Why do rebel splinter groups emerge during peace processes, and who chooses to defect? Since Colombia's landmark peace agreement with the FARC in 2016, roughly half of the territory once controlled by the group has seen a resurgence of rebel activity by FARC splinter groups. I argue that the FARC's return to arms is a case of “middle-out fragmentation,” whereby opportunities for profit induce mid- or low-ranking rebel commanders to establish splinter groups. In Colombia, I argue that profits from the cocaine trade incentivized local-level FARC officers to defect from the peace agreement and allowed them to rapidly mobilize viable splinter groups. I offer several lines of evidence for this argument. I first construct a chronology of splinter group formation, which demonstrates that mid- and low-level commanders, rather than high-level commanders, were the key drivers of fragmentation. Second, I show that splinter groups emerged in areas where opportunities for profit were greatest. Among areas previously controlled by the FARC, those with coca cultivation prior to the peace agreement were up to thirty-seven percentage points more likely to see splinter groups emerge by 2020 than areas without significant production. Using soil and weather conditions to instrument for coca cultivation produces similar results. Further, I use a novel measure of how critical each municipality is to drug trafficking to show that areas that are theoretically most important for drug trafficking are also more likely to see FARC resurgence. I also address competing explanations related to state capacity, terrain, and popular support for the rebels. These findings highlight an important challenge to peacebuilding: satisfying the political demands of rebel leadership is a necessary but insufficient component of peace agreements in cases where opportunities for profit motivate fragmentation from the middle out.

Targeted sanctions, namely asset freezes and travel bans, are no longer the province of foreign policy alone. They are increasingly often used by governments in response to crime, such as corruption, human rights abuse, cybercrime, drug trafficking, and transnational organized crime writ large. Such sanctions are imposed based on permissive evidential standards, such as that of “credible evidence” or “reasonable grounds to suspect.” Their advent has added a new layer to a multi-tier system of state responses to crime. First, there is the traditional approach of criminal prosecution and conviction based on the criminal standard of proof. Second, one rung below is non-conviction based asset forfeiture, a notionally civil confiscation of supposed proceeds of crime that eschews the need for compliance with a suite of criminal trial safeguards. At the third level of this hierarchy are crime-based targeted sanctions, which vest the state with the greatest latitude in dealing with suspected criminals. Based on a wide-ranging analysis of international practice, this article contends that not only are crime-based sanctions de facto a criminal justice tool, but also that a coherent set of principles is required to determine their relationship with other responses to criminal behavior.

El presente artículo examina el fenómeno del homicidio en Colombia y busca comprender las condiciones de vulnerabilidad que afectan al homicidio en las ciudades colombianas. A través de un enfoque teórico y metodológico basado en la vulnerabilidad se analizó dicha relación entre la violencia homicida con los mercados ilegales, los mercados laborales pauperizados y la repartición de la riqueza. La muestra se compuso de las treinta y dos ciudades capitales departamentales de Colombia. Se usaron herramientas estadísticas multivariadas (PLS-SEM) para analizar la relación entre estos factores y el homicidio. Los hallazgos sugieren que los bajos ingresos, la falta de empleo, la desigualdad y la violencia están asociados con un mayor riesgo de homicidio.

The motivations of armed groups are widely considered to be irrelevant for the applicability of international humanitarian law (IHL). As long as organized violence is of sufficient intensity, and armed groups have sufficient capacity to coordinate and carry out military operations, there is an armed conflict for purposes of international law. It follows that large-scale criminal organizations can, in principle, be treated legally on a par with political insurgent groups. Drug cartels in particular, if sufficiently armed and well organized, can constitute armed opposition groups in the legal sense when their confrontation with State forces is sufficiently intense. This article problematizes this interpretation. It corroborates standing legal doctrine in finding that subjective motives are not a sound basis to exclude the application of IHL, but it argues that a workable distinction can be made between the strategic logic and the organizational goals of criminal groups and those of political insurgents. Drawing on a growing body of empirical studies on the political economy of criminal violence, a strong presumption is defended against qualifying as armed conflict organized violence involving criminal organizations.

Money laundering repression and asset recovery are tools that share a very relevant preventive–general role. Both measures in Criminal Law seek to inhibit the monetary stimulus to commit offenses. The former does so by hampering the flow of earnings from illicit sources, and the latter by confiscating the earnings from their beneficiaries. These interlinked goals prove to be most useful from a criminal policy standpoint in the fight against organized crime since they are oriented to the economic disabling of their agents, blockading their financial movement and depriving them of the profits thus generated. This article explains the status of Paraguayan law and its application on these issues.

The origin of illicit economies has been understood as a consequence of ‘low stateness’ (i.e. low reach of the state). Given the limited stateness in many regions, however, this article seeks to explain how only some sub-national territories have become vulnerable to illegal drug trafficking. To make this case, the representative example of the Alto Huallaga valley, in the Peruvian Amazon, is analysed. This article argues that ineffective development and settlement efforts by the Peruvian state in the Alto Huallaga, rather than the absence of the state, produced socio-ecological conditions in the region, in the late 1970s, that made it more vulnerable to the illegal economy. At the same time as international demand for illegal cocaine was expanding, two conditions resulting from frustrated state development plans came together: an enclave of poor peasants who were not self-sufficient and a natural environment impoverished by soil degradation and intensive deforestation, paradoxically not suitable for any crop except coca.