the
chances of a successful implementation of the agreements.65 Furthermore, the role foreseen
for FARC in peacebuilding is ambiguous. The agreement can be read as indicating that the
(demobilised and reintegrated) insurgents are meant to play an active role as stakeholders
in the peacebuilding phase, next to the government; or that it is their removal as an illegal
violent actor which contributes to creating the necessary conditions for peaceful and inclu-
sive development across Colombia’s regions.
There are indications that the parties to the agreement – particularly the government –
are aware of some of these problems. This would explain why steps were taken to prepare
the ground for territorial peacebuilding while the talks in Havana were still underway.
Supported by the government and the security forces, in the first months of 2016 FARC sent
delegations to several regions of Colombia to engage local communities in ‘peace education.’
The office of the High Counsellor for Peace, in turn, established alliances with a range of
social, civic and business organisations, organising workshops across the country to discuss
the challenges of territorial peace in dialogue with communities. In one such encounter, in
April 2016, in a rural municipality in the southern department of Caquetá, Diego Maldonado,
an advisor to Jaramillo’s office, explained that
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL  849

it is fundamental that citizens are very clear about what has been agreed in Havana and that
we are well prepared to answer questions and clarify some of the myths that have been cre-
ated about the peace process. […] The concept of territorial peace is centred on the effective
protection of the rights of all citizens, prioritising the rights of the victims of the armed conflict;
on recognising the capacities and features of the different territories, which means that the
implementation of the agreements will have to be adjusted to the extant territorial capacities
and citizens will have to be included in the design, execution and monitoring and control of
the different aspects of implementation.66
Furthermore, the Colombian state has begun to incorporate the central premises and key
provisions of the agreement into the planning for peacebuilding and post-conflict recon-
struction. This is reflected in the establishment, in September 2014, of the Office of the High
Councilor for the Post-Conflict, Human Rights and Security, presently headed by Rafael Pardo,
which has been seeking to bring sub-national administrations on board. These efforts have
fed into the elaboration of a strategy paper on the ‘institutional preparation for peace and
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the post-conflict,’ which was released by the National Planning Department (DNP, in Spanish)
in September 2016.67 Dovetailing with the respective provisions in the peace agreement, it
outlines the main features of the interventions geared at building peace in a differentiated
way from, with and in the regions that in the past were most hit by the armed conflict. Both
in letter and spirit the accord is also congruent with the National Development Plan of the
second Santos administration (2014–2018).
These efforts notwithstanding, it is quite obvious that territorial peacebuilding is bound
to face significant challenges. To address them, it is crucial to draw lessons from the
above-presented analysis of decentralisation and security consolidation. We posit that gov-
ernance is at the heart of meeting the challenge of territorial peacebuilding in Colombia.
Cognizant that this is an area that requires a larger research effort, the aim of the conclusion
is limited to providing a succinct outlook on what we believe are some of the crucial issues
that need to be addressed.

Conclusion
In our analysis, ‘territorial peacebuilding’ is yet another manifestation of the Colombian state’s
historic quest to integrate the country and establish the conditions for stability and devel-
opment across the national territory. While decentralisation has aimed at overcoming struc-
tural political and social deficits by deepening democracy and enhancing citizen participation
in Colombia’s regions, security consolidation has sought to erect the central state as the sole
provider of security across the country’s territories. Both decentralisation and security con-
solidation have produced some achievements, but both processes have also been hampered
by significant shortfalls.
Decentralisation has been partly undermined by the capture of local and regional political
institutions, income and rents by strongmen and elites – including insurgent, paramilitary
and criminal organisations – which the centre proved unable and/or unwilling to control
and hold to account. Security consolidation, in turn, revealed institutional disconnects and
tensions between the central state’s civilian and military branches. Under the prevailing
conditions of armed conflict and large-scale organised criminal activities, it would have been
impossible to achieve security gains without the prominent participation of the Colombian
military and police. Yet assigning them a lead role in security consolidation without paying
sufficient attention to how the security effort would be complemented and, ultimately,
 850  M. SCHULTZE-KRAFT ET AL.

