A Trajectory of a New Life after a Peace Process

Colombia endured five decades of armed conflict until a peace agreement was signed in 2016.

When the government of Colombia and the guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed the agreement, the world, the country, and the population had a lot of expectations about the country’s future. Some researchers have concentrated on the territory, the environmental costs of the peace process, biodiversity vulnerability, and the increase in illegal deforestation and mining, while others have analyzed the implications of the political process, political parties, conflict resolution, and rural development policy.

However, the trajectories of people have not had deep research like other topics in the post-agreement period, especially when the evidence is that civilians in conflict zones exhibit greater support for the peace process and are more willing to grant political concessions to armed groups. Also, the concept of “territorial peace” is a novel approach in conflict resolution processes because it provides new opportunities for peace-making and re-imagining the nation vis a vis the population in conflict zones.

The ”territorial peace” converted into a transformation space to consolidate the peace in Colombia. For this evolution, the Colombian regions, including cities, need a socioeconomic perspective to consolidate their development. Thus, did ex-combatants have contributed to making the peace process a new reality in Colombian peripheral regions, or was the peace process rise purely the result of political factors?

To address this question, we use data on over 10,000 individuals between 2020 and 2024 who participated in the Colombian peace process, which includes information on individual trajectories after signing the agreement. The private dataset of the Colombian Peace Institution is organized by production projects and municipalities, enabling the estimation of their contributions to specialization and the evolution of various regions. This level of granularity is essential for constructing measures of specialization and localization. To identify the starting and current locations of each, we use geographic coordinates and map them to Colombian municipalities. Due to the limited availability of data on the complete trajectory of individuals, we employ proxies for trajectory, such as the current location, which serves as a valid proxy for a relevant site of socio-economic activities.

Relatedness measures have been validated as robust predictors of the probability that countries, regions, and cities enter or exit an activity, such as product exports, technologies, industries, and research areas [3]. This study enhances our understanding of the role of ex-combatants in the formation of knowledge agglomerations and production activities and provides a perspective on the evolution of trajectories and regional specializations after Colombia’s peace process. The probability of a region developing or maintaining specialization in a specific activity could increase with people possessing knowledge in that activity, as well as those with expertise in related fields. The attractiveness of a municipality is essential by activity or socioeconomic characteristics. From this, we use specific rules of the reincorporation routes and risk cases to identify the trajectory processes and results.