ABSTRACT The Colombian state has achieved forms of stability that rest on its capacity to share sovereignty with both legal and illegal subnational actors. Based on graph theory, this work examines the logic of cooperation that underpins the state’s presence in the port of Buenaventura. To do so, a documentary investigation of judicial sources and academic studies is undertaken, and relationship networks are constructed. Graph reconstruction sheds light on the presence of shared sovereignties in Buenaventura, as forms of collaborative control are not the exclusive domain of the Colombian state. In Buenaventura, these rules come from interactions between political leaders, the military, and criminals.

ABSTRACT: This article traces the Colombian state’s constructions of indigeneity and territory to highlight their enduring inter-relation. In this inter-relation, “territory” is conflated with rural areas, and territorial rights are confined to Indigenous resguardos (reserves). Three political implications arise from this inter-relation. First, Indigenous collectives in urban areas face continued obstacles to recognition. Second, while resguardos have been critiqued for enclosing communities, attention should also be paid to Indigenous political struggles to exceed their boundaries. Third, some transitional justice measures that grant victimhood to Indigenous territories have reproduced essentialist notions of “territory” and culture, undermining their decolonial potential.

Abstract How did the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army (FARC-EP) survive the Colombian state counterinsurgency campaign? This article introduces the concept of counterinsurgency at work as a dynamic that captures the interaction between the practices of the adaptation strategies deployed by the FARC-EP, specifically increased mobility and quarantine, and the Colombian state counterinsurgency efforts from the late 1990s to the 2010s. I argue that the FARC-EP deployed adaptation strategies in response to a modernized Colombian military apparatus by repurposing and incorporating new roles, practices, and rules, which nonetheless had multiple, contradictory effects on this group's inner workings. Evidence from life histories with former FARC-EP combatants and retired personnel from the Colombian armed forces demonstrates this interplay. Life histories with ex-combatants shed light on how increased mobility and quarantine played out in the everyday with contradictory effects. For instance, while both created bonding and readiness, they disrupted socialization institutions and fractured ties with the local population. Retired military personnel's life histories show the different counterinsurgency strategies the Colombian state simultaneously deployed against the FARC-EP, prompting its adaptation capabilities. This article contributes to ongoing discussions on the transformations of armed organizations during the war. It also advances insurgent adaptability scholarship by examining the life histories of participants from both sides of the Colombian armed conflict.

This article explores the challenges of conceptualising and researching power and the State in Latin America and potentially beyond, with a particular focus on Colombia. It makes the case for using ‘elite constellations’ (Savage and Nichols 2018), through an iterative research process, i.e. moving back and forth between theory and data, including constructing a database of Colombian elites as well as qualitative research. Oligarchic elites, whose capital rests on wealth, are the most powerful of constellations. However, to understand how they maintain, protect, adapt and expand their interests, it is important to explore the relationships between them and other elite constellations which draw on varied capitals and in Bourdieu’s terms, dictate and at times dispute the dominant principles of domination in a society. The idea of elite constellations challenges assumptions of homogeneity in rule by the few and/or rule by wealth while recognising ‘unity in the dispersion of power’.

This article highlights the international responsibility of the Colombian State for failing to fulfill its duty of due diligence in preventing, addressing, and sanctioning violence against women as a guarantee of access to justice in cases related to the crime of femicide in Colombia under Law 1761 of 2015. The study grounds its theoretical framework in the paradigm of critical legal theory and feminist theory. Through a qualitative design, the research identifies how the State violates women's human rights by failing to comply with international law. The contribution to knowledge focuses on the consolidation of effective affirmative measures proposed by women as a strategy for the formal realization of due diligence in the lives of women in Colombia.

Abstract This article examines the role of gastrodiplomacy in Colombia’s efforts to enhance its nation brand and cultural diplomacy on the global stage. By analysing the initiatives led by ProColombia, state dinners hosted by the Colombian governments, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Plan for the Promotion of Colombia Abroad, the study explores how culinary heritage is leveraged as a tool of soft power to foster international relations, strengthen national identity, and promote cultural diversity. Drawing on qualitative methods, including content and discourse analysis of policy documents and academic literature, the research highlights the strategic use of Colombian cuisine to project a positive image abroad. The findings underscore the interplay between gastronomic diplomacy, nation branding, and public diplomacy, while identifying limitations in the representation of marginalised communities and regional cuisines in these efforts.

