“Total Peace” in Colombia: Lessons for Negotiating with Organised Crime Groups and Promoting Peacebuilding
March 2025
Briefing Note 36
Felipe Botero, GI-TOC
Kyle Johnson, Conflict Response
Juanita Durán, Laboratorio de Justicia y Política Criminal (LJPC)
Mariana Botero, GI-TOC
Andrés Aponte, GI-TOC
Lina Asprilla, GI-TOC
SOC ACE Project: Negotiating with criminal groups: Colombia’s Total Peace policy
PUBLICATION SUMMARY
The 2016 Peace Agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC)) marked a milestone in the recent history of Colombia. On the one hand, the largest armed group, which represented the greatest threat to the state’s control, demobilised; on the other, multiple areas of the country experienced peace that had been absent for decades.
However, shortly after the FARC demobilisation, some regions fell back into a spiral of violence due to attempts by other armed and criminal actors to expand their zones of control, the emergence of dissident factions of the demobilised guerrilla group, and the presence of criminal ecosystems and local armed groups attempting to regulate communities and areas beyond the reach of the state. This has led to the start of a new cycle of violence.
In response to this situation, and to definitively close this violent chapter in Colombia’s history, President Gustavo Petro launched an ambitious peace proposal aimed at ending armed violence through the Total Peace Policy (TPP). This policy promotes simultaneous negotiations with criminal organisations and “political” armed groups to achieve “Paz Total” (“Total Peace”), negotiating separately with each of the most powerful illegal armed and violent organisations in the country simultaneously.
This Briefing Note summarises lessons from the TPP for negotiating with criminal groups found in research papers coming out of the SOC ACE research project “Negotiating with Criminal Groups: Colombia’s Total Peace”. Drawing on fieldwork in three regions –Buenaventura, Arauca and Tumaco– the note explains how implementation of the TPP provides important lessons and implications for policymakers and scholars in organised crime, conflict resolution and negotiations, and peacebuilding; in particular: the need to understand the evolving nature of violence; the importance of coordinating between local and national authorities; appropriation of the concept of “hybrid political orders”; and the importance of timing and sequencing in negotiations.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
Total Peace Policy: Between light and shadow
One of two full research papers analysing Colombia’s comprehensive peacebuilding policy. Read more here…
Institutional architecture of Total Peace: A normative review studies in practice
Focusing on its legal framework, read the second of two full research papers analysing Colombia’s Total Peace Policy. Read more here…
Incorporating serious organised crime into understandings of elite bargains & political settlements
Research by Alina Rocha Menocal on the relevance of and the relative gap in the evidence on organised crime actors interaction with political settlements. Read more here…
Organised crime groups, criminal agendas, violence and conflict: Implications for engagement and peace processes
A review of the evidence on peace processes and organised crime by Huma Haider. Learn more here…