For decades, politicians and journalists framed Colombia’s civil war (1964–2016) as a narcotics problem, collapsing its political and social dynamics into the claim that the FARC was nothing more than a drug cartel – a narco-terrorist organisation masquerading as a political movement. This ‘War on Drugs’ narrative served as the major pretext for extensive U.S. intervention from the late 1990s onwards, under which Colombia became one of the largest recipients of U.S. military assistance globally.
Drawing on my recent article, War of Movement, published in the Review of International Studies, I explain why this framing fundamentally misunderstands how and why the conflict escalated.
The article rejects the idea that Colombia’s war can be understood as an ‘internal conflict’ – the dominant category in security, conflict and peace studies. Instead, it reinterprets the escalation as fundamentally internationalised, shaped by the uneven and combined dynamics of global capitalism and Colombia’s violent process of neoliberal reintegration during the 1990s. This reframing shifts the focus away from the dubious moral tale that the FARC ‘degenerated’ into a drug cartel toward the deeper political-economic dynamics shaping the conflict.
