DEFENSE AND SECURITY STUDIES
Violence, State building, and paramilitaries / V. 6 • N. 2 • 12th Edition • November 2011
public interest, legal, and rights of citizenship are all doubtful representations of the state’s significance; nonetheless, these conditions have been continuously defined by the counterfactual hypothesis: “to assume that the state will emerge strong after all weeds have been pulled. However, this is a false start: sometimes the weed seems to be the foundation, the root, of the state”12.
justified the undeniable burden of being a sovereign state have been limited to the elites and have not been extended to the general public whose lives could be improved by independence or may even be affected by it. These states are essentially legal but are still far from complete, in other words, these are empirical states largely yet to be built. Therefore, I will refer to them as “quasi-states”14.
Consequently, post-colonial states, although fulfilling some of the characteristics noted above, are states that exist due more to formal acceptance by the international community (what we call negative sovereignty Robert Jackson) than due to their own ability to establish a stable economic, political, and legal framework13.
Therefore, taking into account the elements observed in Mann, Escalante, and Jackson, in this paper the Colombian state will be considered a state built on non-systematic or linear events (in which war played some role). It is a state suffering from serious shortcomings in its politicaladministrative structure15, whose weaknesses create power vacuums that have been coopted by illegal organizations that are deployed in some sectors of the national territory in violation of the sovereignty and state institutions.
In this sense, it is possible to recognize that Colombia is a post-colonial country, which suffers from some institutional weaknesses common to such countries and, according to Jackson’s criteria had elements of a negative sovereignty. Furthermore, it is with a quasi-state that there are some institutional gaps which have been co-opted by illegal groups, as will be shown later. Jackson’s notion of quasi-state, fits the administrative-political reality of the country since such states are those that: “Such states have not been approved or authorized nationally, and therefore lack the institutional features of sovereign states as also defined by traditional international law. These states have a limited statehood character: their populations do not have many advantages traditionally associated with statehood. Their governments are often deficient in political will, institutional authority, and organizing power to protect human rights or provide socioeconomic welfare. The precise benefits that have historically
12 Ibíd. pág 68. 13 JACKSON, Robert, “Quasi-estates: Sovereignty, international relations and third world” Cambridge studies in international relations: V12, 1990, págs 21-25.
36
Now war has been a constituent factor of the Colombian state, therefore, it is essential to identify the composition of such war and any violent events associated to it, in order to determine not only its impact on the dynamics of the state but also to recognize the development of self-defense groups and the violence that derive from its existence (i.e. the emerging criminal gangs). In this sense, it is possible to recognize different forms of violent events that can also be identified as common features in relation to: the type of violence inflicted, motivation or origin of the violence, the
14 Ibíd, pág 21. 15 Much can be said about the weaknesses and the flaws of the Colombian State. Next I will enumerate a few. First the Colombian state has a “disability” to integrate the historical homeland and to establish a legitimate monopoly of force and the production of regulations “(see Orjuela: Sociedad Colombiana en los 90’s. 2005. Pp 71) to its time, “the weakness of the Colombian state is due to a limited territorial integration” (ibid), in addition, Colombia suffers from a “regional political and social fragmentation, and the elites that have prevented the structuring of an effective system of power and have been one of the reasons why centralization is weak “(ibid) added to this” almost 60% of the territory consists of areas that are not integrated or poorly integrated into the economic, political and social life “(ibid). Consequently, it is clear that there is a political and administrative structural weakness in the country, namely the absence of a genuine agrarian reform, the inability to generate a state with order and no credibility and integration of all production sectors.