Local Order in Conflict: The impact of armed group and state interactions during infrastructure implementation in Colombia

Studies of post-conflict security, criminology, or critical post-conflict peacebuilding have often approached the role of criminal, conflict, and development actors in radically different ways. By examining the systems and actors involved in marginalized regions in Colombia and the relationship between global development-as-peacebuilding efforts and criminal activities and groups, this proposal offers a critical perspective on the influence of the global on how criminal and non-state actors negotiate post-conflict spaces.
Research Aims
The entanglement of conflict actors, criminal networks, and peacebuilding development has been
a subject of interest for the academic world for some time now. However, while there have been
numerous studies on how conflict actors or crime have negative ramifications on security and
long-term peacebuilding efforts, few studies have attempted to understand how these actors and
networks may be in turn shaped by the national and global forces of post-conflict development.
This proposal aims for a multidisciplinary approach that draws from security studies, criminology
and critical peacebuilding theories to consider how the multiple processes involved in shaping
post-conflict spaces have a unique and interconnected effect on the possibility of long-term peace.
In particular, it does so by studying the multiple overlapping spaces of the post-conflict
environment in Colombia, considering how the various non-state violent actors, state-actors, civil
society, and global actors all interplay and affect the development of peacebuilding.
In order to expand state presence in previously marginalized areas, Colombia's President Santos
has introduced the ZIDRES law aimed at making areas with little development, infrastructure, or
state presence more tempting for international and large scale agro-industrial land development.
This reform and the introduction of these new actors and developments could have significant
repercussions in the power dynamics of non-state violent actors, including demobilized FARC
(Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) guerrillas, the continued presence of ELN (National
Liberation Army) guerrilla combatants, and the various criminal bands (Bacrim) and paramilitary
groups still operating in these marginalized areas. This proposal therefore offers three research
questions:
1. How are security dynamics negotiated in post-conflict marginal spaces in Colombia that
are targeted for development?
2. What is the impact of how non-state violent actors understand and occupy marginal
spaces on the possibility of development? How is this development linked to
peacebuilding?
3. What is the impact of global development actors in post-conflict areas still dominated by
non-state violent actors and criminal networks and how do they affect prospects for longterm
peace?
Study design/Theoretical orientation
In order to address this theoretical gap, this proposal argues that the question of how criminal and
violent non-state actors in the post-conflict environment can impact security and peacebuilding
should be balanced with the question of how do the various processes of transitioning from
conflict, including development, influence the emergence of criminal activity. The post-conflict
environment is not simply a direct continuation of conflict, but rather pulls in new actors, and
introduces new systems or processes that might strengthen existing actors. Increasingly, the
aftermath of conflict is carefully observed and intervened in by international communities and
actors, whose roadmaps for peace come pre-packaged with specific approaches to government
and economic development (Richmond and MacGinty 2007).