This chapter examines the identity construction and related stigmatization within the framing contest of desmovilizados (deserters) versus reincorporados (loyalists). While this contest is primarily amongst groups of ex-combatants themselves, the government also plays a role not only by encouraging desertion, but also by contesting both sides, grouping all ex-combatants under the same criminal label, and discrediting any frame constructed by combatants and/or ex-combatants. While this contest is much less structured and the frames emerged more organically – particularly as the deserters do not have a clear leadership constructing a strategic frame for them, nor a clearly defined audience – it was still having a powerful influence on reintegration experiences. In this last contest, which overlaps with all the others, language and labelling are key, as these components both create stigma and help ex-combatants fight against it.

This chapter lays out the background of the current conflict in Colombia, explaining why, despite the peace agreement in 2016, Colombia is far from a “post-conflict” country. This chapter discusses the disputes around the peace agreement, the history of previous peace agreements and attempted disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs in Colombia, and the ongoing problems with ex-combatant unemployment, reintegration, and recidivism into violence and illegal activities. The chapter also discusses how hierarchies of victimhood have become a flashpoint in the Colombian peace process, especially regarding the government’s resistance to including victims of state violence in reparations process.

The value of this book is, above all, in its erudite restatement of the centrality of Latin America to the theorization of populism and, by implication, representation, citizenship and the state. That the region does not occupy a more important position within the sociological literature on populism, citizenship and the state, and is not used more widely as the basis for comparative social theory, is a frank mystery – and one this book sets out to challenge. The fault lies with longstanding biases in social science that mean Latin American states and societies are more frequently studied for what they fail to be, instead of what they are. There is little point imagining Latin American states will behave like European ones since they emerged from quite different social and political circumstances, have different levels of capacity, and face different dilemmas. But, instead of probing these differences analytically, Latin America so often finds itself shoehorned into social and political theories that render it, almost inevitably, failing and deviant. And even when the region offers rich, complex, multifaceted histories of important political phenomena that could serve as the starting point for wider theoretical debate – as with populism – its vital contribution is still all too easily side-lined or bolted awkwardly onto theories driven by Anglophone and European narratives. In the case of populism, this really is a huge opportunity lost, since on this particular subject, Latin America is a gift that keeps on giving, as this admirable set of studies makes abundantly clear.

All experiments in populist politics begin with grievances of citizens or subjects who think they deserve better from government. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that one important contribution of this collection stems from the set of essays that explores populism as the expression of those grievances within the context of the Latin American left. Emphasizing the roots of populism as – at least at times – a vehicle for progressive social demands, stands in refreshing contrast to the contemporary emphasis, in the media and European scholarship especially, on populism as the expression of radical right politics and the rise of chauvinism, racism, xenophobia and extreme, and frequently gendered, law and order programmes of social control.

For decades, two sophisticated historiographies, postcolonialism and critical archival studies emphasized that knowledge is power and that archives are power. These two formulas have been subject to recent criticism from a small group of renowned researchers, who stress that knowledge and archives do not possess such a linear and direct relationship with domination. It remains for us, therefore, to explore how, and in which specific social contexts, knowledge and archives allow administrations to achieve more power. This chapter follows the Council of the Indies during its nomadic existence, from 1524 to 1561, in which ministers prioritized communication with vassals (along with a subsequent incoherence of imperial policies) over an assertive, coherent program. This chapter also explores the decision-making technologies of this nomadic council, especially how it applied limited textual hermeneutics to petitions. It also follows the extraordinary juntas: committees which occasionally convened to solve imperial crises and which applied more sophisticated knowledge-based decisions to Indies problems. Nonetheless, I argue, the Council’s members recognized the inefficacy of its theological approaches and its largely nonarchival hermeneutics, setting the stage for reform.

The concluding chapter extends the book’s theoretical insights in three ways. First, it explores the extent to which the causal process elaborated here might travel beyond irregular civil war settings and reflect processes of institutional change in other threat-laden environments. Second, it revisits the theory’s scope conditions and discusses when we might observe the wartime emergence of state-bolstering or “reinforcing” rules, as well as whether different institutional logics can emerge in distinct policy arenas within the same state. Finally, it elaborates the broader theoretical, conceptual, and policy implications of this research. It focuses particular attention on what this framework means for state development amid armed conflict, the relationship between the state and organized crime in war, the theory and practice of post-conflict reconstruction, and understandings of “the state” more broadly.

Chapter 3 provides a concise history of Guatemala’s and Nicaragua’s highly divergent conflict dynamics, but also illustrates how similarly narrow and insulated counterinsurgent coalitions emerged. The chapter first describes the road to armed conflict in both countries. It then examines the variables central to the process of wartime institutional change: the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat and the creation of a narrow counterinsurgent elite coalition with heightened decision-making discretion. It chronicles two moments in the Guatemalan armed conflict (the late-1960s and mid-1970s) and one moment in Nicaragua’s Contra War (early to mid-1980s) in which state leaders perceived a marked increase in the threat posed by insurgent forces. Finally, it examines how this sense of state vulnerability reconfigured wartime structures of political power in both cases as state leaders sought to combat the mounting insurgent threat.

Chapter 9 chronicles the postwar trajectory of extrajudicial killings within the Guatemalan police. It first examines state violence during the transition period and subsequent postwar police reforms, which included the creation of the new National Civilian Police (PNC) in 1997. The chapter then analyzes how the dominant wartime distributional coalition managed to survive peacebuilding reforms and uphold the undermining rules governing extrajudicial executions to eliminate “undesirables.” In an important contrast from the case of Guatemala’s customs administration, the PNC saw the direct reentry of these groups into the upper echelons of the security cabinet, highlighting a different pathway of institutional persistence.