It's my great pleasure to introduce our new change in character for Director Studies.
So that's from a cast of millions. She was almost literally the action setting, and that is particularly impressive in so many different fields,
but really has connected with us in terms of looking at this problem, if that is what works of non-state actors find.
She has been a research associate at the first to try Graduate Institute for Central Conflict Development, Peace Building, Trust Fund,
custom research and personal inventories of conflict security, transnational organised crime of peacebuilding,
and the role for violent non-state actors playing in those dynamics.
What I think particularly interesting is not as she writes back saying this is not going to be studied, but she's actually being that done.
She's going to act on some fieldwork in order to see further her knowledge of what should board
about this particular reference to Colombia and ongoing conflicts in that area and also the region.
She holds a master's degree in international relations with distinction Cold War studies at King's College, London.
And you don't have a problem with assistants who are in other work, which are not referred to in terms of the UN work as well.
But that will come, I think, through the course of our discussions anyway.
And she is extraordinarily well published for her age.
That's not supposed to be sexist or just simply meant to be a testament to your industry and achievement.
Annette, thank you.
Well, thanks, everyone, for coming this afternoon to my talk. I'm going to talk about arrangements of convenience mobile amongst directors.
And the idea here is really to look at violent contexts that cannot be explained by only looking at conflict,
just because there are many different actors in warfare,
conflict actors, but also criminal actors, rebel groups on the one hand, commentaries on the other, but also drug cartels.
And if we want to understand these conflicts, which are the case of many conflict areas,
war zones, then we really have to know how they relate to each other.
Now we know that these actors don't operate in isolation.
There's often cooperation among these actors, but then, on the other hand, also conflict.
And what I find is that this is puzzling for for three main reasons.
The first one is that we see ideologically opposed to actors that cooperate with each other.
But then, on the other hand, also ideologically aligned actors that fight each other.
Then the second point is that civil war scholars, like colleagues, for example, claim that these are just try for monopoly territory.
But then often we see cases where different actors share territory.
And then finally, if we think about the actors like the Mafia and criminal cartels, we would expect if we follow our own,
for example, scholars like become better that they would try to reduce the costs, for example, through signalling.
But then still, we see that these actors invest quite a lot of costly resources in fighting.
So there are several puzzles which mean that we don't really understand how these actors interact with each other,
and as we went on to try and enhance that understanding,
but then also in order to know what this means for security, what does it mean for people on the ground in conflict zones,
in war zones, where there's presence of many, many different actors rather than just one stereotype of a rebel group versus the government,
what this means for for people, how they perceive the security, and also how they're objectively affected by security.
So the idea really is to understand the relationships between these actors and
not just their presence or not just looking at one group and in isolation.
And so the key points that I want to make today with my presentation is look at three different types of arrangements.
Can you actually see Russia switch off the light? Good, good, good.
Okay. So at first, expand a bit more about the concept of arrangements, of commitments and how to conceptualise this.
And then look at three different types of security impacts.
The first one is in the absence of an arrangement where I argue that there's violence, however, citizens can follow clear rules of behaviour.
Then the second cluster are the short term arrangements.
These are arrangements among different by the non-state actors that change very quickly that are rather fragile.
And here my main point is to say that, yes, there is selective violence.
But what might have an even bigger impact on the long run is really the uncertainty that it causes among civilians.
And I'll explain that later. And then finally, in long term arrangements, when the stable relationship between different set actors,
this kind of leads to what I call shadow citizen security and shadow citizenship.
And again, I'll come back to that later just so that you have the three key points right at the start.
So I draw on the case of the Colombian borderlands for my analysis, and the reason is quite clear.
First of all, that area, Colombia is obviously part of the America,
which is the region with the highest homicide rates worldwide today, according to the last UNODC report.
In the unknown region in particular, Venezuela, for example, has a homicide rate of 54 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.
Colombia is a bit over 30. Ecuador is a bit over 12.
If we compare that to the UK, it's one. So it's high homicide rate, violent region.
But then also in Colombia, as you know, there's a decades old armed conflict that started over 50 years ago.
So the country is a is a conflict zone.
And importantly, the border areas are the areas that are particularly severely affected by that conflict.
Over the last decade, the security policies of the previous president in Colombia and President Uribe have actually made the big cities safer.
So in Bogota and Medellin, Cali, the security situation has improved.
