At the end of civil wars, sovereignty is often divided, resting both with the state and with nonstate actors. Territories and populations are carved up and the government does not enjoy the allegiance of all of its citizens. Its use of violence and repression against sectors of society strips it of its legitimacy, and subsets of the population may have little trust in the state. When, during the conflict, the state ceases to protect all of its citizens and provide them public goods, it breaks its social contract with its people and leaves a vacancy for “rebel governments” to fill.1

The Colombian government recently concluded a decades-long civil war by signing a peace agreement with the largest of its opposing guerrilla armies: Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC). It has also been involved in negotiations with the other major rebel group, Ejército Nacional de Liberación (National Liberation Army, or ELN). Both groups have been fighting the Colombian government since the early 1960s. Divisions in Colombian society over how to end the war with the FARC that bedeviled the protracted peace negotiations in Havana, Cuba, and led to the Colombian people’s initial rejection of the peace agreement are enduring challenges to a sustainable peace. These divisions are likely to reappear as the rebels demobilize, surrender their role in narcotics trafficking, and re-enter Colombian society and politics.

On August 24, 2016, the Colombian government of President Juan Manuel Santos and leaders of the FARC rebel movement (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) signed a peace agreement designed to bring to an end the FARC insurgency that had lasted since 1964. One provision of the agreement was that it would be put to a vote in a plebiscite for Colombian citizens to ratify or reject. On October 2, 2016, the plebiscite was held and, surprisingly, 50.2 percent of voters rejected the agreement. Shortly thereafter, the Colombian government and FARC negotiated and signed a revised agreement and sent it directly to the Colombian legislature for ratification, bypassing a second referendum. Both houses of the Congress ratified the agreement, marking a formal end to the war between FARC and the government of Colombia.

The Colombian Final Accord is an innovative agreement, particularly with respect to the amount of overall content devoted to transitional justice, victims, and the emphasis on subsequent implementation (Herbolzheimer, 2016; Nylander, Sandberg, and Tvedt, 2018). Some of the most contentious issues in the negotiations that produced the accord were related to truth and reconciliation processes, prosecution and sentencing for war crimes, prisoners release, and amnesty, and the armed actors and negotiators showed great interest in learning from other peace processes. The overall end result of these efforts was the reaching of what is almost certainly the most victim-centered comprehensive peace agreement ever negotiated.1

After the demobilization of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia [United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia] (AUC) in the mid-2000s, Uribe’s government declared that paramilitarism had ceased to exist and that the private armies that remained in existence were simply engaged in organized crime. He gave them a name: Bandas Criminales Emergentes (Bacrím) [Emerging Criminal Gangs].

Coming up to the end of the peace process in 2016, Colombia has experienced a general improvement in homicide rates and security in the last decade, yet targeted attacks against social leaders continue. For example, indigenous leaders, union leaders, mining and peasant leaders, and others have been attacked despite an earlier paramilitary demobilization effort and the recent peace processes. After four years of peace talks, with a full range of suspensions, re-starts, and flare-ups of conflict, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) and the government of Colombia agreed to formally end their decades-long conflict. After an animated campaign against the peace deal, led by former president Álvaro Uribe, Colombian voters narrowly rejected it (50.2 percent) on October 2, 2016. Despite the failure of the referendum, the Colombian Congress unanimously passed a revised accord in late November 2016, and the country officially entered into a post-conflict stage.

The objective of this chapter is to explore the future effect of organizational design on the likelihood of success or failure of the implementation of peace agreements using the Colombian peace accord as a case study. Previous exercises analyzing the implementation of peace agreements in the world have attributed great importance to aspects other than organizational design to explain the success or failure of the implementation. For example, the peace studies literature tends to explain problems in implementation by highlighting the factors associated with the war itself (type of conflict, types of spoils available, etc.) or by giving great importance to political factors (position of relevant actors, level of polarization, etc.) as the variables that explain each success or failure (Stedman, 2001; Hartzell, 2002; Cousens et al., 2003). However, these studies do not consider organizational design as a relevant factor for understanding why implementation processes fail or are successful.

Since the 1960s Colombian public universities have served as a stage for the violent enactment of dissent and resistance and have become one of the many theaters of the internal armed conflict. The images of armed hooded militias parading on university campuses, throwing explosives at the police, destroying public property, or interrupting the regular flow of academic life became part of the routine landscape of many public universities.

The last chapter of this volume is somewhat unusual for an edited book in social science research on peace and transitional justice. But, it is one that we thought it was important to include. “Geographies of Truth,” by personnel from the Casa de la Memoria (House of Memory) of Medellin, is a discussion of how individuals from the museum developed key exhibits on the violence in Colombia. This process begins with a great many similarities to social science projects as literature is reviewed, original data are collected, and all the materials are analyzed for their relevance and role in, in this case, museum exhibits. At this stage, scholars would typically then conceive of our understanding and representation of events of the past in fairly conventional, analytical products that are designed to communicate to fellow academics. But those who curate museums like Casa de la Memoria must arrive at a work product in ways that will affect people not just intellectually but also emotionally and physically through the various senses. Such exhibits are also constructed for a much larger audience − the people of the nation − whose experiences are being represented. Thus, the process by which these exhibits are created is both fascinating as both an alternative means of conveying understandings about war and violence, and for the responsibilities the museum personnel have toward society as a whole in representing their truths. There is much we, as peace studies scholars, can gain from understanding their work.

The establishment of a peace agreement in November 2016 between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was a landmark achievement for a conflict that has persisted since 1964 in a country that has experienced civil war dating as far back as the 1940s. This peace agreement to end a more than fifty-year-old insurgency is all the more remarkable given the past history of failed peace attempts between the two sides. Over the decades, the two sides have vacillated between violent efforts aimed at winning the conflict outright and imposing their own settlement terms on one another and efforts at dialogue aimed at settling the conflict through negotiation. While these two processes – violence and negotiation – seem distinct, they are inextricably linked to one another. Violence between the FARC and the Colombian government shaped the occurrence and outcomes of peace efforts between them. At the same time, negotiations between the two sides conditioned future violence between them.