This study investigates the experiences of community workers who support Venezuelan migrants to access mental health care in Nariño, Colombia, an important migratory site on the southern border with Ecuador. The Colombian state has done much to enable healthcare access for the 2.86 million Venezuelan migrants in the country, but major barriers to services remain. This qualitative study explores access to services and unmet needs in mental health for migrants in this region. A phenomenological approach was adopted. Participants were selected from a range of frontline community organisations. Semi-structured interviews were completed remotely and reflexive thematic analysis of the data was performed. The timing of this study - during a period of reduction of funding for humanitarian projects in the region - permits insights into the concerns of community workers facing a critical gap in mental health care for migrants with irregular status, particularly a striking lack of services for unaccompanied men in transit. This study identifies concerns about the pervasive nature of psychoactive substance use in unaccompanied men in transit, raising an urgent need for further research. We found that competing socioeconomic priorities prevent migrants from attending to their mental health and additionally reflect on specific challenges associated with the condition of transit in this border region. This study supports previous research, which has noted lack of knowledge by health providers of the legal rights of migrants to healthcare, and adds complexity by exploring conflicting viewpoints on allegations of institutional discrimination.

Freedoms, Agency and Colombian State Organization

This paper examines the intersection between audiovisual archives and collective memory through a renewed approach to Yuruparí: Traditional Popular Art, a Colombian state documentary television series, focusing on the episode Angélica la palenquera (Gloria Triana and Jorge Ruiz, 1984). Developed in collaboration with the Kuchá Suto Communications Collective in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, the project involved the screening of the restored episode followed by a collective cataloging process. At its core lay a dialogue among local historians, musicians, and community leaders of different ages, allowing memories to nuance and reshape the historically imposed archival narratives on the communities. The project aims to broaden the categories and naming practices used by the archives that safeguard the Yuruparí collection, foregrounding the communities represented in the images and sounds in order to reclaim agency over the archives’ future. By proposing participatory approaches, it highlights broadcast archives as sites of creative engagement capable of challenging power dynamics of representation. Collaborative methodologies foster an ethical and dynamic form of access, grounded in ethnographic and qualitative systematization, while offering a framework for potential decolonial archival practices.

This article aims to identify risks and opportunities in graduate follow-up in order to establish strategies for updating the services, products, and processes of the Public Accounting program in its engagement with graduates. Graduates of the program must be aware of the pressure exerted by the State through legislation and regulations they must comply with, the fiscal control to which they are subject, and the legal responsibility they assume when certifying financial information. The State imposes disciplinary sanctions through bodies such as the Central Board of Accountants for non-compliance with regulations (Rendon & Toro, 2018). It is important to mention that there are three main risk factors in the accounting profession: mental workload, state pressure, and social pressure. This is a positivist, descriptive study with an experimental design, for which a measurement instrument was administered to 219 accountants, allowing the research objective to be achieved. The results indicate a lack of agreement among graduates that a public accountant can maintain mental health by implementing healthy lifestyle habits. There are no clear strategies for managing the pressure exerted by the Colombian state. There is no full consensus on a solid vision for compensating for social pressure. Graduates identify professional experience as a strength of accounting professionals. Based on this, strategies are being designed to update services, products, and processes.

This work is related to the research line teaching argumentation, focusing on argumentative skills and linking serious online games. The objectives were: first, to explore a serious online game for teaching the basic argumentative skills. Second, observe the students’ progression in the mastery of such skills when they interact with the game. The mixed exploratory case study was adopted as a method, with students from the penultimate grade of secondary education in a Colombian state school. One of the most relevant results was that 61, 36% of the students improved their level of proficiency in at least one of the skills observed.

Review of: <i>Dissident Peace: Autonomous Struggles and the State in Colombia</i>

This study examines how middle school students in a Colombian state school develop key skills for critical thinking and citizenship formation through the creation of persuasive writings. Texts in which fifty-seven students addressed a conflictive situation were analyzed with the Argumentum Topic Model (AMT), observing both the relationship between premises and conclusions and the inferential strength of their reasoning. The results revealed the use of diverse argumentative strategies such as resorting to places of definition, establishing causal relationships, foreseeing consequences or exploring alternative solutions. The ability to reflect, to apply legal knowledge, to analyze conflicts and to understand different perspectives that students can develop by writing persuasive papers related to a problem that is close to them was evidenced. Finally, this study allows us to appreciate the important educational implications of persuasive writing for critical thinking and citizenship education.

The article analyzes the coat of arms of Agua de Dios, a town linked to the history of leprosy and the ways in which the Colombian State and modern medicine have dealt with the disease over time. The coat of arms, cre- ated by local painter José Ángel Alfonso, can be inter- preted as a “place of memory” that confronts the social stigma that associates Agua de Dios with the experience of isolation and disease, to redefine it as a “city of hope,” highlighting the resilience and agency of its inhabitants. In order to develop this work, interviews, ethnographic observation, consultation of historiography of and about Agua de Dios, archive review, and heraldic and icono- graphic analysis were carried out.