However, it also has pushed the conflict towards the periphery.
So now the actors are quite concentrated and also well beyond the borderline on the Ecuadorian side in that case and on the Venezuelan side.
And at the same time, these areas are strategic dark corridors.
There are the areas where coca is cultivated and processed or also in cocaine.
And if you look at the Pacific Coast here and the Caribbean coast, these are the starting points of the major international trafficking routes.
We know the US Pacific side, often via West Africa, towards Europe on the inside.
So in a way it just sums up all the different dynamics that are attractive for better non-state actors income sources.
If we think about the drug trade but also other forms of organised crime and
smuggling and also the way how they have their supplies in these border areas,
they come from other regions, for example, ammunition and arms via Venezuela.
And then also it's it's an area of retreat for these actors.
It's the only area where they're still presence, whether of other states, is not very much present.
So they can operate rather freely if compared to the to the more central areas.
So this is the reason why I look at these these areas, because they represent a kind of good laboratory,
if we say it like that, to analyse the interactions of different non-state actors.
Now, as Robert already mentioned, I've drawn quite a lot of feedback.
I spend about a year in that area and conducted interviews and 433 interviews with different stakeholders,
with ex-combatants, with traffickers, but also with refugees, indigenous leaders, military police officials.
And basically what I did is this is mainly Colombia Ecuadorian border.
So you can see that my route itinerary where I went to different villages really on the ground in order to talk to people.
I did the same at the border with Venezuela.
So this is the southern part and then went up to the to the most central part, Catatumbo, which is one of the hotspots of the Colombian conflict zone,
and then also to the northern part of the Colombian Venezuelan border, where the dynamics are more shaped by local indigenous groups.
So here, for example, I stayed with the different families. So this helped me to know what's really going on, on the ground.
And what I did is I tried to map the presence and the relationships that these different violent non-state actors have on the ground.
So what you can see on that map is each colour representing a different but a non-state actor.
So that includes the rebel groups, the forest and the ELN, but it also includes right wing groups.
And these are smaller groups that emerged after the paramilitaries in Colombia were demobilised around 2006.
There are groups like Les Negros and some of them were successors of the parties,
but often there were also mergers with pre-existing drug cartels, with different groups.
And then there also even one of the groups is the Sinaloa cartel.
So the Mexican cartel has presence and smaller drug trafficking or criminal groups.
And what I then can see with the numbers to try and identify how do they relate to each other,
how how do they cooperate if they cooperate or if they're just coexisting in the same place?
And I did the same for the Colombian Venezuelan politics. Institute.
And I'll just to come back why this is important not only to Colombia, but also other regions.
As you can see here is the number of groups. And this is still relatively low.
And these are the most important ones. But. If we think about places like DRC, there are over 50 different groups.
If we think about places like Syria, apparently there are over 6000 different groups.
So in other areas of the world, it gets more complex to find out how they relate to each other.
But there definitely have some kind of relationship and do not operate in isolation.
So it helps us to understand how how these groups operate on the ground.
Now, what I didn't do is in order to understand how they cooperate,
draw on different kinds of literature, because it's not just Civil War actors, it's also other actors.
I think we have to think about it more broadly. And what I found useful is to look at the literature on cooperation among states.
But return cooperation. Mafias and organised criminals.
And so in the case of the state, this is really also what's carrying this argument where we have cooperation in quasi anarchy.
And these actors operate in some kind of quasi anarchy because there's no one institution that there was them.
Then with regard to the Mafia. This is really useful to understand how they operate in a context of illegality,
in a context where there's no law that imposes certain rules, which means that there's a lot of distrust between these different groups.
So in a way,
they have to cooperate with each other and trying to reduce the distrust that exist because they're not necessarily on the same and the same line.
And then finally looking at organised criminals,
it really helps to understand the way in which they're drawn comparative advantages and in which they might have
different kinds of approaches just in the way that legal businesses work in order to increase their benefits as well.
So this leads me to a quite complex typology of arrangements.
And here what is important over each of the three clusters in the absence of an arrangement,
the short term arrangements and the long term arrangements.
And that's where I cluster all the different types of arrangements that I've identified that you saw in the Met before.
And just a bit of background on that.
These arrangements are really shaped by the mechanisms that are available to reduce distress so that they can actually cooperate with each other.
Now, if you start here at the bottom, which is combat urban areas, it's what I call target relief.
