Social leaders play a crucial role in serving as mediators between communities and authorities. What happens when these leaders are systematically eliminated from their communities? This paper argues that the systematic elimination of social leaders not only weakens communities’ organisational capacity to denounce and resist criminal politicians but also heightens the fear and reduces the pool of leaders that can potentially run against them in the future. Focusing on the cycle of violence in 1980s Colombia, I find that towns exposed to violence against social activists experienced the rise of criminal politicians in the 2000s. Furthermore, survey evidence suggests that violence in these areas heightened citizens’ fear and diminished their willingness to politically mobilise. This paper underscores the importance of social leaders for sustaining democracy and highlights how their selective assassination facilitates the rise of criminal politicians.

How does state-perpetrated violence shape political preferences during conflict? This paper examines how property rights expansion conditions electoral responses to state violence, drawing on three rounds of presidential elections in Colombia. I argue that state violence alone does not generate electoral backlash against law-and-order politicians. Instead, by reducing dependence on state officials and fostering political autonomy, secure property rights can amplify voter rejection of coercive platforms in areas with a legacy of state-perpetrated violence. Empirical evidence from municipal-level analyses and a regression discontinuity design based on Colombia’s land restitution program supports this argument. The results show that granting property rights significantly weakens electoral support for candidates advocating coercive security policies, particularly in regions with histories of state violence. These findings highlight the role of property rights in reshaping political accountability and voter behavior in contexts marked by state repression.

How do state interventions targeting illicit economies influence armed violence? Using Colombia as a critical case, we argue that aerial spraying of coca crops exacerbates violence by destabilizing local power dynamics and disrupting interactions among armed actors, civilians, and the state. Using municipal-level data from 2000 to 2015, we find that aerial spraying increases overall levels of violence in affected areas. Aerial spraying, we find, propitiates retaliatory violence against the state, stimulates turf wars between armed organizations, and produces civilian victimization. Moreover, we show that paramilitaries and criminal organizations respond more sharply to aerial spraying, escalating retaliation against the state and violence against civilians. By contrast, insurgent violence remains more consistent, driven by ideological goals and largely independent of eradication efforts. These findings reveal how fleeting large-scale interventions can inadvertently fuel conflict by altering the strategic equilibria of violent actors in illicit economies.

The expansion of mining and conflict violence are closely related phenomena, but there is widespread variation in the coercive responses state actors embrace to subdue resistance to mining. To explain this variation, we emphasize the interplay of motives (incentives) and opportunities (enabling conditions) available to state actors. Contrasting previous approaches, we provide a cross national analysis on the determinants of coercive responses for all Latin American countries. Our analysis also considers various forms of violent and non-violent coercive responses by the state. Our results support a motive-based explanation: state actors adopt coercive responses when the mobilizing capacity of communities as shown by indigenous involvement is the strongest, and when the economic potential of mining properties as indicated by their lootability is the highest. Our findings have implications for the expansion of extractive activities beyond mining.

Extensive research suggests that electoral competition and power alternations increase violence in weakly institutionalized democracies. Yet, little is known about how political parties affect violence and security. We theorize that the type of party strengthened in elections shapes security outcomes and argue that the rise of programmatic parties, at the expense of clientelistic parties, can significantly reduce violence. In contexts of large-scale criminal violence, programmatic parties are less likely to establish alliances with coercive actors because they possess fewer incentives and greater coordination capacity. Focusing on Brazil, we use a regression discontinuity design that leverages the as-if random assignment of election winners across three rounds of mayoral races. We find that violent crime decreased in municipalities where programmatic parties won coin-flip elections, while it increased in those where clientelistic parties triumphed. Our findings suggest that whether electoral competition increases violence depends on the type of party that wins elections.