directed by the civilian state apparatus and supported by local communities resulted in
undercutting the effectiveness and legitimacy of the PNCT.
The peace process between the Santos administration and FARC, which has now moved
into the third and last stage of building ‘territorial peace’ over a period of up to 20 years,
combines certain elements of both decentralisation and security consolidation but comple-
ments them with a new strategic focus on integrated rural development. The importance
that the peace agreement assigns to broad citizen participation and political representation
echoes some of the fundamental tenets of the decentralisation process. Disarming, demo-
bilising and reintegrating FARC, substituting illicit crops and curbing drug-trafficking and
other criminal activities is clearly in alignment with security consolidation – with the signif-
icant difference, however, that this time the role of the security forces is clearly circumscribed
and does not conflict with civilian mandates and priorities. Integrated rural development,
which is at the heart of the territorial peacebuilding agenda, constitutes the third element
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of this complex, long-term strategy to achieve peaceful and more inclusive development in
Colombia that was negotiated and agreed upon between the government of President
Santos and the insurgents.
The fundamental problem, as we see it, is that this peacebuilding strategy neither takes
into account sufficiently the extant decentralised system of government nor does it include
in any real and appropriate fashion the variegated concerns and interests of the many social
and grassroots organisations, particularly in the territories most affected by the conflict and
state abandonment. While the peace agreement highlights the importance of citizen par-
ticipation in peacebuilding and the constitutional obligation of the state to guarantee the
fundamental rights and liberties of all citizens, it fails to stipulate with any detail what role
municipal mayors, departmental governors and other local and regional entities, as well as
social and civic organisations are meant to play in this process. Instead the parties to the
agreement resolved to establish a number of new, constitutionally not sanctioned forums
and organisations charged with promoting citizen-led implementation of the peace accords.
If this issue is not addressed with urgency early on in the peacebuilding phase, it is likely
that the process stands to face serious obstacles for it will not be supported by the existing
institutional and social infrastructure.
Pending future in-depth research on the negotiations in Havana, at this point we can only
speculate that the government and the insurgents decided not to establish a clear link
between peacebuilding and Colombia’s decentralised system of government because of a
shared wariness about the shortcomings and problems of just that system. However, we
believe that at some point during the implementation phase, rather earlier than later, the
local and departmental governments ought to be linked explicitly and by law to the peace-
building endeavour in order to enhance the chances for significant and sustained citizen
participation. This would require tackling head-on the above-mentioned problems of the
infiltration and capture of local and regional governments, revenues and rents by all manner
of illicit and criminal interests. And it would require including communities in the territories
in what would have to amount to a new comprehensive governance strategy for peace-
building. If territorial peacebuilding should turn out to be the key to strengthening the hand
of the central state as well as empowering the (rural) regions, municipalities and populations
to do their part effectively and legitimately in what would be a truly national effort to achieve
inclusive and peaceful development, Colombia would, at long last, be on her way to closing
the loop.
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL  851

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank three anonymous reviewers and the following colleagues at Universidad Icesi
for their useful comments on previous versions of this article: Luis Fernando Barón, Juan José Fernández,
Juan Pablo Milanese, Carlos Moreno and Vladimir Rouvinski. As always, we are solely responsible for
any faults in interpretation and errors of fact the reader might encounter.

Notes on contributors
Dr Markus Schultze-Kraft is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies at
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Universidad Icesi in Cali (Colombia). He holds an M.A. in political science from the Free University
Berlin and an M.Phil. in Latin American Studies and D.Phil. in Politics from the University of Oxford
(St Antony’s College). For more than twenty years, Dr Schultze-Kraft has been conducting research
in the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa and the Western Balkans, focusing on violent conflict prevention
and resolution, peacebuilding, security system reform, organised crime, and a range of complex
governance issues. Prior to joining Icesi, Dr Schultze-Kraft headed the Governance Research Team at
the Institute of Development Studies (IDS, University of Sussex) and the International Crisis Group’s
(ICG) Latin America and Caribbean programme. His published work includes numerous scholarly
articles (e.g. in the Journal of International Development; IDS Bulletin; International Journal of Drug
Policy; Hague Journal on the Rule of Law) and book chapters, a book on comparative conflict resolu-
tion and the restructuring of civil-military relations in Central America (Editorial Norma, 2005), and
three dozen ICG and IDS policy and evidence reports. His new book Crimilegal Orders, Governance
and Armed Conflict is scheduled to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. Dr Schultze-Kraft has
furthermore engaged in numerous programme evaluations and consultancy assignments with the
World Bank, the European Commission, Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, the German
Civilian Peace Service, the UK’s Department for International Development, the Swiss Development
Cooperation and the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction, among others.
Oscar Valencia is a full-time professor at Fundación Universitaria de Popayán (FUP) in Popayán -
Colombia, where he teaches political science and coordinates the research programme of the law
school and the research group on armed conflict and peacebuilding in Colombia. Mr Valencia also
serves as a professor of Colombian foreign policy at Pontifícia Universidad Javeriana, Cali - Colombia.
He holds a degree in political science from Universidad del Cauca in Colombia and an MA in Political
Science from Montreal University, Canada. His current research focuses on local peacebuilding in the
municipality of Argelia, Cauca, and the internationalisation of the Colombian armed conflict.
David Alzate holds two bachelor degrees, a BA in Political Science (cum laude) and a BA in Sociology
(cum laude) from Universidad Icesi (2017), Cali - Colombia. He works on peacebuilding, drugs policies
and rural development. In the context of a project on peacebuilding and crimilegal orders (2015) he
assisted Dr Markus Schultze-Kraft with providing research on the cases of Sierra Leone, Kosovo and
Bosnia & Herzegovina. David has extensive experience in conducting fieldwork in rural districts in Cauca
department (Colombia), analysing (i) the relationships between local peacebuilding and international
interventions and (ii) the implementation of drugs policies and alternative development programmes
as well as community-led productive projects in the coca economy.

