The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) exists as a lonely island in a sea of corporate sugarcane. Standing at the gates of CIAT outside Palmira, Colombia, one absorbs the contrast between the research orientation of the CGIAR’s global food system model and the reality of corporate monoculture. This chapter situates CIAT’s history globally and locally. It introduces Colombian precursors, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Colombian Agricultural Program (1950–64), and the pivot to globally oriented international agricultural research centres in the 1960s. It contextualizes how CIAT came into existence amid broader Cold War and Green Revolution transitions. Just as scholars of the Colombian conflict have examined the effect of “deterritorialization” in the intensification of conflict, the chapter shows how the CGIAR network further internationalized and detached agricultural science from local contexts and applications. Paradoxically, despite the Green Revolution’s well-known Cold War geopolitical aspects, the creation of CIAT and CGIAR inadvertently contributed to the specific geographic, political, and economic conditions that fed armed conflict in Colombia.

Proportionality purports to contrast means with ends to decide whether a specific rule breaches the Constitution. The chapter starts by analyzing discussion of the 2016 agreements between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla in the Colombian Constitutional Court, whose justices split over the standard of review to be used to decide the scope of the special legislative powers conferred to the president to implement the Peace Agreement. Part of the Court believed that those special presidential powers were to be scrutinized under stringent standards similar to those applied in judicial review of emergency powers. Others pointed out, by contrast, that those powers were to be deployed not in an emergency setting, but in a transitional one where more lenient standards of review apply. The chapter suggests that this debate between exception and transition illuminates the analysis of how judicial discourses build relations between means – legislative and executive norms – and goals – attaining peace – adding dimensions to the proportionality/necessity framework as a field where judges deploy their powers to exert political control over other public branches. While the Court framed the debate around the concept of “necessity,” Colombian constitutional discussions suggest that necessity and proportionality could even be interchangeable concepts.