Fragmentation and Cohesion in the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia

Existing scholarship recognises the centrality of peace processes as critical junctures to explain why non-state armed organisations remain cohesive or fragment. However, the intersection of conditions endogenous to the peace process with preexisting sources of cohesion and fragmentation that produce, or not, breakaway factions remains unexamined. To fill this gap, I select four cases of secondary groups of the FARC-EP in which breakaway factions emerged, or not, during the peace process. In doing so, I carefully examine how existing explanations on fragmentation and cohesion—both internal and external to armed groups—in the civil wars and military sociology literatures perform in producing variation in fragmentation and cohesion in terms of proportion, level of analysis, and leadership and composition of breakaway factions. These findings draw on life-history interviews I conducted with ex-combatants and other research participants in Colombia, as well as archival and secondary sources. To compare the case studies, I rely on comparison with "ethnographic sensibility" and "casing." I deploy the “explaining-outcome process tracing” variant to build case-specific combinations of mechanisms, with which I demonstrate different paths toward the observable outcomes. As a result, I introduce my organizationally disaggregated approach to fragmentation and cohesion, which rests on four pillars: disaggregation of armed groups, time, coexistence of fragmentation and cohesion, and mechanistic heterogeneity. This approach advances civil wars and military sociology research on the importance of disaggregating non-state armed organisations, deepens our understanding of within-secondary group dynamics of fragmentation and cohesion that unfold before and during peace processes, and can be translatable to other contexts.

Eduardo Álvarez-Vanegas is a doctoral candidate at the Comparative Centre for the Study of Civil War in the Politics and International Relations Department at the University of York. His work focuses on fragmentation and cohesion of non-state armed organisations, peace processes, and war-to-peace transitions in Colombia. His doctoral dissertation examines the emergence of breakaway factions from the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia—People’s Army (FARC-EP) during the peace process (2012-2016). His forthcoming article, “Weapons of the Weakened, but not Wiped Out: Insurgent Adaptability through Life Histories,” will appear in the Journal of Peace Research in January 2026.