Using the Adaptive Cycle to Revisit the War–Peace Trajectory in Colombia

This paper focuses on a comprehensive historical analysis of Colombia’s war and peace trajectory from 1964 to 2023. We use a resilience thinking approach and the adaptive cycle conceptualization of change to analyze this trajectory, based on qualitative and quantitative information on violence, political and social interaction processes, and deforestation, including a statistical analysis of actor dynamics to identify nonlinear phase transitions. As a result, we propose a new narrative: namely, that war is the regular regime, and peace is the collapse of this regime, initiating a process of reorganization and regrowth. This narrative holds for the period between 1964 and 2000, but in the early 2000s, the system was transformed. Actors and their interactions have changed, and a new system has emerged. Secondly, we observe that the increase in violence between 1995 and 2001 coincided with a clear national trend of rising deforestation. However, since 2002, deforestation has remained high while violence has declined, challenging simple causal assumptions. These findings caution against interpreting deforestation dynamics solely through national-scale or post-agreement perspectives. Our results show that peace in Colombia has been fragile and partial, and instead of marking a definitive transition, the post-agreement period reveals a reconfiguration of armed conflict. This complexity underscores the need for future research that considers regional patterns and actor-specific dynamics in forest governance during conflict transitions.