Telling the Difference: Guerrillas and Paramilitaries in the Colombian War
Abstract
The effort to build a political economy of war without politics is finding its limits. The question now is what comes next. How to put politics back in? This article compares systematically two non-state armed groups that participate in the Colombian conflict, the main guerrilla (FARC) and the paramilitary. It shows that despite their similar financial bases, they appear to exhibit systematic differences鈥� regarding both their social composition and their internal/external behavior鈥攁nd claims that the key to understanding them is the set of organizational devices that each group crafts in its process of survival and growth. All this suggests that a main tenet of the early political economy of war, that all non-state armed groups can be understood as being strategically identical, is flawed. It also poses a classificatory challenge
Citation
Politics and Society (2008) 36 (1) 3-34 [doi:10.1177/0032329207312181]