War economies in peacetime: the Colombian context after The Havana peace agreement

The Colombian armed conflict, characterised by the involvement of several actors, guerrillas, paramilitary groups, state military forces, and criminal organisations, has had differentiated regional impacts and dynamics over the national territory. For more than five decades, all non-state armed groups have financed their actions, stability, and political discourse (if there is any) through diverse illegal economic activities, from drugs’ trafficking to gold mining, kidnapping, smuggling and timber exploitation and trafficking, among others. The influence of the international community, especially regarding the war against drugs, as well as of the illegal global markets and the immersion of the private sector, has also shaped the conflict. Currently, Colombia is living a transition stage towards peace with the signed, in November 2016, of the ‘Final Agreement to End the Armed Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace’ after four years of peace talks between the national government and the FARC-EP guerrilla, the major non-state armed group. The transition scenario after ten months of implementation is not promising, the expected changes were not clear-cut, while difficulties were. This study aims to explore the problematic nature of the peace, now that the major non-state actor is out of the play, and its uneasy relationship with localised and resource-related increases in violence and resource extraction involved in criminalised war economies in drugs and gold. This study combined quantitative and qualitative data to understand the current context in the major gold and coca producer areas. The theoretical framework used to analyse the findings was the transformational peacebuilding approach, and the rational choice theory, focused on the war economy literature. A key finding of this research is that the economic benefit of the criminalised war economies of drugs and gold keeps the non-state armed groups active and incentives alliances and disputes between them, in the local and regional scenarios. This parallel extra-legal economy also has generated fragmentations within non-state armed actors, constituting a kind of anarchical insurgent and criminal map and projecting a new conflict stage rather than peace. Parallel, the perpetuated horizontal inequalities between national, urban, and regional elites, and rural marginalised and minority populations are used to explore other than economic explanations of the persistence of non-state armed actors, high and localised violence and war economies in peacetime.