Counterinsurgent Paternalism: Wartime Organizational Effectiveness in Colombia's DDR Program (2006-2016)

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Panel Session: War

Abstract

How do public sector organizations achieve high effectiveness during armed conflict? Scholarship on state capacity has long grappled with this question, and existing explanations tend to foreground the preferences and commitments of political elites. This paper argues that such accounts simultaneously overestimate the autonomous capacity of the state to reform itself from within and underestimate the degree to which the structural position of client populations shapes which pathways to effectiveness are available—and what alternatives are foreclosed. I propose a configurational explanation of wartime organizational effectiveness through the concept of Counterinsurgent Paternalism. Effectiveness of this kind, I argue, is neither a product of elite will nor of bureaucratic competence alone. It emerges, instead, from the interaction between a high programmatic consensus among political elites and organizational leadership, and a low coherence among the program’s target population. This combination produces public service delivery that is simultaneously effective by conventional metrics and deeply asymmetric in its power relations. Counterinsurgent Paternalism is illustrated through an account of the ARN’s first decade of operations (2006-2016). Colombia’s disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration agency, the ARN had managed over 50,000 demobilizations by 2016, when the government signed a landmark peace agreement with the FARC and the agency underwent substantial reform in anticipation of the guerrillas’ collective demobilization. The analysis draws on primary and secondary sources, as well as on over seventy original interviews with agency officials, former fighters, and policy actors.

Author

• Sebastián Rojas Cabal, Princeton University