TY - JOUR
T1 - Selective Civilian Targeting
T2 - The Unintended Consequences of Partial Peace
AU - Prem, Mounu
AU - Rivera, Andrés F.
AU - Romero, Dario A.
AU - Vargas, Juan F.
N1 - Funding Information:
∗Corresponding author. This paper circulated previously under the name “Killing Social Leaders for Territorial Control: The Unintended Consequences of Peace”. We thank Adriana Camacho, Giacomo De Luca, Héctor Galindo, Jorge Gallego, Felipe González, Dorothy Kronick, Luis Martinez, Nicola Mastrorocco, Pablo Querubín, Andrés Rosas, Martin Rossi, Fabio Sánchez, Santiago Saavedra, Jacob Shapiro, Abbey Steele, Mateo Uribe, Austin Wright and seminar participants at the Columbia University Development Colloquium, the 2018 Annual Workshop of the Households in Conflict Network, the 2018 LACEA-LAMES Annual Conference, Rosario-Andes Taller Applied (RATA), Universidad Javeriana, the 1st Colombian Economic Conference and the 5th Workshop on the Economics of Organized Crime for helpful comments and suggestions. We are especially grateful to Charu Prem for in depth comments at various stages of the project. This paper is funded by the Colombia Científica-Alianza EFI Research Program, with code 60185 and contract number FP44842-220-2018, financed by The World Bank through the call Scientific Ecosystems, managed by the Colombian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 M. Prem et al.
PY - 2022/7/31
Y1 - 2022/7/31
N2 - Peace agreements may inadvertently increase selective violence against civilians when they are incomplete in two key dimensions. First, only a fraction of the existing armed groups participates in the agreement. Second, the legitimate government fails to establish an institutional presence in the areas previously controlled by those who do participate. Under these two conditions, the resulting vacuum of power may attract active armed groups who engage in selective civilian victimization to obtain control. Studying the recent Colombian experience, we find that the permanent ceasefire declared by the FARC insurgency in 2014 led to a surge in the targeting of community leaders in former FARC strongholds, perpetrated by armed groups excluded from the peace process, with the goal of consolidating their dominance in those areas. Critically, selective victimization is attenuated by some dimensions of state capacity and exacerbated in places that are more valuable as proxied by the existence of recent land conflicts.
AB - Peace agreements may inadvertently increase selective violence against civilians when they are incomplete in two key dimensions. First, only a fraction of the existing armed groups participates in the agreement. Second, the legitimate government fails to establish an institutional presence in the areas previously controlled by those who do participate. Under these two conditions, the resulting vacuum of power may attract active armed groups who engage in selective civilian victimization to obtain control. Studying the recent Colombian experience, we find that the permanent ceasefire declared by the FARC insurgency in 2014 led to a surge in the targeting of community leaders in former FARC strongholds, perpetrated by armed groups excluded from the peace process, with the goal of consolidating their dominance in those areas. Critically, selective victimization is attenuated by some dimensions of state capacity and exacerbated in places that are more valuable as proxied by the existence of recent land conflicts.
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U2 - 10.1561/100.00020088
DO - 10.1561/100.00020088
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85128999098
SN - 1554-0626
VL - 17
JO - Quarterly Journal of Political Science
JF - Quarterly Journal of Political Science
IS - 3
ER -
