Jonathan D. Ostry, Andrew Berg, and Charalambos G. Tsangarides over at the (seemingly very different) IMF:

Economists are increasingly focusing on the links between rising inequality and the fragility of
growth. Narratives include the relationship between inequality, leverage and the financial
cycle, which sowed the seeds for crisis; and the role of political-economy factors (especially
the influence of the rich) in allowing financial excess to balloon ahead of the crisis. In earlier
work, we documented a multi-decade cross-country relationship between inequality and the
fragility of economic growth. Our work built on the tentative consensus in the literature that
inequality can undermine progress in health and education, cause investment-reducing political
and economic instability, and undercut the social consensus required to adjust in the face of
shocks, and thus that it tends to reduce the pace and durability of growth.

That equality seems to drive higher and more sustainable growth does not in itself support
efforts to redistribute. In particular, inequality may impede growth at least in part because it
calls forth efforts to redistribute that themselves undercut growth. In such a situation, even if
inequality is bad for growth, taxes and transfers may be precisely the wrong remedy.

While considerable controversy surrounds these issues, we should not jump to the conclusion
that the treatment for inequality may be worse for growth than the disease itself.

More here. Also see here.

Maya Mikdashi in Jadaliyya:

In the past few months sex panics and moral panics, centered on gendered bodies and abuses, have rocked Lebanon. In this article I want to revisit three of these panics: photos of a semi-nude Lebanese Olympic Skier’s body and reactions to it; the impunity of wife murderers and wife abusers; and the razing of a Syrian makeshift refugee camp after (ultimately false) accusations of sex abuse by a camp resident of a mentally disabled Lebanese man. I bring these three cases together in order to think about the political work that the moral/sex panicdoes in making and remaking Lebanese national identity and in articulating its gendered architecture. I do so in order to avoid thinking each separately under the rubrics of sexual discrimination or abuse in Lebanon.

Jackie Chamoun is a skier representing Lebanon at the Winter 2014 Olympics. Her qualification for the premier international sporting event is itself a success, given the lack of training infrastructures and support for athletes (particularly females) in Lebanon. Recently, photos a friend of Chamoun’s took for a calendar, featured the athlete in various poses (though not full frontal) and topless. The photos spread through the Internet like wildfire. In response, the Caretaker Lebanese minister for Youth and Sports, Faisal Karami, ordered an investigation into the photos. He stated that they, and by extension Chamoun, were damaging to the country’s image. In a country with chronic youth unemployment and a widely corrupt professional sports system, as well as the lack of support for sports and youth more broadly, it was these photos that were just too much for the good minister. Almost immediately, people reacted, both positively and negatively, to Karami’s announcement. But what was the image of Lebanon that Karami wanted to protect, and why was the site of a female athletic body—and athletes, given that their bodies are their work, are rightly proud and confident in them— so threatening to that image?

More here.

Stephanie Bernhard in Full Stop:

If you want to see an expression of pure despair, ask a college freshman to parse Rachel Carson’s rhetorical choices at 8:00 in the morning. That’s what I’m doing this semester for a composition class I’m teaching at the University of Virginia. The course is called “Representing Climate Change,” and our collective goal is to discover and deploy effective methods of talking and writing about our looming environmental crisis. The task is daunting. Climate change is at once really easy and really hard to write about. It’s easy because there is so much to say, and hard because progress toward a solution is so slow.

But what do I know about the fossil fuel industry? I study literature. I am not a scientist. My specialties are agrarian novels and Modernist aesthetics, not cloud formation or sea ice. When making arguments, I have to trust the vast majority of scientists who agree that humans are changing the climate, that the changes will have huge and unpleasant effects, and that we should really get our act together and fix the problem. The scientists’ job is to perform and publish the research that supports these claims. My job — and my students’ job — starts where peer review ends: we need to make scientific evidence digestible and believable to a general audience. Since solving climate change requires mass engagement, how we talk about the problem matters as much as the science that confirms its urgency.

More here.

