Este artículo analiza el caso de la Segunda Marquetalia, disidencia de las FARC-EP que anunció su rearme en agosto de 2019 tras el retorno a las armas de “Iván Márquez” y otros excomandantes, quienes denunciaron incumplimientos del Estado al Acuerdo Final de Paz. A partir del análisis de su trayectoria, estructura organizativa, componente ideológico y accionar armado, el estudio concluye que, aunque inicialmente se proyectó como la disidencia con el componente político más sólido, terminó fracasando como proyecto rebelde. El artículo se basa en los principales hallazgos de la investigación realizada en la maestría en Estudios Políticos del IEPRI de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
The substitution of illicit crops in areas of special environmental interest led to a substantial reduction incoca leaf cultivation in these territories during the program’s first three years. However, since 2020 therehas been a growing trend of replanting. This article examines the factors that have contributed to thisreplanting and, based on a comparative case study between two categories of protected areas—the Sierrade la Macarena National Natural Park and the Ariari–Guayabero Integrated Management District—argues that the restrictive and isolationist approach that predominates in the environmental regulatory framework has limited the establishment and sustainability of peasant substitution economies. The paper further argues that the normative dichotomy between the ecological function and the social function of property can be overcome through Productive Ecological Restoration.
This article explores how gota a gota loans become embedded in the labor processes of the popular economy in the city of Medellín. To this extent, it seeks to highlight the political order underlying the money lent by these moneylenders. In contrast to the dominant approaches, the approach proposed here does not focus exclusively on violent practices of debt collectors or the outcomes of state regulations on the credit market. Rather, in this article, gota a gota moneylenders are observed from the point of view of valorization, indebtedness and labor process of popular economies. The success of these debt relations, we argue, lies in its ability to present itself as a guarantor of popular life and labor.
Este artículo tiene como propósito identificar y analizar los ejes temáticos centrales, las contribuciones más relevantes y las agendas de investigación que han ocupado el interés científico de la revista Análisis Político durante su trayectoria. A través de un mapeo científico y técnicas de clusterización, se identificaron seis grandes líneas que estructuran la trayectoria de producción intelectual de la revista y muestran la evolución de sus preocupaciones analíticas. Este proceso permite afirmar que la revista ha evolucionado hacia un horizonte más amplio e interdisciplinario, donde convergen campos como la teoría política, las relaciones internacionales, la sociología, la comunicación y los estudios culturales; incorporando frentes nuevos de indagación como la violencia política y los procesos de paz, memoria y justicia transicional, ciudadanía y legitimidad democrática en Latinoamérica, política exterior y geopolítica, comunicación política y participación digital, así como derechos humanos y movilidad social. Más allá de ser una ventana para monitorear los cambios políticos de la región, la publicación ha sido clave para el impulso de agendas de investigación que conectan los debates globales con las realidades imperantes en el escenario latinoamericano.
The creation of the international drug control regime in the early XXth century compelled Colombia to adopt its first regulations in the 1920s. Law 11 of 1920 regulated drug transactions in pharmacies, and Law 82 of 1923 ratified the 1912 Opium Convention, under which the parties committed to gradually suppress opium smoking and to restrict the manufacture and consumption of processed drugs to medical purposes. Although there was consensus among the national elite on the need to control substances considered risky, this was not a priority issue, and continued pressure from the United States was required for the Colombian Congress to complete the approval process of these laws. This article examines this legislative process and situates it within the context of the emergence of the international regime.
Este artículo presenta y analiza cinco experiencias regionales colectivas de construcción de memoria sobre el conflicto armado interno en Colombia, llevadas a cabo por grupos organizados de víctimas, mujeres de sectores populares urbanos y rurales, campesinos, afrocolombianos, indígenas, sectores de la academia universitaria e intelectuales y artistas de las regiones. Estas experiencias pudieron estudiarse gracias al desarrollo entre mayo de 2019 y mayo de 2023 del proyecto “Memorias desde las márgenes. Justicia transicional inclusiva y procesos de memoria creativos para la reconciliación en Colombia”, desarrollado desde el Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales (IEPRI) de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia y la Universidad de Bristol con el apoyo del Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación.
