Drafting Redistribution: Rural Movements and Land Dispositions in Peace Accords

• In Event: (Re)distributive Policies, Elites and Non-elite Actors in Latin America

Abstract

Political transitions are usually conceived of as the reworking of political democracy for excluded actors (O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986). Yet transitions also perform as key instances for economic democracy by engineering prior wealth distribution. Between 1990 and 2021, 42 out of 84 civil war negotiated settlements address land reform, including ownership, access to agricultural support services, and property returns (Bell and Badanjak 2019). Why is land redistribution committed in civil war negotiated settlements?

I argue that outsider, non-armed actors—e.g., rural-poor movements—shape the content of peace dispositions on land redistribution depending on their strength and frames of mobilization to either credibly threaten political and economic stability or develop broad-based consensual collective action from not only like-minded movements but also other actors like NGOs, political parties, and faith communities. Deploying strategies and frames linked to underlying sources to conflict that are allegedly associated with insurgent rhetoric and action—what I call class-based, belligerent mobilization—, movements compel the signatories to compromise on land reform when mobilization can credibly put governments’ political legitimacy and economic elites’ agricultural enterprises at risk. Under such conditions, elites are forced to cooperate as a way of reducing the costs and risks of uprising mobilization in contexts already rife with large-scale violence. Conversely, by employing strategies and frames connected to massive, gross rights violations—what I term reparation-based, rightful mobilization—, movements influence peace dispositions on land redistribution when mobilization shows distancing capacity from rebellion and builds wide-reaching coalitions for redistribution. Under such circumstances, elites acquiesce to redistributive reform based on claims that align with liberal normative commitments to redressing massive and serious rights violations yet do not seemingly pose threats to wealth distribution.

To test the observable implications of my argument, I employ a mixed-methods research design to assess the impact of rural-poor movements’ claims on the 2016 peace agreement signed between the Colombian government and the former guerrilla group FARC-EP. The Colombian peace accord enshrines not only disarmament, reincorporation, and transitional justice measures but also redistributive land reform, including land access to the rural poor and agricultural production services. Using topic modeling, principal component analysis and cluster analysis to a novel dataset on 56,817 citizen proposals for the 2012-2016 peace table, I first identify the class-based and reparation-oriented frames that rural-poor movements and other social organizations employed to articulate land claims at the bargaining table and map out patterns in frame usage across petitioners. Second, I utilize ordinary least-square regression to test whether frame types, organizational coalitions’ discourse, and protest activity shape the signatories’ incorporation of citizen proposals into the accord. Text data is supplemented with a dataset on rural-poor contentious action to construct the independent variables. Through plagiarism detection software, I construct the main independent variable that indicates the percentage of the peace accord that directly borrows from citizen proposals. Finally, I complement statistical findings with 15 in-depth interviews with movement leaders and guerrilla and government negotiators to unpack the causal mechanisms at work.
Contributing to prior scholarship on the political economy of redistribution, social movements, and peacebuilding, this paper explains why and how non-armed actors seek to diminish a critical grievance in land-based conflicts through diverse strategies and repertoires of mobilization. More specifically, my findings elucidate the strategies and framings that rural-poor movements like Indigenous, Afro-descendant, victims, women, and peasant organizations employ to effectively influence redistributive outcomes, challenging elites’ disproportionate capacity to thwart redistribution and jeopardize peace.

Author

• Isabel Güiza-Gómez, The University of Notre Dame