Alec Baldwin in New York Magazine:

I flew to Hawaii recently to shoot a film, fresh on the heels of being labeled a homophobic bigot by Andrew Sullivan, Anderson Cooper, and others in the Gay Department of Justice. I wanted to speak with a gay-rights group that I had researched and admired, so I called its local Honolulu branch.

The office number turned out to be some guy’s cell phone. I left him a message—I said, “I’m from out of town, I’m visiting Hawaii on business, I’d like to get some information on your group.” After two or three more calls, he answered the phone. I said, “Yeah, I’m the guy that called about your organization.” And he said, somewhat impatiently, “Okay, well, what did you want?” I said, “Well, let me put it to you this way, Nick. Your name is Nick? Nick, let me begin by asking you a question. Who would you say, by your estimation, is the most homophobic member of the entertainment industry currently in the media?” And he paused for a long count of four and said, “Um … Alec Baldwin?”

And I said, “Ding, ding, ding, ding! Bingo, Nick, bingo! That’s who you’re talking to.”

He said, “C’mon!”

I said, “Nick, I want to come in and talk.”

I met with Nick and others from two LGBT organizations. We talked for a while about the torment of the LGBT life many of them have lived while growing up in traditional Hawaiian families. Macho fathers. Religious mothers. We talked a lot about words and their power, especially in the lives of young people.

One young man, an F-to-M tranny, said, “Are you here to get dry-cleaned, like Brett Ratner?” Meaning I could do some mea culpa, write them a six-figure check, go to a dinner, sob at the table, give a heartfelt speech, beg for forgiveness.

More here.

When All This Is Over

After all the heads have rolled
and the young insurgents put up against the wall
by the firing squads
when the puppet masters
have taken their seats in the boardroom
and the bombardiers are sipping drinks
with the chiefs of police
when the journalists change sides again
and the commentators
redefine what they meant in the first place
and the judges sell their shares
in revolutionary understanding
and the clergy decide
that forgiveness was always forgiven
and educators rediscover
the meaning behind the meaningless
when poets grow tired
of too long battling futility
when arrogant financiers
have poisoned all the blood banks
and the drug companies
have rendered us venomous
unfit for social consumption
when we see that things have returned again to how they are
we want to believe
that the ruthless men in the big black cars
are lonely as sin
behind their bullet proof glass
and that it means something
that they may have doubts
in the middle of the night like we have
only worse
we pray
because maybe they can do something about it
before the eagle
stoops and tears their liver out
.
by Macdara Woods

George Divorsky in io9:

An unusual arrangement of particles has been discovered in the cells of chicken eyes. It's the first time scientists have seen such a system in a biological system — one that allows materials to behave like both a crystal and a liquid.

The unique arrangement is called “disordered hyperuniformity,” and it could help researchers design advanced materials, such as optics that can transmit light with the efficiency of a crystal and the flexibility of a liquid.

When matter is organized into states of disordered hyperuniformity, it exhibits order over large distances and disorder over small distances. At one level, it's like a crystal that greatly suppresses differences in the density of particles across large spatial distances. But at another scale, it's liquid-like in that it exhibits similar physical properties in all directions.

More here.

Ben Cosgrove in Life:

In May 1946, LIFE magazine ran a series of remarkable pictures from a Klan initiation in Georgia, at the start of the Third Klan era. Titled “The Ku Klux Klan Tries a Comeback,” the article noted that the KKK pledged initiates “in a mystic pageant on Georgia’s Stone Mountain.” The language that accompanied photographer Ed Clark’s pictures, meanwhile, made clear that, as newsworthy as the story of this particular initiation might have been, LIFE’s editors considered the figures in their white robes and hoods to be rather laughable — if their rhetoric and arcane, pseudo-mystic shenanigans weren’t so unsettling.

