Dissertation Title: Between War and Peace: Political Organizing in Twenty-First Century Colombia in the Face of Party Decline

Committee: Elisabeth Clemens (chair), Marco Garrido, John Levi Martin, Susan Stokes (Political Science)

My dissertation and book project, Between War and Peace: Political Organizing in Twenty-First Century Colombia in the Face of Party Decline, confronts the puzzle that in the past three decades, Colombia’s democracy deepened as political parties weakened. The book argues that peace and war efforts structured ideological thinking and political organization as new actors entered the political field. These efforts provided a way to think ideologically, paradoxically offering a framework for social interactions, social order, and legitimizing power relations. To make this argument, the book studies the reconfiguration of the Colombian left amid the coexisting realities of war and peace efforts in the past three decades, as some left-wing rebel groups demobilized through peace agreements while others continued in war. Through a comparative ethnography of four intermediate cities and the capital city, Bogotá, carried out over two years of fieldwork and supported by 170 in-depth interviews, the book shows that these coexisting contexts molded the cultural and organizational landscape for the Colombian left, setting questions about democracy under paradoxical lights.