State, war, and land dispossession: The multiple paths to land concentration

Abstract

We focus on the role of the state in land dispossession during war. State agencies promote land accumulation not only through coercive paths, but also by combining political and market mechanisms. Each mechanism may link the state with different actors and coalitions. We illustrate how this worked in Tibú, a Colombian municipality in which violence against civilians and land accumulation took place in more or less distinct phases. The case highlights the fact that land accumulation during war is not only achieved through coercion. At the same time, it shows the importance of identifying the specific coalitions through which states establish their presence in contested territories during war. We explain such variation as resulting from the types of alliances and coalitions that the state establishes with different sets of stakeholders, and the aims pursued by coalition actors.

Full text

SYMPOSIUM ARTICLE
State, war, and land dispossession: The multiple
paths to land concentration
Jenniffer Vargas
1
|Sonia Uribe
2
1
PhD student in FLACSO‐Mexico.‐Picacho‐
Ajusco 377, Héroes de Padierna, 14200
Mexico City, CDMX Mexico. Researcher of
Observatorio de Restitución y Regulación de
derechos de propiedad agraria. Bogotá ‐
Colombia
2
Observatorio de Restitución y Regulación de
Derechos de Propiedad Agraria, Bogotá.
Colombia
Correspondence
Jenniffer Vargas Reina, Calle 24 N° 51C‐04,
Bogotá, Colombia
Email: jenniffervr@gmail.com
Abstract
We focus on the role of the state in land dispossession during war.
State agencies promote land accumulation not only through coer-
cive paths, but also by combining political and market mechanisms.
Each mechanism may link the state with different actors and coali-
tions. We illustrate how this worked inTibú, a Colombian municipal-
ity in which violence against civilians and land accumulation took
place in more or less distinct phases. The case highlights the fact
that land accumulation during war is not only achieved through
coercion. At the same time, it shows the importance of identifying
the specific coalitions through which states establish their presence
in contested territories during war. We explain such variation as
resulting from the types of alliances and coalitions that the state
establishes with different sets of stakeholders, and the aims pur-
sued by coalition actors.
KEYWORDS
accumulation, coercion, land dispossession, markets, state
1|INTRODUCTION
This paper focuses on the role of the state in land dispossession during war. We show that in wartime, states not only
promote coercive paths to land concentration, but also other paths that may involve administrative and market‐ori-
ented policies, or some forms of restraint. States establish links with different actors in contested territories, seeking
to broaden their territorial reach and to push forward counter‐insurgent policies, and in this process adapt their poli-
cies vis‐à‐vis land. Since state interlocutors and land stakeholders are heterogeneous (and include local, regional,
national, and global actors), these links may also prompt the state to deploy some actions to prevent land
dispossession.
The importance of rediscovering the link between violent and agrarian conflict has been highlighted in the recent
literature (Ballvé, 2013; Cramer & Richards, 2011; Thomson, 2011). Some of this literature has placed special empha-
sis on the disputes created by the occupation of lands that were abandoned by displaced people, and the way in which
agrarian conflicts fuel war, as in the cases of Rwanda (Jones, 2003), Sudan (Salman, 2013), and Bosnia (Williams,
2013). It is established that there are complex and important links between agrarian and violent conflicts; that states
play a central role in shaping property regimes and political orders associated with land disputes (Boone, 2014), which
Received: 12 January 2017 Revised: 27 July 2017 Accepted: 28 July 2017
DOI: 10.1111/joac.12237
J Agrar Change. 2017;17:749–758. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltdwileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/joac 749

