Peace, Bullets, and Asymmetric Dividends: The Heterogeneous Effects of the 2016 FARC Peace Agreement on Municipal Homicides in Colombia
Using a continuous difference-in-differences design across 1,079 Colombian municipalities from 2013 to 2023, this study finds that the 2016 FARC peace agreement significantly reduced municipal homicide rates, but the benefits were highly heterogeneous and concentrated almost exclusively in areas with the highest prior exposure to conflict, ranging from a 6% reduction in low-violence municipalities to a 44% reduction in the most affected ones.
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 or endorsed by the author. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Peace is rarely a single event that washes over a country like a tide, lifting every shore at once. In the study of conflict and its aftermath, researchers often look for patterns in how violence changes when fighting stops. They ask whether a peace treaty acts like a universal switch, turning off danger everywhere, or if its effects are uneven, touching some places deeply while leaving others largely untouched. This question is particularly urgent in places where war has carved a jagged landscape of safety and danger, where the end of a long civil war might mean something very different for a remote village than for a city. Understanding this difference is not just an academic exercise; it determines where governments should send police, aid, and hope. If a peace deal reduces killing in some areas but not others, spreading resources evenly across the whole country might mean failing the people who need help the most.
This is the central puzzle tackled in a recent study of Colombia's 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, a rebel group that had been fighting the government for more than fifty years. The agreement ended a conflict that claimed an estimated 220,000 lives and displaced millions. While the national news often focused on the signing of the treaty and the overall drop in violence across the country, a deeper look reveals a more complex story. The violence in Colombia was never spread out evenly; it was concentrated in specific regions shaped by drug cultivation, mining, and the reach of the state. When the FARC laid down its weapons, the question remained: did the peace dividend—the reduction in killing—happen everywhere, or was it concentrated in the places that had suffered the most?
To answer this, a researcher analyzed data from every single one of Colombia's 1,079 municipalities over a decade, from 2013 to 2023. Instead of treating the country as a single unit, the study looked at each town individually, comparing how much violence had existed there before the peace deal against how much violence remained after. The researcher created a simple score for each town based on its average murder rate in the three years leading up to the agreement. Towns with the highest rates of killing before the deal were given the highest scores, representing the places most deeply scarred by the war. By tracking these scores over time, the study could see if the drop in violence after 2016 was linked to how bad the situation had been before.
The findings reveal a stark and steep gradient. The peace agreement did reduce lethal violence, but the reduction was not uniform. In the towns that had the lowest levels of violence before the deal, the change was barely noticeable. However, in the towns that had been the most violent, the drop was dramatic. For a town at the very top of the violence scale, the agreement led to a reduction in homicides of nearly 44 percent. In contrast, for a town with only a small amount of prior violence, the reduction was negligible, hovering around 6 percent. The data shows that the benefit of the peace deal was concentrated almost entirely in the places that had suffered the most. The agreement did not fix the country's violence problem everywhere at once; instead, it delivered a massive, immediate safety boost to the specific communities that had been the epicenters of the war.
The study also looked at the timing of this change to understand how it happened. The drop in violence was not a slow, gradual improvement that took years to build. Instead, the data shows a sharp break right in the year the agreement was signed. The violence fell immediately and stayed low through 2023. This rapid change suggests that the primary driver was the simple cessation of fighting by the FARC itself. When the group stopped killing, the killing stopped. This happened faster than any new government institutions or police forces could have been built to replace them. While other armed groups and criminal factions did move into the territory left behind by the FARC, the overall number of killings in these high-violence areas remained significantly lower than before the deal. The peace dividend was real, but it was also fragile, relying on the immediate removal of the main perpetrator rather than a complete transformation of the local order.
One of the most important aspects of this research is how it rules out other explanations. The researcher carefully checked to ensure that the drop in violence wasn't just a natural fluctuation, where extreme numbers tend to drift back toward the average over time. The data showed that before the peace deal, the violence levels in these towns were stable and not drifting downward on their own. The sharp decline only happened after the agreement was signed. The study also considered the possibility that the drop was an illusion caused by better reporting. If police had simply started recording more crimes in these remote areas after the peace deal, the numbers might have looked like they went up, not down. But the opposite happened: the recorded violence went down. This suggests that the decline was genuine and not an artifact of how the data was collected.
The implications of these findings are clear for how a country should manage its recovery after a war. If the benefits of peace are concentrated in the most violent areas, then a strategy of spreading resources evenly across the entire country is inefficient. It would mean giving the same amount of attention to a quiet town that is already safe as to a town that has just seen its murder rate cut in half but still faces high risks. The study argues that post-conflict security efforts should be calibrated to the geography of the war. The places that suffered the most need the most support, not just because they are the most dangerous, but because they are the places where the peace deal has already done the most work. If the state does not step in to fill the vacuum left by the rebels in these specific high-violence zones, the gains could be lost.
Ultimately, this research offers a nuanced view of peace. It challenges the idea that a peace agreement must either succeed everywhere or fail completely. In Colombia, the agreement did not pacify the entire nation uniformly; violence persisted in other forms, and new groups emerged. But in the specific territories where the war had been fiercest, the agreement delivered a profound and immediate reduction in killing. This uneven result is not a failure of the peace deal, but a reflection of how war and peace actually work on the ground. The study suggests that success should be measured by how well it protects the communities that bore the brunt of the conflict, rather than by a single national average that hides the deep differences between a safe city and a war-torn village. The peace dividend was real, but it was steeply graded, concentrated in the places that needed it most, and it serves as a reminder that rebuilding a country requires looking closely at the map of its scars.
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