Drawing on two decades of collaborative legal ethnographic research with Indigenous communities, this article weaves personal narrative and lived experience to highlight working-class scholar-activism and embodied spiritual rituality as an act of resistance within academia. It critically challenges Western research ethics paradigms by emphasising ethics as a lived, relational practice grounded in rituality and interconnectedness rather than mere compliance. Through an audiovisual lens, it demonstrates how visual storytelling can embody and amplify more-than-human voices, fostering relationality and responsibility. The paper offers two key contributions: recentring the positionality of working-class scholars and recentring the agency of the more-than-human int he field of law as vital in knowledge production. While decolonial and Indigenous scholarship advocate for diverse epistemologies, they often overlook working-class perspectives rooted in societal justice. I argue that a heart-based resistance grounded in critical care, relationality, Indigenous ontologies and spirituality can foster transformative academic knowledge.

Development planning was a form of interventionist social knowledge widely used in the mid-twentieth century. Planning was employed with different aims, and the adoption of concrete techniques and procedures was highly sensitive to each country’s institutional context. This article studies the life trajectory of Colombia’s Ten-year Plan, an internationally celebrated attempt to design economic development on a large scale in what actors characterized as a politically “democratic” and economically “liberal” setting. Based on the Colombian case, I argue that a central function of planning in developing countries was to build trust, on behalf of local stakeholders and international donors, in the state’s capacity to credibly use public resources and foreign aid to achieve its development aims. In turn, planning also allowed outsiders to invigilate the actions taken by states on the economy, and to make them accountable for their commitments. I examine the media of persuasion used in the build-up to, and the publicization and revision of the Ten-year Plan, to account for the shift from the macro scale of comprehensive plans to the smaller-scale development interventions observed in the 1960s. This case shows that the malleability of planning procedures was key for the enduring resilience of the planning system.

Guided by interviews with key protagonists and extensive archival research, this article reinterprets the escalation of the Colombian armed conflict during the critical period of the 1990s. It rejects conventional characterisations of the war as an ‘internal conflict’ and challenges dominant approaches based on state weakness and economic opportunity. Instead, the article situates the FARC’s rapid expansion against the background of the international political economy, linking the conflict’s escalation to changing social relations of production. Grounded in historical materialism, and particularly drawing on the concepts of uneven and combined development, passive revolution, crisis of authority, and war of movement, the article explains how the Colombian state’s reintegration into global capitalism deepened social fragmentation, displaced subaltern populations, generated new terrains of resistance, and provoked a spreading crisis of authority that the FARC strategically exploited. It is argued that the FARC’s expansion was not a symptom of criminal degeneration but a strategic political response enabled by Colombia’s passive revolutionary transformation within the uneven and combined dynamics of global capitalism. The article contributes to broader debates in security, international political economy, global development, historical sociology, and regional studies, inviting scholars to identify the underlying but not immediately visible dynamics shaping conflict and peace.

How does the form of community dissent shape public support for coercive state policies? This article addresses this question through a vignette experiment on coca forced eradication in Colombia. Participants were randomly assigned to scenarios in which communities either verbally objected to or mobilized against coercive eradication efforts. Exposure to mobilization, compared to verbal objection, reduces support for both unconditional eradication and outright opposition. By contrast, it increases support for eradication conditioned on community consent. These effects are consistent across racial frames, suggesting that the impact of dissent form may transcend ethnic boundaries. We interpret these findings as evidence that visible, organized community dissent can shift public preferences toward more community-centered and conditional approaches. These findings contribute to research on protest, state coercion, and public opinion by showing that the form of dissent shapes support for coercive state interventions.

In many tourism-dependent islands, an acute imbalance between increasing demand for wastewater management and the capacity of existing sewage infrastructure represents an increased risk for ecosystems and population health. Given that locals may be opposed to increasing tourism taxes to fund investments in sewerage, promoting charitable giving among tourists may be an alternative to improve wastewater management in tourist destinations. Using a contingent valuation survey, this study assesses whether tourists are willing to donate to improve wastewater management in San Andres Island, Colombia. Split-sample treatments were implemented to examine the response of tourists' giving preferences to priming communications regarding the effects of poor wastewater management. Results indicate that tourists are willing to donate to improve local wastewater management. Our findings also provide useful insights about tourists' giving preferences to design effective charitable giving campaigns to improve wastewater management.

Acuto’s manuscript is a gateway to understanding what could be called ‘Indigenous Latin American Archaeology’ (or ‘Indigenous Archaeology in Latin America’). This manuscript summarizes several arguments that have shaped the theoretical panorama of Latin American Indigenous archaeology in recent decades. The first argument is of a historical order. Clearly, the construction of national identities in Latin America that began in the 19th century after the wars of independence set forward a programmatic agenda concerning the question of the region’s Indigenous populations. The core of this agenda was to eradicate Indigenous populations so that the territories could be populated with modern citizens. So once the new Latin American republics were recognized, the project of clearing what would represent the Indigenous background was undertaken.

