Abstract This article tests claims from the comparative extractive literature by examining how state-company linkages shape civil society mobilization against extractive projects. We focus on convenios de cooperación (CCs)—contracts through which extractive companies finance branches of the Colombian armed forces or judiciary to provide security for company operations. We employ a mixed-methods design. First, we analyze a panel dataset of nearly six hundred contracts signed between 2002 and 2020, assessing their relationship to threats, assassinations of social leaders, arbitrary detentions, and other security indicators across municipalities. We then pair this statistical analysis with fieldwork in two case study sites: Jericó, Antioquia, and the Ariari region of Meta. Our analysis asks two central questions. How do CCs fit into extractive companies’ broader repertoires of community control? And what do they mean for civil society mobilization—how are they lived and felt on the ground? Findings reveal sectoral variation and differences in how CCs are activated and experienced over time. By introducing the first systematic dataset on CCs, we make visible a widespread but understudied mechanism through which firms embed repressive capacity in state security apparatuses, thereby advancing debates on corporate counterinsurgency, protest criminalization, and security governance in Latin America.
Gillooly et al. (Thu,) studied this question.