The armed confrontation in Colombia is an important case of violence in the Americas. Escalating progressively since the mid-1970s, it has reached such an intensity that it now threatens to divide the country into three different territories: the northwest, dominated by counterinsurgent paramil itary groups; the Andean and central area, controlled by the constitutional armed forces; and the southeast, where leftist guerrillas prevail. Until re cently, such intranational or civil wars tended to be regarded as reflections of Cold War hostilities.1 Scholars focused on interstate or systemic dynam ics, and paid little attention to domestic conflicts, violent nonstate entrepre neurs, or the implications of intranational struggle for longer-term patterns of political change and state transformation in so-called Third World socie ties. By bringing real social actors back in, this study of armed conflict in contemporary Colombia shows that the state's monopoly of the means of violence?an attribute that is often considered as given, permanent, and even natural?is actually social and practical. Authority over the means of violence is contested and changing, and is, in fact, a variable quality of the state. What are the origins of the fragmentation observed in the case of Colombia? What kinds of cleavages threaten the contested configuration of the Colombian national state? If, as some allege, the Cold War provoked the conflict, then what accounts for the continuance of armed confrontation in the post-Cold War period? Unlike many current national conflicts, ethnic or religious divisions do not fuel the dispute in contemporary Colombia, and the class approach alone cannot account for the persistence of armed conflict or the variety of regional alignments shaped by the dispute. Even drug trafficking, which has contributed to the escalation of confrontation,