feed or escalate into violent conflicts and civil wars (Van Leeuwen & Van Der Haar, 2016); and that even during war,
land accumulation does not take place in an institutional vacuum (Gutiérrez, 2014). However, we are still far from
understanding the specific and complex mechanisms that link statehood, coercion, and markets. This paper helps to
fill this gap.
Both the putative link between land and violent conflict and the role of the state in establishing, or
deconstructing, that link can be observed in a particularly pristine manner in Colombia, which is one of the countries
with most concentrated land tenure in the world, with a land Gini coefficient of 0.86 (IGAC, 2012). Furthermore, its
war has been marked by massive waves of displacement (at least 7 million displaced) (RUV, 2017) and massive pro-
cesses of coercive land dispossession (CNMH, 2013). Indeed, in other countries, the relation between land and war
has been very different.
1
To explain the pro‐concentration pattern of the Colombian conflict, it is fundamental to
understand the role that the state played in the accumulation processes that took place during the country's conflict.
The Colombian literature has clearly identified the key role of economic and political elites in the country's land
dispossession (Gutiérrez & Vargas, 2016; Salinas & Zarama, 2012). State authorities have played a central role in pro-
moting and legalizing the takeover of land by paramilitaries and associated actors (Ballvé, 2013; Observatorio, 2017).
In several regions, such as Urabá and Magdalena in Colombia, massive dispossession was carried out by coalitions of
paramilitary groups, cattle ranchers, banana entrepreneurs, and state authorities (Quinche, 2016; Vargas, 2016). Here,
the actors that wielded the weapons were the same ones who took over the lands.
We examine here the case of Tibú, a Norte de Santander municipality. This is a territory severely affected by war,
where extreme violence against civilians and dispossession took place during relatively distinct phases. In each phase,
the state relied on different allies. During the coercive phase, the security agencies established alliances with armed
groups that displaced the population but did not take over the land. The accumulation came later, when various entre-
preneurs, encouraged by state policies, bought the land abandoned by peasants and implemented agro‐industrial pro-
jects (Uribe, 2014). This produced a drastic change in land tenure and the use of land.
Thus, land accumulation in Tibú involved two types of coalition. A coercive coalition was formed between the
security agencies of the state and a paramilitary unit intent on deploying punitive actions against civilians. An accumu-
lating coalition was created between state authorities and national entrepreneurs, whose businesses are based on
export products with high demand in the global economy.
In the next section, we discuss the recent literature on the role of the state in land accumulation in violent con-
texts. Then we describe land accumulation in Tibú, and explain the mechanisms through which different state agencies
enabled such accumulation by means of alliances and public policies: coercion, land markets, and incentives for oil
palm agriculture. We also show that some agencies fought against illegal accumulation. Finally, we discuss some of
the analytical implications of the case.
2|DEBATES IN THE RECENT LITERATURE
As Unruh and Williams (2013) have highlighted, during war the institutions responsible for the regulation of property
rights—the very core of the institutional order—tend to be weakened in the extreme. This encourages land disposses-
sion through coercive, but also political, mechanisms (Sachs, 2013). This is the case for Rwanda (Jones, 2003) and Bos-
nia (Williams, 2013), and to an eminent degree for Colombia as well (Salinas & Zarama, 2012). But it is still necessary to
unravel the mechanisms that link the state, coercion, and the market in the context of war to be able to explain dif-
ferential patterns of land accumulation, for war often changes institutional practices rather than merely weakening
them, and where there is weakening there is not necessarily an institutional vacuum.
The key role of institutions in land accumulation is also highlighted by the problems of looking at the latter as a
process of “primitive accumulation”driven by the interests of the export agro‐industry and the world food system
1
For example, in El Salvador the civil conflict was associated with land fragmentation and there was some redistribution to the poor
peasants (Wood, 2003).
750 VARGAS AND URIBE