All the tents come this no distress reducing mechanism, which means that groups either fight each other or there's a tense calm.
So there's not necessarily violence, but there's still no agreements of violence can break out any time.
So if you think about it as a cycle of violence, that's just a different moment in that cycle and not necessarily where violence erupted.
Now, the short term arrangements, they are being shaped by shared interests.
So, for example, two groups might engage in in a budget agreement where they exchange arms for drugs because they both have an interest in the deal.
But that doesn't mean that in general trust each other.
So there can still be high distrust. But for this specific deal, there's enough they reduce distrust sufficiently in order to cooperate.
But it's also based on personal bonds.
And that happens, for example, when two group leaders get along well, when two group leaders sit together and say, okay, we have a tactical alliance.
But again, that doesn't mean that in general they would cooperate with each other and they are usually very short left and fragile.
That can break down very quickly. That's why they're also on the short term arrangements.
And then finally, we look at long term arrangements. They are different types of arrangements, some of them based on again,
I put it into the category, but this is really bonds with a third with a third party.
So this comes back to if we think about states, international institutions,
both third parties and third party sponsors that regulate the relationships between different groups.
It can also be based on values, and that's quite obvious in the case of strategic alliances.
So for example, when there are two rebel groups, the Island and the five, which are the major ones in Colombia right now,
that they would be able to cooperate with each other because they share,
at least to some extent, similar ideology in other cases, similar religious beliefs.
So that gives them a stronger basis to also share information and also engage in joint operations, joint activities often against the state forces.
And then finally, power, which either means that one group really dominates over the others and achieves to separate the others,
which makes it very stable. So this is just to give you an back on on the on the on the concept.
And what is important here that these mechanisms, they are really based on general categories of motivation for for cooperation.
So they can apply here in this case to talk about it, non-state actors, but also in general to two social actors.
Why would social actors cooperate with each other? Now, what does this mean for security?
And here it's important to look at security, not only in terms of.
Several us. So it's not only about violence, homicide rates and displacements, but it's also about the perception of security.
And that's something that I find particularly important by drawing the feedback on there and by talking to people,
because it shows that the impact is not always the same.
If we look at depending on if we just measure it in terms of numbers or actually talk to people and ask them how do they feel about security.
So in the first case, absence of an arrangement, my argument this was the key point at the beginning is that produces violence,
but it also means that civilians can achieve clear rules of behaviour.
So what that means is that it's quite clear where the foreign fighters who's fighting against whom.
And to give you an example, this is a quote of one of my interviews who says,
you always have to be careful because talking openly about the paramilitaries or the guerrillas produces risks.
It's not that we don't talk about this, but only with caution and social norms, certain norms, because we are in a conflict zone.
And what's interesting, this is someone from Ecuador, right,
who says that we are in a conflict zone because that's in the border area close to Colombia.
But the conflict dynamics spill over to the to the Ecuadorian side.
So what this reflects is that there are clear rules. The person knows that they should just not talk about it.
And that helps maybe not to eliminate risk of insecurity, but at least to reduce certain risks in order to live in that in that particular region.
Now, what we usually look at is really the clashes or combat between paramilitaries and rebel groups or in other it's not only non-state actors,
also the state and rebel groups, but they are also kings, which are different.
Rebel groups are in war with each other, and that's something that is rather neglected in the literature so far in Colombia.
That happened in the Department of Roca, which is situated in the south east of the border with Venezuela,
where between 2006 and 2010, the UN and the Iraq war in a in a guerrilla war.
So they were fighting each other, although the island was supposedly supported by by the state to fight on the front.
But it was in fact, it was a war between the two different guerrilla groups.
And as you can see here from the from the slide, from my hope, you can see it in the back between 2000 620,000 tendencies.
What was taking place? This is where the homicide rates went up.
The kidnappings went up, landmine victims. So it was very clearly a very violent period in 2010.
They had the agreement that they would not fight each other anymore here and they dropped afterwards.
But here, what was interesting when I talk to people, yes, there was violence and that's something that they had experienced before.
They you quite happy with the parliamentary as well. They were present there.
But what was most disturbing was the fact that it did not make sense why these two rebel groups would fight each other.
So previously then they knew that there were entrenched mines between the rebels and the authorities, on the other hand.
But the rebels have historically been rather close to each other.
