Building civilian militarism: Colombia, internal war, and militarization in a mid-term perspective

Abstract In late 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia signed a peace agreement to bring an end to an internal war in Colombia that had lasted more than 50 years. During this process, pro-military attitudes within Colombian society that called for a hardline solution and rejected the peace agreement were highly visible, revealing the extent to which militarism had been embedded in Colombia over the years. This embedding of militarism had been enabled by the country’s many years of chaos and the use of counterinsurgency forms of warfare, which over the years had led civilian elites to adopt a militaristic approach to countering threats. In this article, I will examine key issues related to the central role of militarism and militarization in the scenario of violence and insecurity in Colombia, drawing on mid- and short-term historical perspectives, to highlight what I refer to as the country’s ‘civilian militarism’. First, I discuss how the main conceptual framing regarding militarism, militarization, and security applies to the Colombian case. Second, I describe and analyze the origin of civilian militarism in the context of the struggle between Colombia’s traditional political parties, and the militarization of the police and the intertwining of its role with that of the army as a legacy of that time. Third, I briefly examine how various presidential programs have embedded the concept of security in the 1990s and thereafter, though this is seen as a façade to enable the unfolding of a military approach to countering threats over the years, and how mandatory military service was used until recently as a tool to bolster support for militarism among everyday people.