State, war, and land dispossession: The multiple paths to land concentration

Abstract

We focus on the role of the state in land dispossession during war. State agencies promote land accumulation not only through coercive paths, but also by combining political and market mechanisms. Each mechanism may link the state with different actors and coalitions. We illustrate how this worked in Tibú, a Colombian municipality in which violence against civilians and land accumulation took place in more or less distinct phases. The case highlights the fact that land accumulation during war is not only achieved through coercion. At the same time, it shows the importance of identifying the specific coalitions through which states establish their presence in contested territories during war. We explain such variation as resulting from the types of alliances and coalitions that the state establishes with different sets of stakeholders, and the aims pursued by coalition actors.

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

“…The evidence from Colombia presented here (see Peña, Álvarez, Ruiz, Parada, & Zuleta, ; also Vargas & Uribe, ) helps to refine the recently revived idea of primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation and “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, ), have been used by a number of political economists and in a variety of ways: to cover the wide wingspan of the advancing commercialization of social life (Harvey, ); to suggest a feature common to developing economies but with echoes of the early foundations of capitalism (Khan, ); and to highlight a common feature of modern war economies (Cramer, ; Cramer & Richards, ), partly to suggest that these wars may have dynamics that in time may be more complex than the simplistic World Bank () notion of war as “development in reverse”.…”

“…Where the beneficiaries of dispossession were not participants in the violence—for example, in North Santander where, after demobilization of paramilitary groups, large palm oil producers acquired lands that had earlier been drained by the paramilitaries—the development policies of the Colombian state drove the dynamic of capitalist expansion built on extra‐economic compulsion. But, as Vargas and Uribe () show, the state has not acted as a unitary organization, exclusively serving one set of interests.…”

Agrarian elite participation in Colombia's civil war

“…A substantial part of land dispossession also passes the test. Indeed, cattle ranchers and other rural elites could simply be opportunistic beneficiaries of the paramilitary activity, or act as brokers between the paramilitaries and state decision‐makers (Peña, Alvarez, Ruíz, Parada, & Zuleta, ; Vargas & Uribe, ). But a substantial part of this activity was triggered in the context of war, caused direct damage to guerrillas and their (alleged) social base, and supported one party against another.…”

Food Security, trade specialization, and violence in Colombia (1916-2016)

“…Competition over land and territorial control to maintain cattle-ranching and the illegal economy (Richani, 2002) are closely related to the agrarian elites' direct participation in conflict (Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017) by legal (Peña-Huertas et al, 2017) and illegal means, and together with the active role of the state (Ballvé, 2012;Grajales, 2011Grajales, , 2013. The elites linked to commodity crops such as coffee, banana, or oil palm, who paid for security and fought peasant claims (Gutiérrez-Sanín, 2019), were the direct beneficiaries of land dispossession and the public policies to promote their agribusinesses (Maher, 2015;Vargas and Uribe, 2017). Therefore, in the case of Colombia, agrarian change towards tropical specialization and food dependence can be linked to international market forces, as well as to domestic and non-market forces such as the use of violence.…”