Abstract Guided by interviews with key protagonists and extensive archival research, this article reinterprets the escalation of the Colombian armed conflict during the critical period of the 1990s. It rejects conventional characterisations of the war as an ‘internal conflict’ and challenges dominant approaches based on state weakness and economic opportunity. Instead, the article situates the FARC’s rapid expansion against the background of the international political economy, linking the conflict’s escalation to changing social relations of production. Grounded in historical materialism, and particularly drawing on the concepts of uneven and combined development, passive revolution, crisis of authority, and war of movement, the article explains how the Colombian state’s reintegration into global capitalism deepened social fragmentation, displaced subaltern populations, generated new terrains of resistance, and provoked a spreading crisis of authority that the FARC strategically exploited. It is argued that the FARC’s expansion was not a symptom of criminal degeneration but a strategic political response enabled by Colombia’s passive revolutionary transformation within the uneven and combined dynamics of global capitalism. The article contributes to broader debates in security, international political economy, global development, historical sociology, and regional studies, inviting scholars to identify the underlying but not immediately visible dynamics shaping conflict and peace.

This article examines the counter-hegemonic right to collective and historical memory, focusing on the case of the Magüí Indigenous Reservation in Nariño (Colombia). From an interdisciplinary perspective, it addresses the reparative function of collective memory and its close relationship with human rights, identity, and pluralism, emphasizing how memory, understood collectively, becomes a mechanism of resistance and cultural re-signification in the context of post-conflict. Likewise, it analyzes the normative sources that support the right to memory, both at the international level and in the position adopted by the Colombian State, grounded in the rights to truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-repetition. Finally, the article highlights the role of indigenous community initiatives as pacifying means that vindicate memory and dignify victims in contexts of both war and peace.

This article analyzes the role of political campaign financing in the capture of the Colombian state from 2018 to 2023, as well as its relationship with material inequality. Theoretically, the research is based on Corporate State Capture approaches and elite theories that explain the concentration of economic power and inequality. Using a mixed method approach combining a review of government documents, clear accounts application, data published by the Electoral Observation Mission, press reports, and research carried out in other regional countries, the article establishes that economic elites obtained immediate benefits, such as millionaire contracts and other advantages for their companies, through political campaign financing. This preserved their advantages in the social hierarchy and reproduced structural inequalities.

From "exclusive luxury" to "labor right," and from a space for amusement to one for disconnection, public leisure architecture in Colombia reflects a shift toward democratizing a practice once reserved for elites—now recognized as an indicator of quality of life for all citizens. This study examines how, in this context, the Colombian State has sought to conceptualize, manage, and regulate its citizens' free time through architectural projects designed to fulfill a basic human need: rest.

The response of the peasant movement in the Colombian Massif to the exclusionary neoliberal model characterizing the Colombian State—marked by land concentration, dispossession, and the invisibility of rural communities—was analyzed. Peasant Agro-Food Territories (TECAM) emerge as a proposal of resistance against extractivism, promoting social justice, agroecology, and food sovereignty. These rhizomatic and revolutionary strategies aim to reconfigure the territory and challenge power relations, fostering an alternative model of territorial planning and peasant autonomy. The study employed interviews, document analysis, and historical memory workshops to identify key milestones from 1987 to 2024 and to analyze agency strategies using conceptual categories such as rhizomes, lines of flight, and molecular revolution. Data were coded and analyzed using ATLAS.ti software. The results highlight significant milestones such as the creation of the Plan de Vida Agua y Dignidad (Water and Dignity Life Plan), agro-environmental schools, and popular consultations against mega-mining. These findings demonstrate the communities' capacity to organize and confront extractivist and neoliberal policies. TECAM represents an endogenous alternative that challenges traditional power structures and proposes new paradigms of territorial justice and ecological sustainability. It reflects the peasantry's ability to drive profound sociopolitical transformations, prioritizing common goods and dignified life over the hegemonic logic of capitalist development.

This article analyzes the relationships between international law and domestic law in the field of human rights protection within the Colombian legal system. As a paradigmatic case, it examines Becerra Barney vs. the Colombian State, heard by the United Nations Human Rights Committee, in the context of the so-called “faceless justice.” The article reviews various theoretical approaches that help explain the interaction between different legal orders, with the aim of contrasting them with the actual practices of the Colombian State in fulfilling its international obligations. For this purpose, it explores how the Colombian internal order structures its opening and reception clauses concerning international law. Ultimately, the article intends to (i) highlight the asymmetry that exists between the aforementioned clauses, due to a deficient reception process, and (ii) show how, in practice, with respect to compliance with international commitments, the Colombian State aligns, incorrectly, with dualist theoretical parameters, despite publicly claiming adherence to judicial dialogue and constitutional pluralism.