On the evening of May 9 at 8 p.m. a mob of fully grown men solemnly paraded up to a wide plateau of Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, Ga., and got down on their knees on the ground before 100 white-sheeted and hooded Atlantans. In the eerie light of a half-moon and a fiery cross they stumbled in lockstep up to a great stone altar and knelt there in the dirt while the “Grand Dragon” went through the mumbo jumbo of initiating them into the Ku Klux Klan. Then one new member was selected from the mob and ceremoniously “knighted” into the organization in behalf of all the rest of his fellow bigots. This was the first big public initiation into the Klan since the end of World War II. It was put on at a carefully calculated time. The anti-Negro, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-foreign, anti-union, anti-democratic Ku Klux Klan was coming out of wartime hiding just at the time when the CIO and the A.F. of L. were starting simultaneous campaigns to organize the South. . . . But it is doubtful that the Klan can become as frighteningly strong as it was in 1919. One indication of the Klan’s impotence was its lack of effect on Negroes, who were once frightened and cowed by the white-robed members. More than 24,000 Negroes have already registered for next July’s primaries in the Atlanta vicinity alone, where the Stone Mountain ritual was held.

As mentioned in one of the captions in the gallery above, the Stone Mountain ceremony was put off several times during the preceding year because of wartime sheet shortages. Or at least that’s what LIFE reported at the time. The magazine also made a point of characterizing the garb and actions of members at Klan meetings (slides #10 through 15) as both creepy and pathetic. “Childish ritual and secretiveness,” the magazine noted, “have always been the great attractions for the kind of people who make good Klansmen.”

The more things change. . . .

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

James Gorman in The New York Times:

To crack the code of the brain, Dr. Reid said, two fundamental problems must be solved. The first is: “How does the machine work, starting with its building blocks, cell types, going through their physiology and anatomy,” he said. That means knowing all the different types of neurons in the mouse visual cortex and their function — information that science doesn’t have yet. It also means knowing what code is used to pass on information. When a mouse sees a picture, how is that picture encoded and passed from neuron to neuron? That is called neural computation.

“The other highly related problem is: How does that neural computation create behavior?” he said. How does the mouse brain decide on action based on that input? He imagined the kind of experiment that would get at these deep questions. A mouse might be trained to participate in an experiment now done with primates in which an animal looks at an image. Later, seeing several different images in sequence, the animal presses a lever when the original one appears. Seeing the image, remembering it, recognizing it and pressing the lever might take as long as two seconds and involve activity in several parts of the brain. Understanding those two seconds, Dr. Reid said, would mean knowing “literally what photons hit the retina, what information does the retina send to the thalamus and the cortex, what computations do the neurons in the cortex do and how do they do it, how does that level of processing get sent up to a memory center and hold the trace of that picture over one or two seconds.” Then, when the same picture is seen a second time, “the hard part happens,” he said. “How does the decision get made to say, ‘That’s the one’?” In pursuit of this level of understanding, Dr. Reid and others are gathering chemical, electrical, genetic and other information about what the structure of that part of the mouse brain is and what activity is going on.

More here.

Raffi Khatchadourian in The New Yorker:

Years from now—maybe in a decade, maybe sooner—if all goes according to plan, the most complex machine ever built will be switched on in an Alpine forest in the South of France. The machine, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or iter, will stand a hundred feet tall, and it will weigh twenty-three thousand tons—more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower. At its core, densely packed high-precision equipment will encase a cavernous vacuum chamber, in which a super-hot cloud of heavy hydrogen will rotate faster than the speed of sound, twisting like a strand of DNA as it circulates. The cloud will be scorched by electric current (a surge so forceful that it will make lightning seem like a tiny arc of static electricity), and bombarded by concentrated waves of radiation. Beams of uncharged particles—the energy in them so great it could vaporize a car in seconds—will pour into the chamber, adding tremendous heat. In this way, the circulating hydrogen will become ionized, and achieve temperatures exceeding two hundred million degrees Celsius—more than ten times as hot as the sun at its blazing core.

No natural phenomenon on Earth will be hotter. Like the sun, the cloud will go nuclear. The zooming hydrogen atoms, in a state of extreme kinetic excitement, will slam into one another, fusing to form a new element—helium—and with each atomic coupling explosive energy will be released: intense heat, gamma rays, X rays, a torrential flux of fast-moving neutrons propelled in every direction. There isn’t a physical substance that could contain such a thing. Metals, plastics, ceramics, concrete, even pure diamond—all would be obliterated on contact, and so the machine will hold the superheated cloud in a “magnetic bottle,” using the largest system of superconducting magnets in the world. Just feet from the reactor’s core, the magnets will be cooled to two hundred and sixty-nine degrees below zero, nearly the temperature of deep space. Caught in the grip of their titanic forces, the artificial earthbound sun will be suspended, under tremendous pressure, in the pristine nothingness of iter’s vacuum interior.