The social cohesion of many societies may depend, among other factors, on the affirmation of a common civic creed. In this regard, one of the most relevant questions is why some societies have succeeded in building a sense of national identity associated with civic values, while other societies have not. To answer this question, I propose a heuristic model of the nation as family and postulate that several of the mechanisms that help explain national identity formation are similar to the mechanisms that contribute to explain personal identity formation. Based on this model, I show that the church-state conflict has been decisive in the formation of national identity in Latin America and present evidence from four countries about the effect of this conflict on the levels observed support for democracy, obedience to the law, spread of violence and corruption, as manifestations of quite different configurations of national identity.
This article identifies the editorial line of Análisis Político on justice-related issues and, from that standpoint, examines one of IEPRI’s contributions to Colombia’s juridical-political debate over its 40 years. To do so, it analyzes the journal’s 111 issues and contrasts them with the political sections of El Espectador and Voz through a taxonomy of 7 macro-categories and 65 subcategories, statistically related and qualitatively grounded. The results reveal three differentiated profiles: Análisis Político as a judicial and transitional pole, El Espectador as a constitutional and generalist pole, and Voz as an intermediate socio-legal position.The main finding is that the relationship between academia and the press does not take a binary form, but rather a relational structure in which IEPRI occupies a singular and specialized position in the circulation of political knowledge.
This article presents a state of the art of the literature published about peacemaking in Colombia that is broad and comprehensive. Taking a sample of 243 texts published between 1986 and 2026, in which the Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales (IEPRI) has had a relevant impact, both from the work of its research and the publication of Análisis Político. This allowed us to identify that, in the literature about peacemaking in Colombia, there has been a process of conceptual development and consolidation in which academic authors, ex-combatants, government officials, among other types of authors, have participated. A shift can be seen from narrative texts that seek to share with society the internal events of the negotiations to comprehensive analyses that seek to analyze the negotiation processes as central elements of the country’s political dynamics in the face of violence and identify lessons for future negotiations.
This article examines the community of authors and the thematic evolution of the journal Análisis Políticosince its creation. To do so, it compiles an original database of 1,234 articles published in the journal between1987 and 2025 and uses it to conduct a bibliometric analysis. The results show a gradual diversification of the journal’s academic community, reflected in the growing participation of institutions beyond the founding institute, a steady increase in co-authorship, and a sustained—though still limited—presence of authors affiliated with foreign universities. The thematic analysis also reveals a progressive reorganization of the journal’s research agenda, in which topics such as armed conflict, political violence, and the operation of democratic institutions have gained increasing centrality.
The epistemological evolution of Peace Research (P.R.) has consolidated peace as an autonomous field of study. In Colombia, this field has experienced sustained growth since the 1980s, influenced by the armed conflict and negotiation processes. However, there is still a lack of analysis examining how specialized institutions, such as the IEPRI, have contributed to defining agendas and structuring debates on PR in Colombia. This article analyzes its contribution between 1986 and 2026 through a systematic review of the articles published in the journal Análisis Político and books edited by the institute, using criteria of inclusion and exclusion, classification, and content analysis. The findings highlight contributions to conceptual transformations, debates, and the institutionalization of the Peace Research.
This article offers a critical qualitative review of the intellectual production of the Institute of Political Studies and International Relations (IEPRI) and Análisis Político in order to explain how territorial questions became visible within Colombian political knowledge. The core finding is that IEPRI did not simply neglect peripheral territories; it rendered them legible through frames of conflict, administration, and state crisis. The corpus shows four shifts: region as agrarian violence and clientelism; territory as conflict and subnational politics; land, post-conflict, and the local state; and the Amazon as ecological territoriality and situated knowledge. IEPRI’s main contribution was not a continuous theory of regional development, but a center-produced regime of territorial visibility.
This article stems from the convergence of two factors: the celebration of the 40th anniversary of IEPRI’s founding and an ongoing research project that seeks to examine the role of this academic community in national policies aimed at conflict management, the strengthening of democracy, and the pursuit of peace. Along with a preliminary presentation of key milestones in the Institute’s history since its founding in1986 and an identification of the major national initiatives in which it has played a prominent role, the article reflects on the strengths and challenges encountered in the effort to define a set of dimensions, subdimensions, and variables that would allow for an understanding of the contributions made to the topics under study over a four-decade period. Despite its preliminary nature, this exercise offers a reconstruction of the development of various core functions of the IEPRI, exploring the possibility of incorporating them into the methodological design of the research. Thus, while examining the feasibility and relevance of the empirical material found in documents and archives, the text serves as a timely opportunity to delve deeper into the recovery of institutional memory during this current period of celebration.
