suspectedtobecontrolled)byanothergroup(Steele, 2011; BalcellsandSteele, 2016).<sup>5</sup> Oncedisplaced, IDPs often resettle in the outskirts of big cities such as Cali, Medellín or Bogotá, where they face physical and economic insecurity (Ibáñez and Moya, 2010; Steele, 2017).

To be properly understood, the current displacement crisis must be set against a broader contextofweaktenuresecurity,widespreadinformality,andalonghistoryofviolentlandexpropriation in the country. The Colombian countryside has been characterized by cycles of forced expulsion and resettlement of peasants, which have fueled land conflicts long before the contemporary civil war (LeGrand, 1986). Land ownership is highly concentrated and interventions to increase peasant access to land have often faltered or been derailed (Albertus and Kaplan, 2013). As a result of these and other factors, rural informality is rampant, with an estimated 48% of rural parcels lacking a registered title.<sup>6</sup> These long-running land issues interact with the displacement crisis in complex ways. For instance, there is evidence that elites and other actors have leveraged tenure insecurity to expropriatepeasantlandduringtheconflict(VargasReina, 2021). InfluxesofIDPshavealsogenerated land conflicts among marginalized peasant and indigenous communities competing over resourcesandterritory(deBenito, 2015). Andfinally,withrespecttoIDPresettlementandrestitution, the fact that many rural landholders have no formal ownership of their land means that achieving the legal return of property lost during conflict is rife with judicial and administrative barriers (CODHES, 2015). The result is that displacement both results from and feeds into Colombia’s land historical land problems.

Given the scale of the crisis, a key element of post-conflict policy has been the question of how to resettle IDPs. While prior legislation and elements of the peace process provide for the _restitution_ , or legal return, of land and property to conflict victims, progress has been slow and impeded by numerous factors<sup>7</sup> . Figure 1 visualizes the scale of the restitution problem, highlighting howonly afractionoftheestimatednumberofrestitution-eligiblevictimshavebegun the restitution process, and among those, an even smaller percent have finished the process. The substantial gap between what the restitution need the state anticipated (based on the incidence of displacement) and the actual number of restitution claims received (Garayet al., 2016, p. 18), raises the question of why few victims pursue restitution – a question we shed light on in the study.<sup>8</sup>

> 5The process of political decentralization and democratization since the 1990s has also played a role in the political targeting of civilians (Steele, 2017).

> 6Figure retrieved from USAID’s Land-Links information portal. `https://www.land-links.org/ country-profile/colombia/#1528464011915-6f6e82e5-9a53`

> 7For a comprehensive review of barriers to restitution in Colombia, see CODHES (2016)

> 8Measuring the amount of restitution need is not straightforward and there are varying, competing estimates of total need. The estimates presented here come from De Justicia.

4