For the machine’s creators, this process—sparking and controlling a self-sustaining synthetic star—will be the culmination of decades of preparation, billions of dollars’ worth of investment, and immeasurable ingenuity, misdirection, recalibration, infighting, heartache, and ridicule. Few engineering feats can compare, in scale, in technical complexity, in ambition or hubris. Even the iterorganization, a makeshift scientific United Nations, assembled eight years ago to construct the machine, is unprecedented. Thirty-five countries, representing more than half the world’s population, are invested in the project, which is so complex to finance that it requires its own currency: the iter Unit of Account.

More here.

Mike Gonzalez in Jacobin:

Between 2002 and 2014, the Right failed to dislodge Chavez; on the contrary, Chavez’s electoral support rose consistently until his death early last year. After that, his nominated successor, Maduro, won the presidential elections in April 2013. But this time the right-wing candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, came within 250,000 votes (under one percent) of winning.

It was a clear expression of the growing frustration and anger among Chavez supporters. 2012 had seen inflation rates hovering around fifty percent (officially) and the level has risen inexorably throughout the last year. Today the basic basket of goods costs 30% more than the minimum wage — and that is if the goods are to be found on the increasingly empty shelves of shops and supermarkets. The shortages are explained partly by speculation on the part of capitalists — just as happened in Chile in 1972 — and partly by the rising cost of imports, which make up a growing proportion of what is consumed in Venezuela. And that means not luxuries, but food, basic technology, and even gasoline.

All of this is an expression of an economic crisis vigorously denied by the Maduro government but obvious to everyone else. Inflation is caused by the declining value of the bolivar, Venezuela’s currency, itself the result of economic paralysis. The truth is that production of anything other than oil has ground to a virtual halt. The car industry employs 80,000 workers, yet since the beginning of 2014 it has produced 200 vehicles — what would normally be produced in half a day.

How is it possible that a country with the world’s largest proven reserves of oil (and possibly of gas, too) should now be deeply in debt to China and unable to finance the industrial development that Chavez promised in his first economic plan?

The answer is political rather than economic: corruption on an almost unimaginable scale, combined with inefficiency and a total absence of any kind of economic strategy. In recent weeks, there have been very public denunciations of speculators, hoarders, and the smugglers taking oil and almost everything else across the Colombian border. And there have been horrified reports of the “discovery” of thousands of containers of rotting food. But all of this has been common knowledge for years. Equally well known is the involvement of sectors of the state and government in all these activities.

More here.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Why do so many people object to inequality? Is there something intrinsically wrong with it? Is it wrong because it has bad consequences? Or is there nothing wrong with it? Harvard philosopher Tim Scanlon discusses these questions with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.

Listen to Tim Scanlon on What's Wrong with Inequality?

Dear Reader,

We are very pleased to collaborate with the Amsterdam-based Dialogue Advisory Group (DAG) to bring to you online symposia on topics of international peace and justice. This is the sixth in this series of symposia; the first five can be seen here.

DAG is an organization which discreetly assists government, inter-government and other actors to confidentially manage national and international mediation efforts. Among their publicly known activities is DAG’s involvement in verifying the ETA ceasefire in Basque Country and the decommissioning of the weapons of INLA, a dissident Republican armed group in Northern Ireland.

DAG is directed by Ram Manikkalingam who also teaches politics at the University of Amsterdam. He advised the previous President of Sri Lanka during the peace process with the Tamil Tigers and prior to that advised the Rockefeller Foundation’s program in international peace and security.

In the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia internationally recognized figures will debate challenges in conflict resolution and human rights. One (or more) author(s) will present a thesis in the form of a short essay and then the others will present critiques of that point of view. Finally, the initial author(s) will also have an opportunity to present a rebuttal to the critiques.

The topic this time is the future of the FARC rebels in Colombia.

