Lex Pacificatoria Colombiana: Colombia’s Peace Accord in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

In this short piece, I open a conversation over how the Colombian Final Peace Accord provides evidence of, and a contribution to, a more general lex pacificatoria or "law of the peacemakers" (lex pax for short). 1 In light of the Accord's recent ballot defeat, I integrate into this assessment the merits of using a referendum to approve (in Colombia's case "affirm or deny") the Agreement as a whole. Throughout, I draw on a peace agreement database which has coded over one thousand four hundred peace agreements since 1990 for comparative insight. 2 Lex Pacificatoria: A New Law of the PeacemakersThe practice of negotiating ends to conflict within states can be understood as producing a lex pacificatoria or "law of the peacemakers." 3 This lex pax arises from the attempt to fit the existing laws of war or of peace to the distinctive dilemmas that arise in transitions from conflict. These legal innovations clarify and extend existing international law as it applies to transitions. The lex pax is created by the interaction of both state and nonstate actors involved in the transition process, who respond to legal norms and try to craft solutions that comply with them in creative ways so as to respond to the distinctive dilemmas of peace-making. Other similar attempts to characterize the distinctive application of law in times of transition have argued that a new regime in the form of a ius post bellum or "law of the postconflict period," is at play. 4 In contrast, I have used the term lex pacificatoria that, like the concept of lex mercatoria (law of the merchants), suggests legal developments that have a more "intimated" existence rooted in a legalization of practice rather than a coherent and distinctive new legal regime. 5 The lex pax is not a new coherent distinctive legal regime, because that project is

Jus Post Bellum

“…In her words, lex pacificatoria is the outcome of the "interaction of both state and nonstate actors involved in the transition process, who respond to legal norms and try to craft solutions that comply with them in creative ways so as to respond to the distinctive dilemmas of peace-making." 138 Contrasting lex pacificatoria to jus post bellum, Bell sustains that currently this lex is a matter of lege ferenda, "whose natural trajectory would seem to be toward a more established lex lata in the form of a fully worked out body of law capable of regulating transitions from conflict." In that sense, she suggests that "we might, from this perspective, view the lex pacificatoria as lex ferenda and jus post bellum as its possible future as imagined new lex lata.…”

PaxVis

“…The Peace Agreement Database (PA-X) is a publicly-available, searchable repository of peace agreements from around the world, written from 1990 through 2015. 3 According to Bell and Badanjak [4], a gender) and have numerical values that indicate the amount of detail with which PAs address the topics. The PAs and their codes create over 30,000 data points for analysis [4].…”

“…Their analysis involves open-ended questions characteristic of exploratory search [15]: the sequence of events in a peace process [5], legal implications of PAs [6], and trends in PAs [3] and peace processes [1]. PAs' hybrid nature complicates the analysis: PAs address both national and international law, serve as both treaties and constitutions, and both facilitate change and establish a new state [2].…”

Estatus jurídico internacional del acuerdo de paz colombiano

“…Si bien los mismos están orientados a resolver una situación doméstica, la internacionalización derivada de la referencia a normas de derecho internacional y la participación de actores internacionales en la negociación e implementación ha hecho que estos acuerdos escapen del puro contexto interno y entren a la esfera legal internacional. En esta misma línea, Bell (2016) identifica en el caso colombiano una formulación híbrida entre el derecho internacional y el derecho constitucional.…”