Article summary
Plan Fortaleza (Mano Dura), a military policing intervention in Cali, Colombia, was evaluated through an experimental design. We randomly assigned recurring, intensive military patrols at the city block level.
Plan Fortaleza (Mano Dura), a military policing intervention in Cali, Colombia, was evaluated through an experimental design. We randomly assigned recurring, intensive military patrols at the city block level.
What makes people view nonstate armed actors as legitimate rulers rather than predatory spoilers? Erica De Bruin, Gabriella Levy, Livia I. Schubiger, and Michael Weintraub tackle this question to shed light on political order where state authority is limited and multiple armed groups compete for influence.
Why do some ambitious, nonincremental reforms fail to change entrenched practices? This article develops a theory of discretionary implementation and applies it to Colombia’s ethnic land restitution program (2012–18). Using process tracing of novel datasets on administrative cases and judicial rulings plus in-depth interviews, the authors explain how routine administrative choices—specifically layering and conversion—can slow and narrow extraordinary reform in practice, producing outcomes that fall short of legislative intent.
Why do state efforts to suppress illicit economies sometimes make violence worse? Juan Felipe Campos, Camilo Nieto‑Matiz, and Luis Schenoni examine how a high‑visibility counter‑narcotics tactic—airborne spraying of coca crops—shapes armed conflict dynamics in Colombia. The study probes whether eradication operations stabilize the state’s authority over illicit markets or instead upset local power balances and provoke more violence.
How citizens assign blame for renewed violence after a peace deal can shape whether societies consolidate peace or regress to conflict. Frank Wyer asks whether political messaging that attributes postconflict violence to one side or the other changes public support for peace agreements—a central concern for policymakers, negotiators, and scholars of peacebuilding.
In many countries worldwide, campaign contribution limits are implemented to restrict money's political influence. However, their actual effectiveness remains unclear. This paper examines the effects of these limits using a regression discontinuity design (RDS) based on Colombia's municipal contribution rules. Our analysis reveals that looser limits lead to more public contracts going directly to campaign donors after elections. Specifically:
This article asks which kinds of alleged wartime perpetrators voters are willing to support and why, focusing on civilian-targeting during and after conflict. Using a conjoint survey in Colombia that presents hypothetical former combatants running for office, the study tests a framework grounded in dyadic morality: voters assess alleged perpetrators by inferences about integrity and competence, with security competence proposed as the most salient competence in civilian-targeting contexts.
Desertion—the unauthorized exit from an armed group—shapes counterinsurgency, war termination, and recruitment dynamics. While prior work emphasizes individual motives, organizational decline in the form of military and financial adversity can change how individual preferences translate into collective action.
This study compares human- and machine-geocoded records of human rights violations in Colombia against an independent ground-truth source to assess external validity. Agreement rates between the two geocoding approaches are evaluated for an eight-year focal period, for three consecutive two-year subperiods, and for a selected set of (non)journalistically remote municipalities.
In 2010, Colombia saw an unexpected spike in acid attacks against women—more than any other country's per capita rate globally during 2010–2014. This surge wasn't mirrored elsewhere.
This study examines the fiscal consequences of internal conflict in Colombia. Contrary to conventional expectations, armed groups capture municipal institutions for private gain rather than incentivizing state building.
Vote buying persists despite democratic safeguards. This article explains why: brokers enforce deals through published results only when monitoring small voter groups is feasible.
New methods are presented to estimate causal effects retrospectively from microdata by harnessing a machine learning ensemble. The approach targets a clearly defined "retrospective intervention effect" founded on hypothetical population interventions, so the causal comparisons are specified rather than ambiguous.
Madhav Joshi investigates whether provisions that explicitly advance women’s participation and benefits in the 2016 Colombia–FARC peace agreement help or hinder overall implementation of the accord. The agreement was celebrated for aligning with UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security, but it remained unclear whether adopting a gender perspective affected the fate of the agreement’s wider implementation.
Decentralization reforms in Colombia aimed to increase local responsiveness but produced mixed results. This study analyzes survey data from citizens across the country to assess perceptions of department-level government accountability following administrative and fiscal decentralization efforts.
This article explains how judicial review shapes political relations between national and subnational governments in Brazil, Colombia, and Spain. The analysis centers on two core questions: how supreme courts become pivotal arbiters of vertical intergovernmental disputes, and how national and subnational politicians deploy judicial review to advance their own interests.