In Colombia, the signature of the peace agreement between the government and the FARC is now scheduled for march 2016, after sixty years of a protracted civil war. But since at least four years, the Colombian government has implemented a large panel of post-conflit programs. These programs cover topics as victims, internally displaced people, regional reconstruction, reform of security sector, and commissions about historical violent facts. In the national government, there is even a secretary for post-conflict. The particularity of what we can analyzed as a “post-conflict governance” is that these programs are decided and implemented in parallel of the peace negotiations, and in advance to the partial agreements reached on particular points since the opening of the peace talks. These programs have a very strong performative function, because they anticipate the reality of the end of the armed conflict. In this aspect, it’s a real success, because all political and social actors in Colombia have nowadays a discourse and programs about the “post-conflict”.
This situation can be analyzed as a way by the national government to manage the particular situation between war and peace. The civil war in Colombia didn’t lead at all to the collapse of the Colombian state, but means serious limits to territorial and sectorial sovereignty. The presence of other guerrillas, but also of drug traffic, paramilitary or criminal local groups is a strong contest to the political capacity of the state. Even if the FARC are weakened, they still have a strong influence in some regions. The peace agreement includes a demobilization program for former members of FARC. But the presence of all these actors means that the peace agreement doesn’t mean the peace: a serious threat to the peace agreement is the remobilization of former guerrillas in other armed groups.
In this context the ‘post-conflit governance’ can be analyzed as the way the Colombian government has taken to inforce, in an institutional way, its political presence, in a context of a long ‘war to peace’ period. But it is also indeed a way to intend to regulate political and social relations built in the war in local configurations, in a context where the local presence of the state is historically weak. The actual debates about clandestine gold and coal mines, the tenancy of the land in palm tree regions or the programs for victims and internally displaced people are significant of this problem. The Colombian government has to incorporate in these post-war regulations legal and illegal actors, and to recognize their influence and power. To analyse this particular situation, the paper is built on the comparison of programs of central government and local configurations.