Now having them fighting each other had a strong psychological impact on the population and on how to make sense of the war and how to make
up these new rules that you have to follow in order to understand what is actually going on on the ground and just to show what went on,
what happened afterwards. So in 2010, they agreed they would not fight each other again anymore.
And I went to Raqqa in 2012 so that the guerrilla war was over, but there was still presence of these groups.
And this is how this president was affected in refugee camps, a conflict of the first year of the 11th.
But since then, multinationals and multinationals out of Iraq and those who don't respect those declare themselves military objectives.
So there was a clear demonstration of presence, but there was no threat to each other.
However, there were new groups coming in, posted rights groups, rightwing groups that also had the presence there.
And when I talk to people and ask, Well, how is the security situation? People were saying, well, it's it's the same as the guerrillas.
Well, it hasn't improved. But the statistics show that it has improved.
If you look at the Southern effects, homicide rates went down.
But the general perception was that there was still insecurity because it was not clear who was fighting on whom side,
when might violence break out because it was this tense, calm with presence,
but no clear indication of who's whose rules one should follow in order to to reduce insecurity.
Now, this is the case of urban areas where I said at the beginning that that is different to rural areas.
And in a way here the clear rules of behaviour become less clear simply because the lines are more blurred.
This is the case of Cucuta. It's a city on the Colombian Venezuelan border, which has around 800,000 inhabitants.
Not to be, but still. I'm sorry. An urban area.
And it's very much shaped by the smuggling dynamics, but by dynamics also of organised crime.
So on the one hand, this is small as we can see here, these are smugglers,
so-called Montero's just transporting goods from, from, from one side to the other side of the border.
What you can see is gasoline tanks that are everywhere on the street.
But this is really on a smaller scale. However, it is all the strategic for for the larger truck business because it's exactly on a transit
point for the route towards Venezuela and then which is the starting point to the to Europe.
And on the other hand, gasoline is coming in from Colombia.
So it's a very strategic location. And that's why there's a lot of dispute among different groups of who's controlling the area.
Now, since it's urban, these groups do not wear uniforms as they do, for example, in rural areas.
These groups usually are mixed with the with the civilian population, with the local people.
So it's very hard to distinguish who is actually a member of these groups, who's simply just a bystander.
And what's happened in that area is that it used to be first FARDC stronghold, rebel stronghold.
Then in the mid-nineties and 2000, there was a quite brutal parliamentary incursion after the demobilisation in 2006.
There were still right wing groups first once called Aguilas Negras after that.
And wasn't. When I was there the first time in 2011, it was when the Castros lost their monopoly on violence in the city.
And another group, the so-called Romanus, came in.
Now, the way they enter was not with the clashes and combat and fight, but what they did was they slowly started to kill civilians.
And the civilians were either messengers or informants of the rest of us.
So they slowly tried to eliminate these networks in order to impose their own information intelligence network in the city.
And that meant that people would never know if people are killed because they're informants,
because they are somehow involved or not, which created a lot of mistrust among the population.
And it was simply not clear who's on whose side and how how one should behave in order to to reduce violence in a way.
Now, the third moment or type of absence of arrangement is in the cycle of violence where there's no guns.
So where there's a moment where this tense calm, where there's presence of different groups, but it's not very clear what's going on.
And this example is in Kenya, again, one of the cities which was in Colombia, but close to the Venezuelan border area.
And they I talked to local government officials. It was in April 2012, and they were telling me, well, yes, security has improved a lot.
We've had 100 days without any homicide at all. But in the same sentence, the person was telling me, yes, in a way, which is something has to explode.
Now, we don't we know what's going on underneath the surface.
It's a very tense calm and but from from the statistics, it really looked like four months without any homicide at all.
Now, shortly after I've left, these pamphlets were just in the city and here by the non-selective groups.
They want the population that 27 people were on the list and they basically threatened social cleansing.
So parents would have to make sure that their children or teenagers are at home after 11 p.m.,
that they would not drink alcohol, that they would refrain from doing certain things, certain things, and shortly after.
And so for the first three of these people were killed.
At the same time, also in May, suddenly the different groups started attacks against the army, against police station again.
So there was a period of tense, calm, without violence.
But people knew. And that's how the government officials told me that there was this tense calm, there was this presentiment of danger,
that something would happen soon because they knew about the presence of these groups.
It was just a question of time when it would break out and what exactly would happen.
