State Weakness, Land Inequality, and the Limits of Peace: Colombia After the FARC Agreement

The war between the Colombian government and the FARC was a brutal conflict marked by decades of violence, and the 2016 peace agreement was a remarkable step towards stability in a country that had known little else but war for over half a century. This paper examines whether the 2016 peace agreement has meaningfully addressed the structural conditions that produced the conflict. It argues that state weakness, land inequality, and rural marginalization were core drivers of the conflict and the conditions that led to the emergence of the FARC. This paper argues that the main objective of the peace agreement is to repair these structural issues, and it assesses the substance of its measures to fix the structural foundations of the conflict. Evaluating the implementation of the peace agreement, this thesis finds that it has yet to change the underlying conditions that sustained the conflict.