The agrarian question and violence in Colombia: conflict and development

This article examines connections between Colombia’s internal armed conflict and agrarian questions. It pays attention to the country’s specific historical trajectory of agrarian change, the violent expression of social tensions that this elicited, and the particular ways in which these dynamics were influenced by a changing global context.This analysis of the intimate ties between violent conflict and agrarian questions in Colombia, both in terms of their historical development and their contemporary manifestations, challenges popular notions of the relationship between armed conflict and development. In particular, the article contributes to a critique of the conventional version of the conflict–development nexus by illustrating ways in which the experience of capitalist development in Colombia has been violent and produced poverty.