The Downside of Decentralization: Armed Clientelism in Colombia

Abstract In recent years, decentralization and regional autonomy measures have figured prominently in negotiations designed to end some of the world's most important conflicts, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan. Reforms that shift powers to subnational units deserve the attention of those who are trying to promote security via institutional design, but the risks associated with these territorial reforms are considerable. When political and economic resources are transferred to subnational governments in the attempt to create meaningful access to the political system for former combatants, the great risk is that these same resources can be used to finance a continuation of the armed struggle instead. In response to the popularity of territorial reforms in many post-conflict settings, this paper sounds a cautionary note by evaluating the negative impact of decentralization on security in Colombia, site of Latin America's longest and deadliest armed conflict. After analyzing the design decisions of reformers who hoped that decentralization would help end the conflict, I argue that decentralization in fact financed the expansion of armed clientelism by illegal groups on both the left and right. Thanks to the weakness of the police in much of the national territory, guerrillas and paramilitaries have been able to use decentralized resources to destabilize the state, limiting even further its monopoly over the use of force and creating what are in effect parallel states on the left and right. For helpful comments on this article and help on this research project, I would like to thank Gary Bass, Ana María Bejarano, Edwin Connerley, Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Jim Fearon, Mala Htun, Robert Kaufman, Bethany Lacina, Indira Lakshmanan, Beatriz Magaloni, Sebastian Saiegh, Dermot Tatlow, Eric Thun, Harold Trinkunas, as well as two anonymous reviewers and Elizabeth Kier at Security Studies. I am also grateful to the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this article and to the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University for financing my field research in Colombia.