Notes
1. 
Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn,” 763–83.
2. 
Jackson, “Local Government and Decentralization.”
 852  M. SCHULTZE-KRAFT ET AL.

3.  See, for instance, Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn.”
4.  Schultze-Kraft and Morina, “Decentralization and Accountability in War-to-Peace Transitions,”
92–104.
5.  Jackson, “Local Government and Decentralization”; Eaton, “The Downside of Decentralization.”
533–62. Kent Eaton too has warned about the fallacy of adopting decentralisation as a
peacebuilding tool without paying sufficient attention to the historic, political and security
context of the country transitioning away from armed conflict.
6.  Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio,” 11–54.
7.  On Colombia see, for instance, García et al., “Introducción,” 13–18.
8.  Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State.”
9.  Centeno, Sangre y deuda.
10. See, for instance, Centeno, Sangre y deuda; González, Poder y violencia en Colombia; and
Robinson, “La miseria en Colombia,” 9–90.
11. These problems are particularly evident in relation to the state monopoly on the use of violence
and the administrative effectiveness of the state. A third key attribute of stateness, as the term
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is defined by Andersen et al. (2014, 1204), ‘agreement of who are the citizens of the state’, is of
less relevance in the case of Colombia.
12. The 1991 constitution replaced the one of 1886.
13. Pécaut, “Hacia la desterritorialización de la guerra,” 25. Translation from the Spanish by the
authors.
14. Tilly, The Formation of National States, 42.
15. Centeno, Sangre y deuda.
16. González, Poder y violencia en Colombia.
17. Risse, Governance Without a State?
18. Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State,” 123.
19. Robinson, “La miseria en Colombia.”
20. World Development Indicators 2013, http://data.worldbank.org.
21. Deas, “Colombian Prospects.”
22. Rodríguez, “Ideas para construir la paz,” 10. Needless to say, this ‘stability’, which is sometimes
referred to as the ‘Colombian paradox’, has come at a high cost for many sectors, particularly
the most vulnerable groups of society.
23. Aguilera, “División político administrativa de Colombia.”
24. This political constitution created 34 departments, but reforms in the period 1944–1981
reduced their number to 23. The constitution of 1991 created nine additional departments.
Today Colombia has 32 departments.
25. Departments were divided into two ‘intendencias’ and seven ‘comisarías’, two territorial
subdivisions (national territories) dependent on the executive. Upon the enactment of the
constitution of 1991, these units were changed to departments and 1059 municipalities were
created as new subdivisions of the departments.
26. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio,” 19. While the centre held the ‘winning ace of having the
capacity to designate’ the departmental governors and through them the municipal mayors, the
subnational authorities were not entirely powerless. For instance, the departmental assemblies
and municipal councils were mandated to set the salaries of governors and mayors, not
infrequently making use of this power and leaving them with nothing but a symbolic amount
of pay. More importantly, regional politicians actively participated in factional infighting within
their parties, making it clear to their counterparts at the national level that regional support
for them could be withdrawn at any moment.
27. Hartlyn, La politica del regimen de coalicion.
28. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio.”
29. Múnera, Rupturas y continuidades.
30. Franco et al., “Mortalidad por homicidio en Medellín,” 3211–2.
31. Faletti, “A Sequential Theory of Decentralisation: Latin American Cases in Comparative
Perspective.”
32. Ibid., 338.
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL  853

33. Molano, “El Paro Cívico Nacional,” 115–7.

34. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio.”
35. For detailed treatments of Colombia’s decentralisation and its causes and consequences see, for
instance, Castro, “¿Cómo salvar la descentralización?”; Eaton, “Downside of Decentralization”;
Faletti, “Sequential Theory of Decentralisation”; Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio”; Garay
and Salcedo-Albarán, “Crimen, captura y reconfiguración cooptada”; García et al., Los estados
del país. Instituciones municipales y realidades locales; and Serpa, “Balance y retos del proceso
descentralizador.”
36. Castro, “¿Cómo salvar la descentralización?”
37. Constitución Política de la República de Colombia de 1991.
38. As Tulia Faletti writes, ‘Article 357 [of the 1991 constitution] established that the transfers to
municipalities would increase form a level of 14% of the current national income in 1993 to 22%
in 2002. This reform expanded not only the rate but also the base of the automatic transfers,
which included thereafter both tax and non-tax revenues. As a consequence, the total transfers
to subnational governments (both departments and municipalities) passed from 38–52% of
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the current national income between 1991 and 1997,’ 340.

