Nazih Richani’s book Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia is a convincing and important analysis of the current military conflict in Colombia. The book focuses on a fundamental question: Why is it that the Colombian civil war, which has existed for several decades, has become a protracted, seemingly endless conflict? This question, according to Richani, has larger theoretical relevance. Accepted theoretical frameworks argue that violent political conflict is a process that leads to one of several outcomes: revolution, repression or defeat of the power-challengers, or negotiated settlement. But Richani rightly points out that violent conflict itself may become an outcome, configuring a protracted stable conflict, or a “system of violence.”
Richani’s book then argues that systems of violence emerge under three conditions. The first is the failure of available mechanisms and channels to solve the disputed issues in the conflict. The second is the development of a “positive political economy” for the contending parties. The third is the emergence of a balance of forces among parties that leads to a “comfortable impasse.” These three conditions existed in Colombia at least until the early 1990s, and the chapters are organized to systematically show that this is so.
Briefly, the author argues that land conflict is at the root of the guerrilla war and that existing institutional mechanisms, as well as those specifically created over the years to solve it, failed. This failure opened the door to the emergence of alternative “solutions” that included armed conflict and land seizure. Through the war, guerrillas and military accumulated new wealth to maintain and expand their war activities, establishing what Richani calls a “positive political economy.”
Indeed, taxation of rich landlords, together with kidnapping of rich and non-tax paying individuals, and especially taxation of coca, provided an economic mainstay to guerrilla warfare, and made the relative cost of peace higher than the cost of war. Last, both state policies and U.S. policies toward the Colombian insurgency implied a low intensity strategy of combat between the military and the guerrillas that over time developed into a “comfortable impasse,” where all contenders “prospered.” Thus, institutional failure, material gains from waging war, and balance of forces configured a bounded system of interactions and alliances that perpetuated itself.
Richani rightly underlines the crucial, and often ignored, role of material resources in the perpetuation of the civil war. Yet the author’s definition of a “positive political economy” does not seem sufficient to distinguish Colombian guerrillas and paramilitary groups from all other cases of civil war in which contenders have to lever (or shift) resources to wage wars, thus developing a vested interest in their perpetuation. It may be that abundance and the permanence of resource availability are critical to alter the relative cost of war and peace. Notwithstanding this and other questions Richani raises, he has written an important and theoretically informed analysis of a very complex interaction, with rich and nuanced analysis of the military, the guerrillas, and the changing Colombian upper classes.
Garry M. Leech’s Killing Peace: Colombia’s Conflict and the Failure of U.S. Intervention is an excellent short overview of the past and the present of the Colombian civil war. The book’s clear goal is to inform a lay audience about the complexities of the conflict and to underline the impact of U.S. policy in this conflict. The book, available at , succeeds in both respects. The author anchors the present conflict historically, providing the context and the reasons for the civil war, and the interplay of the different parties—peasants, guerrillas, the state, military and paramilitary groups. Leech decidedly thinks that U.S. policies have fueled the conflict. On the one hand, the U.S. government, through IMF liberalization policies and support for U.S. companies’ investment in Colombia, has exacerbated the economic conditions that feed political discontent and insurgency. On the other hand, the U.S. government has provided aid to the military, nominally intended to combat drug trafficking, but in practice used to combat guerrillas, thereby giving incentives to war and not to peace negotiations. Given the evidence, it is difficult to disagree with the author about this point. These books are needed additions to the not-so-extensive literature in English on Colombia’s current civil war.
