Freezing One Front? Bilateral Ceasefires and the Composition of Armed Violence under Colombia's "Total Peace," 2018–2025
This article utilizes event-level data and difference-in-differences models to demonstrate that Colombia's bilateral ceasefires with major armed groups between 2023 and 2025 successfully reduced state-based violence by 86–94%. The findings show no detectable displacement of lethal attacks toward rival armed groups, though the evidence regarding potential shifts toward civilians remains inconclusive, neither confirming nor ruling out such substitution.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
In the study of armed conflict, peace is rarely a single, quiet moment; it is often a fragile arrangement where fighting stops in one place while continuing in another. When governments and rebel groups sign a truce, a common fear arises: that the pause in violence is merely a tactical shift. The logic suggests that if a group stops fighting the state, it might simply turn its weapons toward rival gangs or vulnerable civilians to seize territory or resources. This idea, known as displacement, implies that a ceasefire does not reduce violence overall but merely moves it to a different front. Understanding whether this shift actually happens is crucial for policymakers trying to end wars, because if truces simply redirect bloodshed rather than stop it, the strategy itself may be flawed.
This question lies at the heart of a recent analysis of Colombia's "Total Peace" policy, a bold experiment launched in 2022 where the government attempted to negotiate ceasefires with nearly every armed group in the country simultaneously. Between 2023 and 2025, the government issued a series of decrees that temporarily halted fighting with groups ranging from the National Liberation Army to various factions of former rebels and criminal organizations. Critics and observers quickly pointed to a troubling pattern: while clashes between the state and these specific groups dropped, violence between different armed groups and attacks on civilians seemed to surge. The prevailing narrative was that the ceasefires had failed, allowing the groups to use their respite to fight each other for control.
However, a closer look at the data tells a different story. The researcher behind this study, Alfredo Merlet, treated the Colombian conflict as a natural experiment. By using detailed records of violent events and the exact dates of the government's decrees, he was able to track what happened to specific groups during their truces compared to what happened to groups that were not covered by a truce at the same time. The analysis focused on three types of violence: fighting between the state and armed groups, fighting between different armed groups, and violence directed at civilians. The goal was to see if the reduction in state-fighting was simply balanced out by a rise in the other two types.
The results were clear and surprising. When a group was under a ceasefire, fighting between that group and the state dropped dramatically, by roughly 86 to 94 percent. This confirmed that the truces were effective at stopping the specific violence they were designed to halt. But contrary to the widespread belief that this energy was redirected elsewhere, the data showed no evidence that the covered groups increased their attacks on rivals. Regarding violence against civilians, however, the evidence was inconclusive, neither confirming nor ruling out a shift in focus. In fact, when looking at the groups that were part of the truce, the number of violent events they were involved in against other armed groups did not rise; in some cases, it even fell.
The confusion that led to the "displacement" theory came from looking at the country as a whole without separating the groups. Across Colombia, violence between different armed gangs did increase sharply after 2023. However, this rise was happening to everyone, including the groups that had no ceasefire at all. Because the overall violence was going up, a simple comparison of "before and after" made it look like the truce groups were the ones causing the spike. When the researcher compared the truce groups to the non-truce groups during the same months, the illusion disappeared. The truce groups were not fighting more than their neighbors; they were simply part of a country-wide escalation that had nothing to do with their specific agreements.
The study also looked at what happened after the truces ended. A common fear is that groups use a pause to rearm and then return to the fight with even greater intensity. The data did not support this either. In the year following the end of a truce, violence involving those groups remained lower than it had been before the agreement started. It did not rebound to a level higher than the baseline. This suggests that the groups did not use the time to prepare for a massive counter-attack, nor was there clear evidence that they shifted their focus to terrorizing civilians to compensate for their inability to fight the state.
The findings suggest that the failure of Colombia's "Total Peace" policy was not because the ceasefires caused violence to move to a different target. Instead, the policy struggled because the other fronts of the war were escalating for reasons that individual truces could not stop. The violence between rival gangs was driven by deep-seated competition over territory and illegal profits, forces that operated independently of the government's agreements with specific groups. The ceasefires successfully froze the front line between the state and the rebels, but they could not stop the war that was raging between the rebels themselves.
This distinction is vital for understanding the limits of peace negotiations. The truces did what they were supposed to do: they stopped the fighting between the signatories and the government. They did not, however, solve the broader conflict. The rise in violence that observers saw was not a side effect of the peace deals but a separate, parallel escalation that affected everyone in the country. The lesson is that while bilateral ceasefires can pause specific battles, they cannot single-handedly resolve a complex, multi-sided war where the drivers of violence are rooted in the struggle for control over land and resources. To truly reduce violence, future efforts may need to address the competition between armed groups directly, rather than assuming that stopping one fight will automatically stop the others.
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