39. Bird, “Fiscal Decentralization in Colombia.”
40. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio.”
41. Garay and Salcedo-Albarán, “Crimen, captura y reconfiguración cooptada.”
42. Ibid.
43. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio,” 31. Translation from the Spanish by the authors.
44. Eaton, “Downside of Decentralization,” 537. Here it is worthy to note, however, that Eaton
overestimates the point that it was the ‘worsening security situation [that] best explains why
decentralization proposals were adopted under Betancur’. The mix of reasons was broader, as
we show above. Ibid, 542.
45. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio,” 16. Translation from the Spanish by the authors.
46. Eaton, “Downside of Decentralization,” 546.
47. Unidad Administrativa para la Consolidación Territorial, “Lineamientos de la Política Nacional.”
48. Palou and Arias, Balance de la Política Nacional, 16–19.This link works in two stages. The first
phase re-establishment of government control in the territory, proposes an intensive military
deployment in order to expel armed groups and eradicate illicit crops, as well as dismantling
the drug-trafficking structures. Only after these objectives have been achieved can the second
stage of transition and construction be contemplated in which the rights of citizens are re-
established along with the proper operation of government institutions and conditions for
regional, social and human development are created.
49. Isacson, “Consolidating ‘Consolidation’,” 5.
50. Palou and Arias, Balance de la Política Nacional, 20–1.
51. Ibid.
52. Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up, 83–5.
53. Palou and Arias, Balance de la Política Nacional.
54. Ramírez, Entre el Estado y la guerrilla; and Ferro, “Las FARC y su relación con la economía de la
coca.”
55. To the Colombian and international publics this framework accord came as a surprise for it had
been hammered out during several months of clandestine talks that took place in undisclosed
locations outside of Colombia.
56. The question that Colombians were asked was: ‘Do you support the final accord on the
termination of the conflict and the building of a stable and lasting peace’ (¿Apoya el acuerdo
final para la terminación del conflicto y construcción de una paz estable y duradera?).
57. Schultze-Kraft, “Peace in Colombia.”
58. In total, the ‘no’ camp submitted more than 500 proposals for changing the accord to the
government.
59. In the past 15 years, Sergio Jaramillo has built a distinguished career in Colombian Government.
In the periods 2002–2004 and 2006–2009, respectively, he held the posts of advisor on political
and strategic affairs and vice minister for human rights and international affairs in the ministry
 854  M. SCHULTZE-KRAFT ET AL.

of defense. From 2010 until 2012 he served as President Santos’ High Counsellor for National
Security and in 2012 he was appointed High Counsellor for Peace. Jaramillo has played key
roles in both the conception and design of Colombia’s security consolidation strategy and the
peace process with FARC.
60. Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, Learn about the peace process, 4. Translation from
the Spanish by the authors.
61. See, for instance, Jaramillo, La paz territorial; Jaramillo, ¿Cómo construir la paz en los territorios?;
Jaramillo, Intervención; Jaramillo, Hacia el posconflicto.
62. In effect, there is likely not another peace accord in the world that would be as painstakingly
detailed in its treatment of the threat of organised crime and criminal-political networks and
on how that threat should be mitigated.
63. Acuerdo de paz, 3. The accord reveals a subtle yet significant difference in the stance of the two
parties regarding the causes and drivers of the conflict. The government puts the emphasis on
the armed conflict, sustaining that it is the conflict itself that is responsible for exacerbating the
structural problems that affect many of Colombia’s regions and that it is therefore necessary to
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transform the prevailing conditions that ‘facilitate the persistence of violence in the territories’.
FARC, in turn, focuses on the ‘historical causes of the conflict, such as the unresolved issue of
land ownership and concentration, the exclusion of the peasantry and the backwardness of
the rural communities’, thereby implicitly justifying the armed struggle as a means to overcome
just those structural problems. Translation from the Spanish by the authors.
64. Acuerdo de paz, 3. Translation from the Spanish by the authors.
65. Among other instances this is evidenced, for example, in the work that one of the authors of
this article (Markus Schultze-Kraft) is as of this writing conducting in the context of the Master
in Government programme at Universidad Icesi in Cali with a group of 36 social and civic
leaders, many of them of Afro-Colombian heritage, from the Pacific seaboard departments of
Valle del Cauca, Cauca and Nariño.
66. Oficina del Alto Comisionado para la Paz, “Occidente del Caquetá dialogó sobre paz territorial,”
17 April 2016. Translation from Spanish by the authors.
67. Departamento Nacional de Planeación, Estrategia de preparación institucional.

ORCID
Markus Schultze-Kraft http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3484-0513

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