ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the Colombian peace agreement’s potential for bringing about deeply needed structural transformations, such as greater political incorporation and a stronger and more equal access to the rule of law. It also discusses the obstacles to implementation that ensue from the country’s historical violent equilibrium—whereby elites in the periphery profit from violence and state weakness, and the political center allows them to persist at the local level as long as they do not affect its interests or its rule—and from the agreement’s legitimacy deficit—resulting from the lack of sufficient popular support to its ratification and from the absence of more democratic mechanisms to address it. The chapter argues that the implementation of the peace agreement is pierced by a profound paradox: The transformations that it seeks to bring about require minimal preconditions that do not exist, and whose absence is the precise reason why such transformations are so important. The agreement’s implementation ordeal can largely be explained by this paradox, which impeded the consolidation of a strong basis of support for peace. However, this initial deficiency has been countered by the configuration of a new popular bloc, which pushes for the fulfillment of the transformational promises of the agreement. Even though this mobilization has increased the stakes of violence and thus made peace-seekers more vulnerable to it, it has also made them more willing to collectively struggle against violence. This gives reasons to hope that, despite the enormous difficulties and power asymmetries, Colombia might be beginning a new period in which the political discussion focuses on redistributive issues where leftist anti-status quo stances have a central role—something unprecedented in the country’s history.
