Aldo Civico, The Para-State: An Ethnography of Colombia’s Death Squads

Authors

Elena Sciandra, University of Trento

Abstract

"On August, 24, 2016, the Colombian conflict returned to the spotlight. On this day the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the last active guerrilla group, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionaria de Colombia), had been signed after decades of discontinuous peace talks. Such discontinuity, along with other peculiarities, have long piqued the interest of scholars in this conflict; not only is it one of the longest civil wars in recent history – its origin dating back to the end of the 1950s – it has also shaped the political, economic, and cultural life of the country. Started as sectarian riots motivated by political ideals, enduring violence and a drug-based economy soon emerged and consolidated, while the civilian population remained caught in a cycle of murders, targeted killings, disappearances, and forced displacement. According to official statistics, between 1958 and 2012 over 200,000 people died, 81.5 % of which were civilians, while more than 4.5 million people were internally displaced.1 Yet a comprehensive study of both the conflict and the actors involved is still lacking."

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Sciandra, Elena (2017) "Aldo Civico, The Para-State: An Ethnography of Colombia’s Death Squads," Qualitative Criminology (QC): Vol. 5: No. 1, Article 9.
Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/qc/vol5/iss1/9