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This study examines determinants of leftist violence at the municipal level in Colombia from 2000 through 2010. A multilevel GLMM model with a negative binomial distribution is used to take advantage of the information available at the municipal and department level. Surprisingly, inequality was not a significant covariate of violence, and agricultural GDP tended to reduce, instead of increase, guerrilla violence. The main risk factors identified include physical characteristics such as rugged topography and prior violence, but also factors that are candidates for policy action, such as unemployment, incorporation of the poor into public services, repression, and the energy and mining sector. These findings suggest interventions to decrease risks of guerrilla violence beyond merely strengthening the state. While repression tends to escalate violence, targeted policies to provide health benefits to those currently underserved, and securing mining and oil operations can effectively reduce the risk of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current peace process between the Colombian Government and FARC - EP in Havana has rekindled the debate over the limits and scope of transitional justice. Phenomena such as horizontal victimization, result of the indirect participation of civilians in the conflict, poses a number of challenges for the transitional justice model, which is defined at the table; in particular how to proceed when violence has been used among neighbors. This article focuses on this tension and, for that, this presents a description of the boundaries of transitional justice and discusses the contexts of opportunity where the horizontal victimization has taken place in a Colombian region strongly affected by the armed conflict, la Sierra de La Macarena. The article concludes with the formulation of a hypothesis aimed at proposing a possible alternative in order to overcome the horizontal violence in the post conflict:, which is the possible complementarity between transitional mechanisms and the local experiences of community justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Illegal organizations, like mafia syndicates, gangs, and insurgencies, are often highly cohesive and hostile toward the outside world. Such groups cultivate a particular form of “anti-social” capital, which relies on ingroup bonding and limits outgroup bridging for the purpose of commissioning illicit acts. We argue that experiences within the group leave members with varying intensities of anti-social capital, and that higher intensities lead to significantly weaker relationships with political institutions and civil society, even many years after they exit the group. We test this theory using survey data from 1,485 former members of insurgent and paramilitary groups in Colombia, along with insights from 68 qualitative interviews. We find strong evidence that anti-social capital has individually varying and sticky effects on former members. These effects are pervasive and intense, and exhibit surprising and counterintuitive properties: former members of pro-state militia with higher levels of anti-social capital are systematically less likely to trust political institutions, while members of peasant-based insurgent groups with high levels of anti-social capital are less likely to participate in their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]