So if it's that moment in the in the cycle of violence, again, we don't see the violence however people feel it,
and especially those who've lived there before and who've experienced the social cleansing before, they knew that something like this would come.
Now, the second key point wasn't on on the short term arrangements.
And here the security impact is selective violence, but also the uncertainty and the short term arrangements.
As I mentioned before,
they're really fragile alliances between different groups based on the shared interests that they would want to engage in a certain business deal,
for example, or also personal bonds between between leaders.
So, for example, they would use the same harbour in order to ship cocaine abroad.
They would share in.
Halogens on stable operations because they know that one group has information on one specific part and the other one on another region.
So they would share certain information, but only over a short period of time in order to have benefits,
and then afterwards maybe just go separate ways again.
Now, here, I would like to share this quote The armed actor damages the morality of civil society.
This lonely beach break, the pearl, the pearl of the Pacific, the presence of a very hard and beautiful material.
It is already scratched, almost certainly fractured, but it starts to be really fractured.
Now, this is a citizen of tomorrow, which is a harbour city at the Pacific Coast.
And he refers with the part of the Pacific. He refers to that town.
So he's saying that the actor is damaging the town, the society, the people, the community living in the town.
And it becomes something fracture. And this just reflects the situation in that situation in that in the town, if you remember,
this was the map that I showed at the beginning of time ago is situated here where there are many different colours,
there are many different groups and present and also different relationships.
And if you look at that in terms of flows, rather than one of them,
just the presence of these groups, we see that they mostly lead toward the Pacific Coast.
So there's Coca-Cola Irrigation in the more central areas and processing, but that needs to be transported abroad, to be shipped abroad.
So usually it's on rivers, but it was a road transport across to Macau, which is the important harbour city and that region.
And from there it is shipped sometimes via the Galapagos Islands to Central America and then to to the US.
So this is a very strategic point where many different groups have an interest and where many
different groups want to have a share or to have benefits from from the illegal business.
It also is an area that is particularly marginalised. The the poverty rates are really, really high.
There are a lot of unemployed youth, especially young men. So there's a large supply of local groups,
of local youth groups that then can be either subcontracted by the groups or they just form their own groups in order to engage in the business.
And for example, say that they would assume one part of the transport of the cocaine to the next stage,
or that they would provide intelligence on the state operations in order to make sure that the cocaine can be can be shipped abroad.
So the strategic location, again, just to show the map of to market itself, it's made up of three different islands.
And in order to have access to the starting point, you have to get from this island of the bridge to the second one over here.
And since there are so many different groups, each neighbourhood is controlled usually by different group or by alliances among different groups.
So they are very,
very micro dynamics that are happening in these urban areas with many different small gangs and groups that would control different areas.
And if someone, for example, wants to ship the cocaine from here over the bridge,
the group might have to engage in an alliance with the one who controls the bridge and then move on.
Now, the local population knows that, and they know, of course, that also this is often dependent on on again,
on the person advance, on the leadership, which is very much also based on emotion.
So one leader is betrayed by the other one. That can be a reason why why the alliance is simply broken down.
And then that's why there's often in urban displacement.
So people would leave their neighbourhood here, go to another neighbourhood where they might have family,
where they might have friends because they know they are safe in the other area and it's easier
for them than going just somewhere in a rural area where they're not skilled as farmers,
where they don't know how to start their new livelihood. Um, so it's dynamics that happen within the time, but that are not visible to the outside.
That doesn't figure in the displacement statistics.
The homicides are not necessarily high. There are no big massacres because it's more based on selective ones.
And this is reflected in the dynamics on the ground, in the unpredictability of violence,
where people don't know when something will happen because you don't know when the alliance will break down.
You don't know when if a certain neighbourhood is now controlled by the first group or if another group came in.
So whose rules do you actually have to have to adhere to?
So this means there's a lot of disorientation. There's uncertainty with regard to how people should behave.
And there, again, is the presentiment of danger, which means that you never know when something might happen.
But it's not captured in statistics. It's not in homicide rates affected.
It's not reflected in and displacement rates.
Now, this, again, is related also to the blurred lines or the ambiguity that exist between who's actually a member of Violent Monster.
Of these groups and citizens. And I think this is reflected quite nicely in that picture, which is a funeral procession that is into Michael.
And I was interviewing someone at that point, and the person explained to me that you can see here this is a football team.