The distinguished participants in this symposium:

• Ivan Briscoe is a Senior Research Fellow at the Conflict Research Unit of Clingendael, where he specializes in the political economy of post-conflict countries and analysis of organized crime, with a regional focus on Latin America. His has written widely on drug trafficking, shadow state structures and the dynamics of inequality, and has carried out extensive field research on these subjects in Central America, the Andes and the southern cone. Prior to joining Clingendael in 2009, he was Senior Researcher at the Foundation for International Relations and Foreign Dialogue (FRIDE) in Madrid, and before then worked a decade as a journalist and newspaper editor in Latin America, France and Spain, including stints in El País, Agence France Presse, and the UNESCO Courier. He continues to write a weekly column for the Buenos Aires Herald, and regularly contributes to openDemocracy. He can be followed on Twitter here: @itbriscoe

• Timo Peeters is a research fellow at the Conflict Research Unit, Clingendael. A criminologist trained in Utrecht University, he is a specialist in the phenomenon of vigilante groups.

• Annette Idler has worked as an academic and practitioner on conflict prevention, peace building, development and transnational organised crime. She is in the final stage of her doctoral research at the University of Oxford's Department of International Development in which she analyses violent non-state actor interactions in Colombia’s borderlands and their impact on citizen security. As a Drugs, Security and Democracy Fellow, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and Open Society Foundations, she conducted over one year of extensive fieldwork in Colombia’s crisis-affected borderlands and was visiting researcher at universities in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. Annette has obtained an MA in International Relations from King’s College London’s Department of War Studies and a BA double degree in German-Spanish Studies/International Politics from the University Complutense of Madrid, Spain, and the University of Regensburg, Germany. She is co-founder of a peace, security and development consulting service and previously worked for UNDP’s Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and the German Development Organisation InWEnt. She has published several journal articles and a book chapter on violent non-state actors, citizen security, borderlands and Colombia.

• Barbara Unger is Programme Director for Latin America at the Berghof Foundation. She was a freelance advisor and trainer for peace and conflict, a coordinator of Zivik project 2002-2004, and also previously worked with the German Development Corporation. She is a long-term activist and member of Peace Brigades International, a member of the German Platform for Conflict Management, and Board member of the Forum Ziviler Friedensdienst.

• Katrin Planta is Researcher and Project Officer on Dialogue, Mediation and Peace Support Structures at the Berghof Foundation. She previously worked as a project officer on the ‘Resistance and Liberation Movements in Transition’ programme and spent six months in Colombia conducting interviews for a research project on armed groups’ cohesion based at Oxford University.

I would like to thank the participants as well as Ram Manikkalingam, Fleur Ravensbergen, Daniël Grütters, and Pamela Kalkman of the Dialogue Advisory Group for working closely with me in organizing these symposia. The logo for the symposium has been designed by Amanda Beugeling.

We look forward to your comments and feedback.

Yours,

S. Abbas Raza

NOTE: DAG and 3QD wish to acknowledge the generous contribution of the Dutch Stichting Democratie en Media toward these symposia, as well as the support of our readers.

THE SYMPOSIUM

[Click the links below to read the essays.]

1. Back to Basics for Colombia's Rebels by Ivan Briscoe and Timo Peeters
2. The Margins at the Centre of the FARC’s Future by Annette Idler
3. Peace Beyond a Peace Deal by Katrin Planta and Barbara Unger
4. The Shady Side of a Modern State by Ivan Briscoe and Timo Peeters

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Please leave comments about any of the essays in the symposium in the comments area of this post. Thank you.

by Ivan Briscoe and Timo Peeters

For the first time ever, Colombia last year produced over a million barrels of oil a day. To reach this grail of the global carbon club, with only Venezuela, Mexico and Brazil now producing more oil in Latin America, the country managed to double its production in the space of six years. It tapped the brain drain from Venezuela's post-2003 oil industry. It dispatched state and private explorers deep into the bush and the sierra. And as the industry grew and boomed, the armed rebellion against the state, now well into its middle age, decided it would also join the bonanza.

