The role of conflict in the 2023 local elections in Colombia

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On October 29, regional elections will be held in Colombia, where 32 governors, 418 deputies from departmental assemblies, 1,102 mayors, 12,072 councilors and 6,513 mayors of local Administrative Boards will be elected. These local elections are fundamental to the provision of local resources and governing across Colombia. Yet they will take place in a complex conflict setting, where despite the 2016 peace agreement and the broad disarmament and demobilization of the FARC-EP, legacies of this group’s conflict governance and a number of other non-state armed actors remain. This conversation among researchers will center around the role of conflict – including that of active and former armed groups – on local elections and electoral participation in Colombia. We will be discussing some of the main empirical insights from this literature and tying the potential implications of this work to the upcoming local elections.

Invited Panelists:

Jamie Shenk is a political sociologist interested in the intersection of armed conflict, democratic governance, and environmental politics with a regional focus on Latin America. Her current book project investigates the implementation of participatory democracy in regions affected by and transitioning from armed conflict. It focuses on communities’ use of the consulta popular (local referenda) to contest the development of large-scale extractives projects in their territories in Colombia from 2013-2018 as a case study She is currently a Democracy Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. She holds a DPhil in Sociology from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Latin American Studies from the same university. Her work is published in Comparative Politics and Journal of Peace Research.

Andres Uribe is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he studies political violence in democracies. His dissertation project, “Coercion and Capture in Democratic Politics,” examines how violent nonstate groups seek to influence the democratic process. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of rebel, paramilitary, and criminal groups in Latin America, it identifies the conditions that lead these actors to intervene in electoral politics, the structural forces that determine whether they succeed or fail, and the consequences of these interventions for democratic institutions and policy outcomes. Other projects explore processes of statebuilding during war, governance by nonstate actors, and the political strategies of anti-democratic politicians. Andres’ research has been supported by the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts and the University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies. He was a United States Institute of Peace (USIP) Peace Scholar in 2019-20. He holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a BA in History from Harvard College.

Christoph Sponsel is a DPhil Candidate in Politics at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on political participation in peace process societies, with a regional focus on Latin America. For his doctoral dissertation, Christoph analyses the involvement and influence of demobilized rebels in protests and social movements using Colombia as a case study. Before joining Oxford, Christoph studied economics at Yale, Cambridge, and the Barcelona School of Economics and business administration at Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid.

María Ignacia Curiel is a PhD Candidate in Politics at New York University and will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Democracy Development and Rule of Law starting in September 2023. She uses empirical and experimental methods to study the participation of formerly violent actors in democracy. Her dissertation, Rebel Party Perseverance: The Political Paths of Former Fighters, analyzes electoral transitions from conflict and the conditions that shape the democratic commitment of parties with violent origins. This work draws both from an in-depth empirical study of Comunes, a Colombian political party formed by the former FARC guerrilla, and from the study of broad patterns in rebel party behaviors across contexts. María’s work has been supported by the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Folke Bernadotte Academy. She has previously conducted research for the United Nations University Center for Policy Research on ex-combatant reintegration into civilian life, consulted for a Caracas-based organization on state-sponsored killings and police militarization and worked for the Inter-American Development Bank on the evolution of Venezuela’s energy infrastructure.