Some politicians engage in relationships with criminal actors in pursuit of mutual interests. How does their rise to power affect state capacity? I focus on one of Colombia’s worst episodes of criminal politics to understand how the victory of paramilitary-friendly mayors impacted subnational taxation. Focusing on close races, I find that the victory of a paramilitary-friendly mayor in 2007 led to a substantive drop in property taxation in subsequent years. I argue that criminal collusion allows politicians and criminals to accumulate wealth and political power, but doing so requires them to deliberately undermine local state institutions. Indeed, the evidence suggests that municipalities governed by paramilitary-friendly politicians experienced a weakening of property rights, the worsening of local judicial institutions, and an alteration of the electoral playing field. Rather than a mere consequence of criminal collusion, state weakening is a politically strategic decision that serves the interests of both criminals and politicians.

How do post-conflict societies contain large-scale criminal violence when state security forces that committed atrocities during a civil war remain unpunished and become key players in the criminal underworld? This article explores the impact on violence reduction of internationalized prosecution (IP): cooperation agreements between an international organization and a country’s public prosecutors to dismantle state-criminal networks through judicial action. We assess the IP process by which the United Nations-sponsored International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) and Guatemala’s law enforcement dismantled over 70 criminal structures led by death squads and the civil war military establishment. Using synthetic control models, we estimate that Guatemala’s IP process plausibly prevented the occurrence of between 20,000 and 30,000 homicides, from 2008 until 2019. Case studies show how IP contributed to violence reduction by removing criminal structures and deterring both state-criminal collusion and the state’s use of iron-fist militarized policies against crime.

Revenue, especially that from agricultural crops, has been considered fundamental for the development of state capacity. While existing research has mostly focused on dynamics of violence, we know less about the impact of commodities shocks on a key dimension of state power: property taxation. In this article, I explore how and why land-based coalitions—alliances between landowners and paramilitaries around the appropriation of land—undermine taxation during civil conflict. Focusing on the expansion of oil palm in Colombia and using a difference-in-differences design, I leverage the international price of oil palm and municipal variation in crop suitability. I find that, in municipalities with higher paramilitary violence and land concentration, the palm shock was associated with lower taxation, outdated cadastral information, and lower land values. This article underscores the deleterious consequences of land inequality for the state’s extractive capacity even in moments of agricultural abundance.

What is the effect of foreign aid on the survival of autocratic regimes? Extant work about the effect of foreign aid on the recipient’s political regime has come to contradictory conclusions. Current findings display the full spectrum of possibilities from a democratizing effect to the enhancement of authoritarian survival. While some studies suggest that foreign aid strengthen autocrats and their incentives to cling to power, others have focused on specific periods and donors, thus finding a democratizing effect of foreign aid. In this article, we argue that the effect of foreign aid on autocratic survival does not operate in a direct way, but it is conditional on the levels of political leverage exerted by democratic donors vis-à-vis the autocratic leaders. This leverage, we find, is defined by the capability of democratic donors to back conditionality with effective political pressure. More specifically, we find that given similar levels of aid, autocratic recipients that are highly dependent on the United States—a quintessential democratic donor with extensive political influence—have a shorter survival rate when compared to those with which the United States has weaker ties and thus lower leverage.

What are the subnational variations of violence against voters? This article studies the effect of land concentration on electoral violence in the context of armed conflict in Colombia. My central argument is that electoral violence tends to be higher in municipalities where landowners are a relevant social actor. More concretely, in areas where violent groups dispute territorial control, higher levels of land inequality—a proxy for landowner prominence—have a positive effect on electoral violence. However, actors do not make the simple choice between violence or no violence but may also resort to fraudulent tactics. Because electoral fraud requires greater cooperation and coordination with the state, I argue that violent groups with stronger links to state officials and political elites are more likely to engage in fraudulent tactics compared to anti-government actors. To estimate the effect of land inequality on electoral coercion and fraud, I exploit the levels of soil quality as an instrumental variable for land concentration in Colombia between 2002 and 2011. This article contributes to the literature on the politics of land inequality; elections and electoral manipulation; and the use of violence in democratic settings.