A recent analysis of the new tactics of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) illustrates that despite the relatively advanced stage of peace negotiations with the government, and the hope that a 50-year conflict may soon come to a negotiated end, there are rich pickings to be had throughout investment-friendly Colombia via the cunning use of arms.[1] It now appears that 2012 was the year in which more attacks on oil pipelines were carried out than ever before; production and theft have marched in lock step. “Miners' commissions”, explains the report's author Ariel Ávila, has been the novel term given to the spawning guerrilla units specialized in pipeline heists.

President Juan Manuel Santos and his team of negotiators in Havana would not necessarily be dismayed by these oil grabs. The entire approach of their peace diplomacy has been grounded in close reading of previous failed negotiations, an appreciation of the organizational dynamics and esprit de corps within the FARC, and a studiedly careful handling of Colombian political and public opinion – including the twitter rage of former President Álvaro Uribe, Colombia's main curmudgeon. Skirmishes, raids and drug production have continued ever since the sides first met in Oslo in October 2012: close to 500 security force officers were killed by the FARC last year. Yet it is Santos' hope, recently relayed in an interview with El País,[2] that the circuitous route to a final deal will eventually bring all sides and factions on board. “The painter wants to sell his work when it is complete,” he explains.

Progress has been made. Preliminary deals have already been reached on rural development and on the FARC's political participation. Although not formerly affiliated to the FARC, the Marcha Patriótica party can be expected to lead the radical cause in this year's elections – and pull a right-leaning political establishment leftwards. Crucially, a third phase of peace talks is now mulling over narco-trafficking, in which the FARC has been involved, largely at the level of protecting coca leaf production, since the 1980s. The rebel group's initial proposal envisages a daring, possibly quixotic combination: community control over crop substitution, alongside major state intervention to buy up surplus crops, maintain farmers' income and find alternative economic uses for marijuana, coca and opium poppy.[3]

Read more »

by Annette Idler

Many analysts are optimistic that peace will be signed in Colombia still this year. Nevertheless, uncertainty prevails regarding the FARC's future. Ivan Briscoe's and Timo Peeters' reflection on various post-conflict scenarios is therefore a welcome contribution. Pointing the FARC's role as spoilers to Colombia's mining sector in the midst of the peace process, the authors present two post-conflict scenarios: a demobilised FARC as political party and the fragmentation of the rebels into greedy drug traffickers. Briscoe and Peeters are critical about these scenarios, suggesting that the FARC might become social bandits instead.

They are right in cautioning about dichotomised scenarios. Yet, while the concept of social banditry contributes towards a more nuanced understanding of the rebels' embedment in Colombia's socio-economic context, it is silent on two points critical for the FARC's future: first, the shadow citizenship that they have established, and second, the regional dimension.

First, in many Colombian borderlands characterised by weak state governance, the FARC do not flaunt authority like social bandits, they are the authority. Arguably, they have won the communities' respect by filling the state's governance void. In 2012, during one of my fieldwork trips to Putumayo, a farmer described to me his life in the 1990s when the FARC was the sole authority: “At least we had our land, our farm and they helped us feed our families”. Indeed, the FARC have helped building health centres, roads, and have provided “justice”, although in highly questionable ways. I thus agree with Briscoe and Peeters that some ex-FARC members are likely to persist as local caudillos. Nonetheless, their authority in certain areas suggests that their leadership will go beyond social banditry to facilitating “shadow citizenship”, the provision of goods and services based on undemocratic means in return for social recognition.

The FARC's continued illicit authority has consequences for the mining sector that go beyond oil pipeline robberies cited by the authors. They not only spoil the extractive industry, they also control it through levying taxes. Certainly, attacks against the extractive industry constitute an effective means of demonstrating strength during the peace talks. Yet once the deal is brokered, the FARC remnants won't need to flex muscles anymore and can concentrate on reaping economic benefits instead. Therefore, the less visible, yet more pervasive challenge for the Colombian government than curbing oil thefts is to ensure that the revenues of the extractive industry will enter the legal rather than illegal post-conflict economy. This is crucial if Colombia's mining locomotive is to pull the country further towards economic growth.