for which it produces (Thomson, 2011). Here, the state tends to be seen as a unitary and homogeneous actor at the
service of global capitalism. Approaches of this type do not account for the power struggles that take place in local
territories between the state and powerful economic and armed actors that fight over the assignment of authority
and the rules of the game (Migdal, 2001), property rights (Boone, 2014), or the social and political orders that are cre-
ated in territories during civil war (Staniland, 2012). They do not take into account potentially contradictory evidence,
either. In Colombia, for example, much of the land taken from the peasants by the paramilitaries was not intended for
agricultural export projects, but for livestock, a form of accumulation that does not always respond to the demands of
the global market (Gutiérrez & Vargas, 2017). If this is the case, then land dispossession cannot be explained without
taking into account the constellation of forces that constitute and uphold political authority both at the national and
the local level.
3|THECASEOFTIBÚ,NORTEDESANTANDER
3.1 |Coercion
The municipality of Tibú is part of the Catatumbo region in the department of Norte de Santander. Its location on the
border with Venezuela makes it part of a strategic corridor that connects the Caribbean region with the Eastern Plains,
which have rendered it important both geopolitically and historically. Since the late 1970s, the National Liberation
Army (ELN) and the People's Liberation Army (EPL) have been present in the area, and later, in the late 1980s, the pre-
dominant guerrilla force was the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
In 1999, the paramilitaries irrupted into Norte de Santander and managed to consolidate control through the
Catatumbo Block (BCa).
2
As in many other parts of the country,
3
it has already been shown that the paramilitaries
had the support of certain units and officials of the army and the national police, with backing from people who were
well placed within the central government (Tribunal Superior del Distrito Judicial de Bogotá, ruling of October 31,
2014).
4
Salvatore Mancuso, the paramilitary commander of the Catatumbo Block, publicly claimed that without the
assistance from the state, the paramilitaries would not have been able to establish and expand in the way they did:
(02:53:55) In 1995 commander Carlos Castaño told me he had a meeting with the top military officials and high
representatives of the State, and that at the meeting they asked him ... to organize Self‐Defence groups in the North
of the country where no Self‐Defence groups existed …The meeting was held and I participated; at that time, I was
ordered to set up those Blocks. It was done hand in hand with the State; without the direct action or deliberate omis-
sion of the State we would not have been able to grow the way we did, or get to where we are now [...]. (Tribunal
Superior del Distrito Judicial de Bogotá, ruling of October 31, 2014, p. 143).
InTibú, the paramilitary offensive had three clearly established goals: to wrest control over the territory from the
FARC, to wipe out its “social base”, and to control the illegal crop economy (Tribunal Superior del Distrito Judicial de
Bogotá, ruling of October 31, 2014; Salinas & Zarama, 2012).
5
The strategy was highly punitive and established a gen-
uine reign of terror against civilians (Asociación Minga, 2008).
2
Judicial and academic sources on the paramilitary expansion in Norte de Santander and Catatumbo region include: theTribunal Supe-
rior del Distrito Judicial de Bogotá (ruling of October 31, 2014); the Tribunal Superior del Distrito Judicial de Bogotá (ruling of Decem-
ber 2, 2010); and Salinas and Zarama (2012).
3
The role played by the armed forces in the emergence of paramilitary ventures locally was prominent. For cases such as Magdalena
Medio, see Medina (1990). For Antioquia and Córdoba, see Salinas and Zarama (2012). On the cases in other regions, see Duncan
(2006) and Reyes (2009).
4
The ruling also describes several actions performed jointly by the security agencies of the state and paramilitaries of the Catatumbo
block in Norte de Santander, ranging from joint patrols, cooperation, and training to carrying out massacres.
5
Controlling coca cultivation does not necessarily involve land acquisition. The division of labour creates a chain in which farmers grow
and sell crops to armed groups that process and market it.
VARGAS AND URIBE 751

Between 1985 and 2014, the Unified Victims Registry (RUV in Spanish) reported a total of 26,188 homicides and
2,121 forced disappearances, of which 15,833 and 1,421, respectively, occurred during the period of paramilitary
hegemony from 1999 to 2004. Similarly, the RUV reported a total of 52,481 persons displaced from Tibú between
1985 and October 2014, of whom 37,490 (71.4%) were displaced in the period between 1999 and 2004 (Figure 1).
The forced exodus of the population implied the large‐scale abandonment of rural land (Figure 2) and conse-
quently a de facto change in landownership, without evidence of any direct and significant appropriation of lands
by the paramilitary unit that operated in the region (Uribe, 2014).
3.2 |Land transactions through the market
Between 2005 and 2010, following the BCB's demobilization, Tibú experienced an increase in land market transac-
tions, despite the continued presence of guerrillas in the territory. Even though many of the transactions did not affect
the original size of the properties, landownership and usage did become significantly more concentrated: the land Gini
coefficient increased from 0.52 in 2005 to 0.67 in 2011 (IGAC, 2012). On the one hand, small properties were more
fragmented, which means that properties of less than 10 hectares became smaller, while the middle‐sized and large
properties increased in size and number. The size of rural properties in Tibú increased by 14,635 hectares during
1999–2010; the greatest increase, of 6,297 hectares, was for properties larger than 1,000 hectares; followed by those
in the range 50–200 hectares, with an increase of 4,037 hectares; and the ranges 200–1,000 hectares and 10–50
hectares, with increases of 2,723 and 1,578 hectares, respectively (Uribe, 2014, p. 254). On the other hand, landusage
became more concentrated because of the expansion of oil palm plantations, the coverage of which increased from
zero in 2000 to 6,077 hectares in 2009 (Uribe, 2014), and due to the simultaneous expansion of oil and coal explora-
tion and production areas.
6
6
“Exploitation requests or mining‐energy titles affect the equivalent of 81.12% of the total area of the municipality”(Acción Social,
2010, pp. 76–82).
FIGURE 1 The population expelled from Tibú, 1995–2014)
Source: Prepared by the authors, based on information from the Unified Victims Registry (RUV), retrieved May 31,
2015 from http://www.unidadvictimas.gov.co/
FIGURE 2 Abandoned land claims included in the official register, 1981–2012
Source: Single Registry of Property and Territories Abandoned (RUPTA, in Spanish).
752 VARGAS AND URIBE