So it's quite likely that it was a young man who was killed at the time.
This is a taxi, which is also quite common because often it's taxi drivers that are killed.
Taxi drivers are the ones who are who are the informants, especially if it's motor taxi on motorbikes.
They are circulating the city during the entire day.
But this is a means of providing intelligence. They know exactly what are the movements of the city, who is coming in.
So obviously everyone. So when I came in, I'm not from there and someone else.
And if other strangers come in, they suddenly they need to know who's present in the village.
If something is changing, if there's an event taking place that usually doesn't take place and they provide the information.
This means that they are particularly vulnerable of being killed because the other groups obviously know about the presence of these informants.
So what often happens is that civilians are used as informants, like in this case, often taxi drivers, but also as messengers.
Even children, for example,
children not just used to transport messages between different groups because they wouldn't be directly because they just trust each other,
or they are used to transport weapons in the school bags, even because it doesn't attract much attention.
And then civilians are also used as contract killers,
because there's always the need for selective violence in order to make sure that the others would
adhere with their with the commitments or to make sure that an alliance does not break down.
So in a way, there's not necessarily a territorial dispute because all the groups need each other,
but there's often activity in retaliation if someone thinks that someone has provided information to the state and that's why they lost a shipment,
that's a reason to kill the other person. Also pre-emptive killings.
So that's why they need a lot of contract killers.
And the way they are contracted is that people are told, okay, I give you money if you do the job for me.
And then the person can say yes and receives the money, receives a group of friends, receive support and receive three free time.
Or the person can say, no, I don't want to do the job and then has to flee or otherwise will be killed, him or herself.
So in a way, it creates this environment of dependence of this group where it's very hard to get away from,
and which also fuels mistrust because you never know who has been contracted by
someone else and you can't trust not even your your neighbour or close people,
which then erodes the social fabric. People want not to try and take action together.
People don't meet because they know that that attracts attention.
People will see them and people don't don't trust each other.
Now the final key point is on the long term arrangements where it's most stable and where,
as I say, there's shadow citizen security and shadow citizenship.
And what I really mean here is that if there's a stable relationship so for example,
if there's a strategic alliance between different groups or even Pacific coexistence, of example,
where different groups share the territory without necessarily sharing intelligence or when there's just one group present and dominating the area,
this means that violence is low.
So you wouldn't see massacres when you see displacements or high rates of violence because these actors have achieved to govern the area.
So if you think about citizenship, not a legal concept, but citizenship really in terms of democratic theory,
if we think about it as the relationship between the state and society as a social contract in these regions,
the non-state actors have taken over the role of the state. So violent non-state actors, especially rebel groups, provide governance functions.
They provide services that can include infrastructure, health, security, justice.
And in return, the community would respect them.
And obviously, it's often a fine line between fear and respect, but also often socially recognise them and and support them.
And the provision of security then is the shadow citizenship security because of this relationship between the groups and the citizens.
So this is just one example of a region where you see this this kind of shadow citizenship that is southern Colombia.
And here at the bottom part, you see Ecuadorians is Ecuador inside.
And this is more unofficial part of it, and that's in Colombia.
This is the road infrastructure. This is the means of transportation.
So it's a very marginalised area with little state prisons, with hardly any economic opportunities except what you can see.
But the coca cultivation is the in the back and this is a way how these violent
non-state actors also achieve and achieve the support of the local population.
They provide economic opportunities in areas.
In Putumayo, for example, they've helped to build roads that help to build health centres and this is why people support
them if they are in these marginalised areas and this is reflected in these calls as well.
So the first one was a teacher saying we are in a war against the state, the state has abandoned us.
And the second one, when two neighbours have a dispute, they don't say,
I call the police, they say I call the guerrillas or I call the paramilitaries.
This is how people threaten each other.
So people themselves would resort to these justice mechanisms or security mechanisms rather than asking the state to help them,
either because the state is not present or because they believe that the rebel group is more efficient in a way than the state.
So, of course, security can be provided by undemocratic means, and it often also involves punishments with torture, for example, if theft is punished.
But for these people, this is normalised. This is just the way things work.
And at least there's order. That's a way how people can live together.
And they've experienced that for a long time. So to them, this is the way their region is, is really government.
Now, the outside perspective is something like this.
This is, again, the area where we just saw the bridge between Ecuador and Colombia.