Read more »

by Katrin Planta and Barbara Unger

Against the background of advancing peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Ivan Briscoe and Timo Peeters discuss various scenarios for the post-agreement development of this five decade old guerrilla organization and its estimated 10.000 combatants. Outlining two extreme and seemingly antithetic patterns of evolution: integration into democratic (party) politics or irrevocable merger with common crime, they conclude that FARC is most likely to take a third path bringing them back to their origins as “social bandits”.

As social processes cannot be programmed, such scenario development is always tainted with speculation. However, it is still a highly valuable and necessary exercise: the faster talks advance, the more Colombian actors need to consider and prepare for post-agreement challenges. With this in mind, would like to comment on three important aspects. Firstly, we believe that nuances do matter. Any consideration of FARC's post-agreement development must distinguish between the trajectory of ex-combatants' individual futures and that of FARC as a collective entity. Secondly, FARC's evolution will not occur in a bell jar: It will not only depend on the groups' own characteristics and nature, but to a great extent on contextual factors. Finally, in a country suffering from rampant social inequality and marginalization, massive social violence, blatant human rights abuses, and general insecurity well beyond the long-standing armed conflict, it would be erroneous to assume that an eventual agreement with FARC and a subsequent demobilization of its militants represents the main key to “genuine peace and security”.

With regards to our first point, Colombia has a rich experience of demobilization and reintegration of guerrilla and paramilitary groups resulting both from peace negotiations and desertion. Variation in individual post-militancy trajectories ranges from a “simple” return to home communities vs. large-scale migration to urban centers, and from the generation of stable income in the legal economy or establishment in the political arena, to (re)recruitment into armed groups and criminal activities. Hence it is not contradictory to presume that out of a single armed organization there might emerge both dedicated politicians and criminals. And while some FARC commanders might manage to maintain their leadership within a particular region, be it as local leader within the institutional framework or as de facto leader , it seems far-fetched to assume that there is a way back “to the roots” for FARC, as if Colombia and its armed conflicts, had not changed in the last five decades.

Read more »

by Ivan Briscoe and Timo Peeters

In our article, we took a schematic approach in discussing three scenarios for the post-conflict development of the FARC. It goes without saying that by taking such an approach nuance is exchanged for a degree of provocation since future reality is far too complex and dynamic to be captured so easily. We would like to thank the other authors for their valuable comments, and admit that maybe we made the forking path rather too simplistic.

Annette Idler puts forward the intriguing concept of “shadow citizenship”. However, this notion of FARC filling the state's governance void by delivering goods and services in return for social recognition needs clarification. How would this look in a demobilizing context such as Colombia? Are we talking about the kind of shadow citizenship currently facilitated by remnant factions of Sendero Luminoso in Peru's VRAE area, protecting rural population against unpopular coca eradication programmes that threaten local livelihoods? Or a more “top-down” and predatory provision of public goods in the form of a regional “defence” force with strong ties to politicians who grant the fighters political favors in exchange for votes, such as AUC in its heyday and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra during the Cold War? Or are we talking about a more “bottom-up” form of shadow citizenship as is currently seen in Mexico's bellicose state of Michoacán, where popular resistance against the Knight Templar Cartel is rooted in a long and robust tradition of localism and popular revolt? We should bear in mind that Colombian departments such as La Guajira and Magdalena have similar histories of popular resistance. In each case, the sort of citizenship on view generates quite different forms of popular representation, risks of violence, and linkages with the central state.

Katrin Planta and Barbara Unger rightly stress that a genuine post-conflict transformation must incorporate all Colombians, with an emphasis on the war-affected and historically neglected rural areas. The sentiments are noble; but what can realistically be expected from Bogotá? As mentioned in our article, inequality in Colombia has risen by 9.4 per cent between 1990 and 2010 (while inequality in Latin America as a whole declined in the same period by 5 per cent). Social exclusion is deep-seated in Colombia. Recently signed Free Trade Agreements with Canada, the United States, and the European Union have only fuelled mass protests by farmers (30 out of 32 largest cities saw big rallies during last's year's three-week strike), as rural workers are unable to come to terms with the demands of transnational agro-industry.

Read more »