Abstract
During internal conflicts, states view some civilians as threats, suspects, or internal enemies based on ideological identification criteria. Institutional security provisions may be unequally delivered based on these views. Often countries in the post-peace agreement phase are characterized by legacies of violence, where states struggle to provide security to all groups, re-establish their legitimacy and fill the power vacuum left by the non-state actors. The existing literature focuses on studying strategies in the aftermath of internal conflict that aim to build state capacity, usually in capacity building, by transforming their institutions and strengthening their security forces. However, some those studies often assume the state and its institutions are benign and neutral in their relationship with civilians during and following conflict. How does ideology influence the attitudes of state armed actors towards civilians after peace agreements? To what extent do state armed actors contribute to the persistence of violence – after peace accords – because their ideological bias influences their willingness to protect and behave aggressively toward civilians, depending on their group identity? My thesis project, “War mentality and post-peace accord violence: A field experiment of political-ideological bias among Colombian soldiers,” answer those question and argue that members of state armed forces – particularly the army – continue to sustain, as a legacy of the conflict, the wartime cleavages that define enemies and threats. I show that aggressive disposition and willingness to protect civilians – the main dependent variables of this study – vary across (1) civilian wartime cleavages and (2) civilians’ political attitudes regarding the political reintegration of the former rebels. To gather the data, I conducted fieldwork in Colombia for four months, during which time I delivered a survey with embedded experiments (N=920) and interviewed 28 Colombian soldiers in 2019, following the peace agreement signed between the government and the FARC-EP in 2016. The study shows how the state’s soldiers may contribute to post-peace agreement violence in Colombia by failing to protect civilians because of their ideological identity. The findings suggest that civilians’ ideological identity influences soldiers’ threat perceptions and emotions, exposing their ideological bias toward civilians. These results indicate that ideology remains an essential driver of soldiers’ attitudes, with the potential to affect their behavior toward civilians. One implication of the study is that without addressing and challenging the history of identity-based grievances that creates enemy images held by soldiers during the conflict, violence can persist. This study’s results are significant for the Colombian transitional period if the state wants to consolidate its presence throughout its territory by healing relations with civilians with different views and backgrounds, and guaranteeing their protection. This might prevent future violence and provide conditions for peacebuilding.