The concentration of land usage by oil palm plantations was striking. According to the cadastral authority (SNR,
2012), between 2005 and 2010 there were large transfers of land. The buyers include several oil palm companies such
as Bio Agroindustrial, Palma Oriente, Palmeros Aliados de Colombia, and Ecopalma, and other well‐connected
industrialists.
7
Figure 3 shows a very active land market in land areas abandoned by peasants. The gray areas highlight the pur-
chases of land. This land had protective measures that prohibited its sale or transfer without prior authorization from
the authorities.
Eight thousand hectares were acquired through the land market and institutional mechanisms, but disregarding
several legal provisions (SNR, 2012). First, many of these purchases were made on Agricultural Family Units (UAF
in Spanish), which are properties that were formed as allotments of public land, awarded to farmer beneficiaries of
agrarian reform. These properties could not be legally sold during a period of 12 years without explicit permission
by the relevant agencies and it is forbidden to accumulate more than one UAF. Second, some transactions were made
far below the “fair”market value. And, third, many purchases were made taking advantage of the conditions of vulner-
ability caused by the conflict, in the sense that farmers could lose their lives or property because of the war, and many
of them had abandoned their farms. From the perspective of Law 1448 of 2011, which was drafted to protect and to
restore property to victims of the conflict, transfers of this type have been defined as forms of dispossession
(UAEGRTD, 2012).
3.3 |Government policies that promoted massive land purchases and their concentration
by oil palm businesses
The promotion of oil palm agriculture was a national policy adopted by the central government and touted by differ-
ent administrations as a “crop for peace”(García, 2014). It was expected that oil palm would also become the basis for
productive projects managed by demobilized combatants from the paramilitary within the framework of the Justice
and Peace process, and thus become an alternative to the substitution of illegal crops (CONPES 3477, 2007).
The first oil palms were planted in Tibú in 2000,
8
when productive alliances were promoted to plant 1,000 hect-
ares of oil palm within the framework of the alternative development plans for the region. Alliances between small
tenants and agro‐industrial firms were actively being promoted and subsidized by oil palm entrepreneurs and Minister
of Agriculture at the time, Carlos Murgas Guerrero, with the assistance of international donors (USAID–MIDAS).
9
The
resources for the alliances were to be provided by the state through the Rural Capitalization Incentive (ICR)
10
and mul-
tilateral bank loans (Murgas, 1999).
From 2005 onwards, oil palm was included in the rural policy promoting crops for the biofuel agro‐industry, and
an official target was set to plant 4,000 hectares by 2020 (DNP, 2007). Government incentives for oil palm crops are
in sharp contrast with minimal or non‐existent incentives for the smallholder sector. Between 2007 and 2014, 86% of
all ICR funds were allocated to oil palm projects and just 14% to other commodities.
Tibú has accounted for a large proportion of the oil palm incentives offered through this rural policy not only of
the department, but also at the national level: the history of credits for oil palm plantations (ICR) inT ibú began in 2005,
7
A database on sales and transfer processes was put together by the Project on Protection of Lands and Properties of the Displaced
Population (Acción Social, 2010).
8
Retrieved May 12, 2016 from http://www.elespectador.com/noticias/nacional/aceite‐de‐palma‐de‐tibu‐holanda‐articulo‐394391
9
In 2005, the former Minister of Agriculture, Andrés Felipe Arias, reported that with resources granted by the government, the Invest-
ment for Peace Fund (FIP—Plan Colombia) of the United States government (USAID) and the Office of the Mayor of Tibú planned to
plant an additional 1,041 hectares of oil palm. See Community Government Council N° 94, retrieved November 11, 2013 from http://
alcandiasalesiano.blogspot.com/
10
The Rural Capitalization Incentive was established by Law 101 of 1993 (Colombia, Congreso de la República, 1996) and was regu-
lated by means of Decree 626 of 1994 (Colombia, Ministerio de Agricultura y Desarrollo Rural, 1994). It was conceived as a right
granted to any individual or legal entity that ventures into new investment projects fully or partially funded by Finagro. It translates
into a contribution in money granted as payment against the balance of the principal of the loan.
VARGAS AND URIBE 753

