The Social Origins of Perpetual Civil Wars

Acosta, Laura

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-n0he-6529

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The Social Origins of Perpetual Civil Wars

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This dissertation uses the case of Colombia to examine the causes and reproductive mechanisms of civil wars that last more than fifty years, which I call perpetual civil wars. It draws on network analysis of violent events and political claims, content analysis of official archival documents and historical records of interviews with guerrilla combatants in the 1950s, quantitative analysis of twenty years of opinion poll data, and in-depth interviews with dozens of Colombian citizens in 2017. In the Colombian civil war, which scholars have regarded as one of the hardest-to-solve civil wars across the world, we find a paradox. Contrary to the assumptions and expectations of many civil war experts, insurgents’ fighting capacities and commitment to disarmament have not proved to be paralyzing for reaching a negotiated settlement in Colombia. Paradoxically, leftist guerrillas’ commitment to demobilize seems inextricably interconnected with the later escalation of the civil war. My dissertation shifts the analytical focus from why peacebuilding fails to who is fighting and why. It defines “perpetuation” as a processual active term, that invites to specify the agents that do the perpetuation, their goals, and the strategies that they use to achieve them. I find that in the 1950s, traditional political parties in Colombia made scapegoats of communists in order to divert accountability for their war crimes. Historical accounts from rural citizens and combatants, however, confirm that communists were rarely engaged in violence. The discourse of scapegoating played a key role in restarting civil war in 1964, and in sustaining violence throughout the twentieth century; it produced shifting affiliations and identities in rural communities, marked out new cleavages within the camps of regime and opposition, and tacitly authorized a small contention of communist guerrillas as legitimate state contenders. Beyond the case of Colombia, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of how global and historical legacies of identity-based discrimination profoundly affect national efforts at peacebuilding. It shows that dominant social groups use political discourse to stereotype minorities as inherently violent and systematically pursue their exclusion by antagonizing peacebuilding efforts, thwarting the implementation of transitional justice, supporting paramilitary groups, and ignoring the victimization of these minorities. This dissertation speaks to concerns about how to achieve true and lasting social change, how social boundaries emerge and transform, and how discrimination processes—and systems of oppression more generally—are sustained.

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