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Navigating Formal and Informal Processes: Civic Organizations, Armed Nonstate Actors, and Nested Governance in Colombia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2020

Charles Larratt-Smith Open the ORCID record for Charles Larratt-Smith [Opens in a new window]
Charles Larratt-Smith*
Affiliation:
Charles Larratt-Smith is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto.
*
c.larratt.smith@mail.utoronto.ca.
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Abstract

Despite the recent surge of scholarship on the role that civic organizations play in armed conflicts and postconflict settings, there is little consensus on how they interact with armed nonstate actors. This article examines how disparate armed nonstate actors can co-opt and manage preexisting civic organizations, and even create new ones, to embed themselves in civilian communities and perform governance functions while simultaneously advancing their ideological agendas. Employing a comparative historical analysis between two armed nonstate units in Colombia, one from a Marxist insurgent group and the other from a counterinsurgent paramilitary organization, the study demonstrates that regardless of their different ideological motivations, regional settings, and repertoires of violence, these actors could navigate formal processes related to legal economies, electoral contests, and bureaucratic-administrative institutions, and informal processes tied to illicit rackets and territorial and population control, more efficiently through their skilled management of local civic organizations.

Keywords

Civil warColombiaarmed nonstate actorscivic organizations
Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 75 - 98
Copyright
© University of Miami 2020

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Footnotes

Conflict of interest: I, Charles Larratt-Smith, declare none.

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