Dealing with Complexity in Civil War: A Genealogical Approach to Understanding Armed Groups

In protracted conflicts, armed groups frequently fragment, re-emerge, or transform their own identities. Due to this complexity, observers frequently agglutinate armed groups into categories that may do poor justice to their current identity, generating flawed labels and mistaken empirical expectations. In this article, we argue that current characterisations of post-2016 Colombian conflict are a prime example of this distortion. We introduce what we call a “genealogical approach” to study multiparty and fragmented civil wars. Our approach entails tracing armed groups across four dimensions: ideological lineage, organisational lineage, social networks composition, and patterns of violence. Rather than freezing groups into static snapshots, this framework allows researchers to track how continuities and ruptures manifest empirically over time. Drawing on published research on Colombia, we show that this approach provides robust answers to long-standing puzzles on matters such as group survival, patterns of violence, and fragmentation. We conclude that accurate descriptions of the armed landscape are not merely an analytical exercise, but a precondition for any meaningful peacebuilding strategy.