The women who have participated in memory-building projects in Colombia have shaped the formation of collective memory in important ways in official and informal projects. They have emphasized and highlighted their gendered experiences of the Colombian conflict and gained valuable experience working with and inside organizations. These experiences have provided women with a sense of feminist empowerment. The case of Medellín is particularly interesting because the city’s women have been engaged in constructing collective memory for decades, long before the ratification of the 2016 Peace Accord. As such, these women had a valuable skill set that they were able to employ in collaboration with the official transitional justice mechanisms supported by the state after 2016. The experience of having their voices recognized and acknowledged has raised the feminist consciousness of the women of Medellín involved with these projects. The Medellín case is somewhat distinct from other Latin American cases of women peace and human rights activists because Colombian women have had several decades to learn the importance of including and even centering their intersectional gendered perspectives. The women of Medellín are not unique among Latin American women, but they have had a significant head start.

Ideology is a powerful tool for parties in armed conflicts, as it provides a source of motivation for combatants to stay in group under difficult circumstances and to perform actions that put them at risk or defy their personal ethical codes. But once in peacetime, besides the effects of past negative intergroup experiences, radical beliefs may become an obstacle to reconciliation and prolong the confrontation in the minds of ex-combatants. An examination of 484 recently decommissioned soldiers and insurgents in Colombia shows how the persistent ideological differences among former enemies help us explain postconflict intergroup bias beyond the effects of wartime victimization. We conclude that addressing the ideological radicalization that prolongs confrontation after armed conflict ceases is fundamental to creating proper conditions for reconciliation, and it offers a viable policy alternative to the much-needed healing from wartime-related trauma.

This study examines the impact of Colombia’s mental health system reforms (1999–2021) on suicide mortality trends using national vital statistics data (51,924 suicide-related deaths). Through joinpoint regression and interrupted time series analyses, we assessed age-standardized suicide rates (ASSRs) across demographic subgroups. Results revealed no statistically significant associations between policy reforms and suicide trends, despite Colombia’s progressive legislative advancements, including Law 1616 (2013) and expanded mental health services. Key findings include (1) declining ASSR for adolescents (−0.75% annually, p < 0.001) but rising rates among women (+3.8% post-2012, p < 0.05); (2) rural areas consistently exhibited higher ASSRs than urban settings; and (3) reforms showed nonsignificant immediate or sustained effects (p > 0.05). The study underscores the complexity of suicide determinants, suggesting that structural factors (e.g., socioeconomic disparities) may outweigh health-sector interventions. These findings highlight the need for integrated, context-specific suicide prevention strategies in Colombia and similar settings.

Los estudios sobre la relación entre música y fuerzas militares suelen estar mediados por enfoques tradicionales que analizan la música marcial o sus usos para los fines de la institución. Sin embargo, existe una producción musical de integrantes activos y retirados de las fuerzas militares que no es marcial, que no necesariamente está institucionalizada y que se aleja de los usos y temáticas que usualmente se asocian a la música militar. El estudio de estas producciones complejiza y enriquece los enfoques tradicionales sobre la relación entre música y fuerzas militares. Este texto presenta los hallazgos de la recopilación y análisis de 463 canciones compuestas y/o interpretadas por militares activos y retirados en Colombia entre 1989 y 2021, junto con entrevistas a algunos de estos artistas. Los hallazgos sugieren que abordar este tipo de música, que pocas veces es reconocida como ‘militar’, permite conocer la perspectiva del soldado como individuo en contextos de guerra y posconflicto; facilita la comprensión de la relación entre música institucional y no institucional y los distintos usos que se le da; y abre líneas de investigación sobre la forma en la que estas producciones entran en diálogo con géneros musicales, identidades regionales y el mercado artístico en el que participan.

How do state interventions targeting illicit economies influence armed violence? Using Colombia as a critical case, we argue that aerial spraying of coca crops exacerbates violence by destabilizing local power dynamics and disrupting interactions among armed actors, civilians, and the state. Using municipal-level data from 2000 to 2015, we find that aerial spraying increases overall levels of violence in affected areas. Aerial spraying, we find, propitiates retaliatory violence against the state, stimulates turf wars between armed organizations, and produces civilian victimization. Moreover, we show that paramilitaries and criminal organizations respond more sharply to aerial spraying, escalating retaliation against the state and violence against civilians. By contrast, insurgent violence remains more consistent, driven by ideological goals and largely independent of eradication efforts. These findings reveal how fleeting large-scale interventions can inadvertently fuel conflict by altering the strategic equilibria of violent actors in illicit economies.

Compulsory voting (CV) has been common in Latin America. While research on its effects is burgeoning, little is known about its origins. This article seeks to start filling the gap by focusing on the adoption of CV in democratising polities. It proposes an explanation that rests on two implications of what this institution can reasonably be expected to do, i.e. increase turnout. The first logic suggests that CV was established to curb electoral malfeasance. The second, in turn, posits that it was introduced for damage limitation to those who held power. These hypotheses are tested against alternatives through a comparative historical study of three South American countries.