Peace made, peace built? Participation, countryside, and politics in the 2010s Colombian peace process
Creators: name: Lara-Rodriguez, Juan
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2023
Subjects: Development studies not elsewhere classified
Peace studies
Economic development policy
Legal institutions (incl. courts and justice systems)
Humanitarian disasters, conflict and peacebuilding

description: This thesis argues that the pursuit of participation and inclusion of all the society and inform well the citizenry about the terms of the accord is vital to achieving peacemaking on the one hand; and, a rural restructure, changing political parties’ informal coercive institutions and shifting the social norm of war towards peacebuilding on the other, are crucial coordinates so as to a routing a genuine development for Colombia. A nation that during the 2010s faced the challenge to end its long-standing civil war between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia − People's Army (FARC-EP) rebels. I advance the argument in two parts: first, peacemaking is divided in two chapters. One examines participation and inclusion in the 2016 peace settlement based on democratic innovation and the ladder of citizen participation, arguing in a constructivist way, and applying hermeneutics that inclusion does not necessarily mean a civil society's control over the peacemaking process, being the participation of the political society and insurgency a precondition. The second chapter of this section focuses on the 2016 peace plebiscite, conceptually argues that personal, relational, cultural, and structural causes are intimately related to voters’ attitudes. And quantitatively discloses from municipal data that spaces with rural poverty, coca crops, victims, remote from the centre and an intense presence of the rebels had positive associations with the yes vote, a heterogeneous influence of the warring parties, and that the vote for no won at higher population and high abstention. The second part of this thesis addresses peacebuilding through three chapters. The first, argues that civil war has been encouraged by the grievance to reduce rural poverty, so, based upon Latin American Structuralism and original data empirically finds a paradox of land redistribution, intense positive effects of technical progress to defeat rural poverty, a dependency that undermines the better rural standard of living, ditches that become greater between centre-periphery, and the egregious effects of forced displacement for the countryside. The second chapter of this section examines the brutality, narcotics trafficking, and corruption enforced by active Colombian political parties (19 parties and one social movement) from 2011 to 2020. To do so, I addressed historical contingencies of the party politics and build a novel panel data set where the brutality composite indicator, the corruption indicator and coca crops are response variables for the explanatory matrix of political parties elected to executive branch positions. The findings unmask political parties who enforced or rejected these three coercive and violent informal institutions beside divergent causes. Lastly, in chapter five, the third part of section two, posits eight individual political preferences (kinship, funding, perpetuation, ideology, decision-making, religion, military, and media) that cement the norm of civil war. Hence, I carry out an experiment with all members of the 2018-2022 Colombian Congress cohort (102 subjects in the Senate and 170 in the House of Representatives). The results indicate that the population is dominated by a selfish adapted community with heterogeneous preferences according to subjects’ chamber or the experimental groups (i.e., self-enforcers, dodgers, and scofflaws).