Over the course of a decades-long armed conflict, the Colombian state took a variety of approaches toward its insurgent opponent, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Successive governments swung between pursuing negotiations and responding with military counterinsurgency measures. FARC, for its part, proclaimed its commitment to "the combination of all forms of struggle": seeking legitimation through both political and military means.
Investigating the relationship between FARC and the Colombian state from the outbreak of conflict in 1964 to the signing of the final peace agreement in 2016, Alexandra Rachel Phelan offers new insight into the dynamics of insurgencies. In such conflicts, both states and insurgents seek to assert their legitimacy, which has crucial implications for any prospective resolution. Phelan examines how FARC adopted different means of legitimation as part of its overall political and military strategy and how these strategies influenced government responses. She argues that the case of Colombia demonstrates that insurgents are more likely to engage in negotiations when the state recognizes their political legitimacy than when it demands their defeat. During a protracted conflict, when it is unclear that the state can win by military strength alone, offering incentives for political settlements can minimize-and perhaps even end-fighting. Drawing on interviews with former and active FARC leaders and Colombian government officials, as well as access to key primary documents, this book sheds new light on the Colombian conflict and provides rich theoretical understanding of the role of legitimacy in counterinsurgency more broadly.
Industry Reviews
This book is a welcomed addition to the growing literature on Colombia's turbulent history and civil wars. Alexandra Phelan skillfully delves into the struggle for political power and legitimacy between the state and its main contender, the armed Marxist rebels of the FARC. -- Nazih Richani, author of Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia
The Combination of All Forms of Struggle by Alexandra Phelan is an important contribution to the literature on how terrorist and insurgency campaigns end. Using Colombia as a case study, Phelan's incisive analysis, based on extensive and meticulous field work, provides fresh insights into how non-state actors build legitimacy through a combined strategy of violence and negotiation. -- Professor Bruce Hoffman, Georgetown University
Alexandra Phelan's book is a conceptual and descriptive synthesis of Colombian governments from 1982 to 2016 to find a way out of the last, longest and most complex armed conflict on the continent. Based on an impressive mass of documents and field interviews, Phelan illuminates this trajectory of the Colombian armed conflict from a creative combination of the Gramscian approach to coercion and legitimacy, with the Weberian approach on sources and structures of local or national power. But unlike the many studies on the recent peace process, Phelan here carefully explores the history of the subject of negotiation and antagonism, in its demands, its changing ways of relating to the civilian population and with the State. And, above all, how after a long pendulum movement of war and negotiation, the convergent conditions occur that lead the insurgency to sit at the table with the Santos government in 2013 and not get up from it until signing the Havana Accords in 2016. It is a negotiation process that has been nourished by numerous international experiences, and at the same time stands as a model for future processes in the way of building an agenda, of processing differences, and institutionalizing a type of transitional justice agreed upon between the parties. An essential text for students, academics, and experts in negotiations and theories of armed conflict resolution. -- Gonzalo Sanchez-Gomez, Emeritus Professor at the National University of Colombia and Former Director of Colombia's National Centre for Historical Memory
Dr. Phelan's use of unique primary sources, fieldwork, and expert analysis provides a magisterial understanding of the incredible story of how the FARC and the Colombia government negotiated an end of a decades-long conflict. Her convincing presentation of the FARC's drive for legitimacy make this a must read for anyone interested in insurgency and civil war. -- Craig Whiteside, Ph.D., U.S. Naval War College at the Naval Postgraduate School