The purpose of this article is to narrate a significant experience of participatory action research and its impact on reality, which took place at the IEPRI and other settings in recent years. To this end, the article analyses the work led by Fals Borda on spatial organization in Colombia. Drawing on a history of the present, it details how issues of territorial organization were analyzed and the proposals formulated to resolve them. It is argued that the activities carried out helped to guide processes of territorial reorganization, shape public debate, influence territorial law, social movements and regional research centers, as well as strengthening geographies of origin and state planning.
This article presents a spiral autoethnography that, drawing from lived experience, proposes a relational reading of memory, territory and identity as the foundation of knowledge. In the context of the 40th anniversary of IEPRI, the text positions itself as testimony and reflection, articulating personal trajectories, collective processes and pedagogical practices developed at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Through the metaphor of the mochila, the article traces a path that integrates origin, rupture, recomposition and expansion, proposing the re-weaving of language as a political act to resignify reality and question epistemological hierarchies. Experiences such as Saber y Vida, the Red Intercultural and the Aula Viva de Saberes show how knowledge is embodied, shared and transformed in relation. Epistemological justice appears as the handle that holds the weave together without fragmenting it, and repara-action as the act that restores the bond between thought, feeling, word and action in the body and territory. More than a theoretical reflection, the article proposes a way of inhabiting knowledge that recognizes care and living memory as principles for re-weaving life.
El conflicto armado colombiano ha impulsado la proliferación de Empresas Militares y de Seguridad Privadas (EMSP), redefiniendo los conceptos de guerra y conflicto armado en el siglo XXI, difuminando las fronteras entre los roles de combate y los no combatientes, y creando desafíos para la gobernanza y el control civil. Este artículo examina la evolución de las EMSP en Colombia y su impacto en la seguridad y la consolidación de la paz, proponiendo una tipología para comprender su diversidad. Se argumenta que la privatización de la seguridad plantea desafíos para la rendición de cuentas y la transparencia, pero también ofrece oportunidades para la consolidación de la paz. El análisis del caso colombiano proporciona valiosas perspectivas sobre las transformaciones de la guerra en el siglo XXI, destacando la necesidad de una regulación eficaz y un control civil responsable de las EMSP.
Este artículo analiza los avances y retrocesos en la feminización de la guerra, definida aquí como la inclusión femenina de forma masiva en ejércitos nacionales y fuerzas irregulares rebeldes. Esto a través del seguimiento a los casos con mayor participación femenina en tres tipos de conflictos: las grandes guerras de alcance mundial; revoluciones y guerras de guerrillas; y lo que ha sido denominado como “nuevas guerras”. Hubo dos grandes vías para la integración femenina al ámbito militar durante el siglo XX: i) los ejércitos aliados y grupos de la resistencia durante las dos Guerras Mundiales y ii) las revoluciones inspiradas en el materialismo dialéctico. Para el siglo XXI, iii) los ejércitos predadores, así como los creados sobre líneas étnicas y religiosas, también desarrollaron políticas de inclusión. Sin embargo, una vez que la guerra termina, las promesas de igualdad femenina son fácilmente olvidadas en todos estos casos.
Este artículo analiza la transformación de la guerra en el dominio marítimo en el siglo XXI, desde un enfoque transdisciplinar que articula geopolítica, estudios estratégicos, relaciones internacionales, seguridad y derecho internacional. Se argumenta que el mar es hoy un espacio de conflicto híbrido, donde confluyen disputas interestatales, actores no estatales, presiones legales y tecnologías emergentes. A través del estudio de casos como el Mar del Sur de China, el Mar Negro, el Mar Rojo, el Ártico y el Caribe, se evidencian continuidades y rupturas frente a las guerras marítimas tradicionales. El artículo concluye que es necesario fortalecer la gobernanza marítima y adaptar los marcos normativos a las nuevas formas de guerra en el mar.