when over COP 1,300 million was granted (equivalent to 2.72% of national loans). The amount of these loans grew
progressively until 2009, when it reached a peak of COP 12,318 million (99.7% of departmental loans and 12% of
national loans). In one decade (2005–2014), Tibú received credit for oil palm plantations worth COP 61,336 million.
11
The introduction and expansion of the oil palm crop in Tibú has taken place through an arrangement of produc-
tion alliances, in which the companies that promote them are part of the Oleoflores business group, the main
11
Database by municipality of oil palm loans granted through ICR. Information processed by ORDPA (2014) according to information
from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MADR‐Finagro).
FIGURE 3 Rural land in Tibú transferred between 2005 and 2010
Source: Acción Social (2010).
754 VARGAS AND URIBE

shareholder of which is Carlos Murgas, known in the industry as the “Oil Palm Czar”. The main funds for the produc-
tion alliances promoted by Oleflores are the ICR and the DRE Special Credit Line, created with the objective of
strengthening exports, as indicated earlier.
3.4 |Institutions that protect the land of the displaced population
In Colombia, there are two laws that contain arrangements to prevent the illegal accumulation of land that were
disregarded in Tibú: Law 387 of 1997 and Law 160 of 1994. Law 387 establishes the protection of lands abandoned
by those who are forced to flee or are at risk due to armed conflict, and prevents transactions or sales of those lands
without prior authorization from the relevant authorities, in this case the Territorial Committees for the Comprehen-
sive Protection of the Displaced Population. Such committees include local authorities, are chaired by mayors, and
decide which assets to protect. When a property is protected, it must be registered by its cadastral identification num-
ber. After this, notaries and registrars cannot allow sales or transactions (purchases, sales, etc.) of the protected prop-
erty. Law 160 of 1994 prohibits land accumulation beyond one UAF per family. The size of a UAF varies by region (in
Tibú, it is 36 hectares).
In the case of many land purchases in Tibú, these laws were blatantly disregarded (SNR, 2012). Purchases of land
were undertaken without the authorization of the committee. Many were permitted by notaries and public registrars,
who overlooked the protection measures enacted by the committees. There were other cases in which the commit-
tees raised protective measures but individual members of the committee, despite lacking legal authorization, allowed
the transaction. In addition, they did not take the necessary steps to verify that the domain transfers were voluntary
and not coerced. Palm oil companies accumulating land beyond established limits accounted for a significant share of
the total purchases of land (SNR, 2012).
One reason underlying the failure of the committees to block the frenzied purchases of protected land was the
deregulated nature of land property rights in Colombia. The committees did not have the information to identify
non‐consensual transactions; the cadastre was out of date; there were no information systems that could allow the
identification of the irregularities described above; and notaries and registry offices used the informality of landown-
ership to bypass the measures aimed at the protection of assets (SNR, 2012). Furthermore, local authorities such as
governors and mayors supported the expansion of oil palm agriculture in Tibú, putting their weight behind pro‐con-
centration market dynamics.
12
4|THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE CASE
4.1 |Variation and coalitions
As noted above, in Tibú there is apparently no direct connection between the paramilitaries and the oil palm busi-
nesses. These enterprises made opportunistic purchases after the paramilitaries had demobilized, taking advantage
of the conditions created by the initial violence and the incentives offered by the central government. This is different
from regions such as Magdalena and Urabá, where the legal rural elites that took over dispossessed lands (ranchers
and banana growers) were themselves involved in the alliances that promoted waves of dispossession (García & Var-
gas, 2014; Quinche, 2016; Vargas, 2016), or the case of Curvaradó and Jiguamiando in Chocó, where there was a
direct connection between oil palm businessmen and the paramilitaries (García, 2014).
The state agencies that networked with the paramilitary, namely but not only the army and the police, were not
the same agencies involved in the promotion of oil palm agriculture (i.e. the central government and the Ministry of
12
See “The government replaced coca in the Catatumbo region with African palm”, retrieved February 27, 2015 from http://www.
eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM‐1633593
VARGAS AND URIBE 755

