Introduction: Land rights, restitution, politics, and war in Colombia

Abstract

This paper introduces contributions to a symposium that report some of the findings and arguments to emerge from a collaborative research project involving five Colombian universities forming the Observatorio de Restitución y Regulación de Derechos de Propiedad Agraria (Observatory of Restitution and Regulation of Agrarian Property Rights). In a number of ways, the research presented in the symposium advances understanding of the political economy of rural Colombia, and of war in Colombia, and the papers, drawing on the original evidence collected by Observatorio researchers, develop arguments that have a wider relevance too for agrarian political economy and the understanding of violent conflict. In particular, the papers highlight the direct participation of elites in violent conflict; the varieties and nuances of wartime primitive accumulation; the complexities of the state's role in wartime agrarian political economy; the gender dimensions of agrarian conflict; the interaction of war and law; and the significance for service provision of farm size. As Colombia—hopefully—passes from long war to peace, these arguments and this evidence may be valuable in debates about what kind of peace can develop.

Narco‐frontiers: A spatial framework for drug‐fuelled accumulation

“…The commanders of these counterinsurgent militias genuinely saw themselves as the forces of order in places where the state's institutional presence and authority had supposedly lapsed or never existed. The jailed leader of Urabá's largest paramilitary faction, a charismatic former beer truck driver known as "El Alemán" (The German), put it plainly at the start of his trial: "Our interest as a politico-military organization in arms was not only to win the war against Colombian 17 Peluso and Lund (2011) make this point and a recent special issue on Colombia published by this journal reached much the same conclusion (Cramer & Wood, 2017). 18 Footnote 3 is a sample list of case studies from these countries.…”

Largely on their own: Dealing with the rural legacies of conflict through local participatory peacebuilding

“…A large body of literature on the agrarian roots of civil conflict shows findings on how some recent and ongoing violent conflicts have roots in, and are shaped by, agrarian structures and the struggles to change them. The mechanisms covered have deep repercussions in the origin, trajectory and persistence of war (Cramer & Richards, 2011; Cramer & Wood, 2017; Grajales, 2011; Gutiérrez, 2019; Thomson, 2011; Wood, 2003).…”

“…The consequences of Colombia's complex civil war—the longest ongoing internal conflict in the Western Hemisphere—have fallen heavily on peasant communities in Colombia's rural zones (Courtheyn, 2018; Cramer & Wood, 2017). Fifty years of conflict have seen hundreds of thousands of lives lost, millions displaced and widespread violations of human rights.…”

Acaparamiento de tierras y acumulación por desposesión en Colombia. El caso de las Zonas de Desarrollo Rural, Económico y Social (ZIDRES)

“…El despojo forzado de tierras ha transformado extensos lugares dominados por la agricultura a pequeña escala, creando un espacio propicio para llevar a cabo proyectos agroindustriales. Así sucedió por ejemplo en el Bajo Atrato, donde la violencia y expulsión de poblaciones ancestrales dio paso a cultivos de palma aceitera (Cramer & Wood, 2017).…”