Gobierno de arriba: Community institutions and armed competition as determinants of FARC governance in Viotá, Cundinamarca

Abstract

Despite the common sense view of wars as anarchistic, non-state armed actors often govern over civilians and impose order in the territories under their control. This work focuses on the character, extent and trajectory of rebel governance and rebel behaviour vis-à-vis civilians in the municipality of Viotá in Colombia, where the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército del Pueblo (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army, FARC) established dominant control in the early 1990s. In doing so, it champions the local dimensions of rebel governance. This work studies the influences of pre-existing community-based institutions and armed competition between the FARC and its adversaries on FARC governance in Viotá and finds that these local dimensions more constitutively defined the character and trajectory of FARC governance in Viotá than such macrolevel dimensions as ideology and the nature of the FARC as an organisation. This result implies that, if we are to truly understand the dynamics of rebel behaviour towards civilians, future work should dedicate more attention to the local dynamics of civil wars in general and rebel governance in particular. Furthermore, this research shows that civilians are agentic actors in civil wars and that the logic of indiscriminate violence dictates that the use of such violence is strategic. Finally, this work implies that counterinsurgency strategies that seek to neutralise the enemy are counterproductive and should instead seek to improve state institutions and protect civilians