Beyond Gatekeepers and Case Studies: Agency and the Latin American (and Colombian) Perspective in Civil War Studies

There is a growing acknowledgement within the field of Conflict Studies that civilians are rarely passive subjects in civil wars. They engage in multiple ways in conflict dynamics (Malthaner Citation2011, Citation2015, Viterna Citation2013, Staniland Citation2014, Loken Citation2022), and for a variety of reasons: the work on ‘pleasure in agency’ of Elisabeth Jean Wood about the revolutionary movement in El Salvador (Wood Citation2003) is an important reminder that this involvement goes well beyond a purely maximising rational impulse, and that we need to factor in those things that matter to people (Sayer Citation2011 dixit). More recently, the rebel governance literature has been paying closer attention to civilian preferences and to bottom-up pressure on rebels to arm, mobilise, re-arm or re-mobilise and to the ways in which wartime orders are co-created between civilians and combatants (Barter Citation2014, Citation2015, Worrall Citation2017, Bulutgil Citation2020, Kubota Citation2020, Florea and Malejacq Citation2023, Gutiérrez and Voyvodic Citation2025), with various degrees of collaboration, negotiation, pressure, resistance and indeed open hostility (Arjona Citation2016, Masullo Citation2021a). While there has been a tendency to regard civilians as purely peacefully resisting armed actors (e.g., Kaplan Citation2017, Krause Citation2018), it is clear that responses are rarely limited to this.