Agriculture), which granted strong incentives for the oil palm firms to accumulate land despite regulations that explic-
itly prohibited such accumulation.
How should we account for the different paths towards coercive eviction of the peasants and the different paths
towards land accumulation? Key factors would be the type of coalition that the state built with different stakeholders;
the characteristics of the actors that were part of those coalitions; and the aims they pursued. In Tibú, there was a first
alliance between the security agencies of the state and the paramilitaries of the Catatumbo Block (BCa). But the latter,
unlike other paramilitary units, were not interested in rural assets. The main feature of the members of the BCa was
their clear anti‐subversive nature (Gutiérrez, 2014); that is, they were highly punitive groups more linked to the secu-
rity agencies of the state than to rural elites. For instance, their immediate leadership was made up of specialists in
violence; they ventured into the municipality not at the behest of rural elites, but as a result of requests by interme-
diaries of the army; their punitive actions were based on an anti‐subversive ideology and a militaristic model.
13
This
had implications for the type of alliances they built and their relation to the land: they rarely accumulated land by coer-
cion and they did not transfer it to third parties.
The accumulating coalition, on the other hand, was made up of legal actors: agencies of the central state and
entrepreneurs at the national level, the latter characterized as productive agents with ample political and social capital,
who had, and still have, a dense set of relationships with high‐level state decision‐makers, for whom it would not be
profitable to deal with the costs and risks of a coercive land dispossession. The worsening of the rural inequality indi-
cators due to the activity of this coalition was as profound as, and at times deeper than, the increases in rural inequal-
ity caused by its coercive coalitions. However, the ultimate set of actors that acquired the land was different.
The incentives that we find in Tibú resulted from the combination of strategic objectives related to national and
global demands, economic power, and political connections. Oil palm had been identified by the Colombian govern-
ment as an ideal commodity to replace illicit crops and promote peace (García, 2014) and also potentially as a highly
productive alternative for farming. FEDEPALMA, the palm oil producers' association, was already very powerful. Car-
los Murgas was an extremely well‐connected actor: he had been president of FEDEPALMA and Minister of Agricul-
ture, and had personal and professional links with politicians at the regional and national levels.
14
That power
allowed Murgas to promote the institutional arrangements that benefited the sector while he was the agriculture
minister.
5|CONCLUSIONS: LAND CONCENTRATION AND THE STATE REVISITED
The state is neither a unitary nor a monolithic entity. Beyond the classic debate about the degree of autonomy of the
state (Skocpol, Evans, & Rueschemeyer, 1999), Migdal (2001) has shown that in certain contexts, of which Colombia is
an egregious example, the state must compete or negotiate with other actors and organizations for the establishment
and regulation of rules (see also North, Wallis, & Weingast, 2009). Economic elites and non‐state armed actors play an
important role in terms of setting and enforcing rules in specific territories (Migdal, 2001).
Thus, the study of land dispossession should be linked to the understanding of the role that states play in these
processes. We have shown that, in addition to its regulatory role, the Colombian state selected the winners of land
accumulation using mechanisms such as agrarian development policies, subsidies, and credits to promote sometimes
overtly illegal land concentration.
We have also shown that in the case of the Colombian armed conflict, there is no single path of land accumula-
tion. We can envisage at least two routes: one in which coercion and accumulation went hand in hand, and were
deployed by the same actors; and another in which coercion and accumulation did not coincide and were carried
13
The organizational characteristics of the paramilitary groups were highly varied. The Colombian paramilitaries did not consolidate a
unified army but, rather, had a protean nature (see Gutiérrez & Vargas, 2017).
14
A list of his contacts with high‐level politicians can be found online; retrieved April 14, 2016 from http://lasillavacia.com/
quienesquien/perfilquien/carlos‐alberto‐murgas‐guerrero
756 VARGAS AND URIBE

out by different coalitions (accumulating and coercive coalitions). The state agencies involved in each case were dif-
ferent. Ultimately, each of them was functional to land concentration. Yet their interests and forms of operation did
not always converge. War involves costs and risks even for powerful actors. For example, only some local elites dare
to get involved and only some armed groups can deploy extreme violence against civilians (Ron, 2000). One of the
implications of this case study is the need for conflict studies and agrarian political economy to take a more nuanced
and empirically rigorous view of processes of “primitive accumulation”facilitated by war.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper presents research results from the Observatorio de Restitución y Regulación de Derechos de Propiedad
Agraria, which is a research project funded by Colciencias. We are grateful for the input and comments on earlier ver-
sions from Christopher Cramer, Elisabeth Wood, Francisco Gutiérrez, and the members of the Observatory of Resti-
tution of Land. We also thank two anonymous referees for helpful criticism. The opinions and any deficiencies in the
paper remain our own.
ORCID
Jenniffer Vargas http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2879-5100
Sonia Uribe http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2364-8008
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How to cite this article: Vargas J, Uribe S. State, war, and land dispossession: The multiple paths to land con-
centration. J Agrar Change. 2017;17:749‐758. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12237
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