And the green areas are mass displacements.
So this is where clashes between different armed groups have taken place and the bridge is probably around here.
So the blank area would say, okay, there's no violence.
Probably things are quite well, maybe there's still a poverty and not a lot of development, but things are in general quite fine.
However, these are exactly the areas where there's a lot of confinement and access restrictions.
So what's going on in these territories is that there's no displacement because people are not allowed to leave the territory.
These are the areas where we don't know about human rights violations because if people speak out,
if people talk to humanitarian organisations, they are punished for doing that.
So it's just complete silence about what's going on in these territories.
It's not necessarily violent. That's why there's shadow citizen security.
So the security provided by other means, but that's controlled by actors other than the state.
In a way, this is probably quite dangerous to the state because the state is often not even aware of that,
because we tend to look at the homicide rates, we tend to look at the mass displacements,
but without knowing what's locally going on, on the ground,
we don't know that these large regions of the country that are controlled by it, by other actors.
So just to conclude, what does this all mean?
So the first cluster, the absence of an arrangement, what is important here to note is really that there are rules of behaviour despite violence.
So if we are. We look at the threats of violence.
We don't know what this means to people on the ground. And sometimes they can feel relatively safe if they at least know.
What are the mechanisms? How can they protect themselves by following certain rules?
Now, the second one in the short term, equipment arrangements with these airlines are shifting very quickly and are very fragile.
It means that perceptions of insecurity can erode the social fabric. So really this constant feeling of uncertainty, of not knowing what's going on,
of not trusting anyone else because you don't know who's involved and who not.
It means that people do not take collective action, that people are not trying to participate in something because they simply don't trust each other.
And that's something that's eroding society on the long run.
And then finally, the last point on the long term arrangements is that the illusory calmness can basically excuse security impacts.
So we don't see violence happening in these areas. That doesn't mean that that everything is fine or that there's no presence of these armed actors.
It can also mean that they are actually controlling the area.
And that's why I would argue in favour of a shift from studying ungoverned spaces, the violent ones,
the ones where we have the clashes and different groups and massacres to also studying
illicitly governed spaces which are less visible and which we can't capture in numbers,
but where they actually have to go on the ground, talk to people in order to understand what's what's actually going on.
Now, the relevance here is really on two levels.
So first, obviously for Colombia, and I think that's something where I hope that tomorrow the troposphere or the Blavatnik school will
address or should address because it's key to decide the post-conflict security policies in Colombia.
There are currently peace negotiations between the government and the major rebel group, the Frog.
And what we need to understand is that these different arrangements,
these different relationships between actors, they are quite likely to represent, even if the fact demobilise.
So even if one of these groups drop out,
it means that there are still different kinds of relationship with other groups or with new groups that emerge that simply are reshuffling.
And something that happened, for example, over the course of my feeling was that when I started, there were no peace negotiations.
So in a way, it was mostly about the absence, the first cluster and the second cluster.
Then around the in the in the middle of my of my fieldwork,
the peace negotiations started and the fact became actually stronger because they had to show strength also in the negotiations.
And then suddenly in areas like Tomoko, where when I was there, it was very fragile.
They had gained more control and it became more stable relationships.
Now, what can happen after the demoralisation is that there's a reshuffling again,
that maybe it will drop again from the more stable relationships into the unstable relationships to fragile arrangements,
which means that violence might increase. But that does not necessarily mean that there's more presence of these groups.
So we have to understand how these relationships work in order to then address them and to see where are the entry points in order to address them.
And now generally for the world, I think this is really important.
If we look at other groups like Boko Haram, ISIS, Hamas, Al Shabab,
because it means that in regions where we don't see a lot of violence, where these actors have been present before,
it's likely that they just have settled into a stable relationship with another actor that they have achieved to govern a certain area,
but not necessarily that they're not present anymore. Or in another area, we don't see massacres or we don't see mass displacement.
That might mean that now there are fragile alliances between different groups,
that they're kind of cooperating in certain business deals and organised crime,
not necessarily drafting also on human smuggling and other forms of organised crime.
And that's why there is more selective violence which then has an impact on the local population in terms of uncertainty,
in terms of the social fabric, which is important to strengthen the society and to address these problems.
So it's essential to understand the security impacts of these violent non-state actor
relationships and not only their presence both in Colombia and also in other conflict settings.
Thank.