When Rebels Become the New Bosses
Rebels Do Not Take Kindly to Criticism: The Strategic Failure of Local Resistance against Colombia’s FARC, by Urban Reichhold, Journal of Latin American Studies 57 no. 1, 2025.
This article investigates the effectiveness of nonviolent civilian resistance against rebel groups, addressing a major gap in the civil resistance literature, which has largely focused on resistance against states rather than armed non-state actors. Using the case of Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the study asks when and why civilian resistance succeeds or fails in extracting concessions from rebels.
The article develops a theoretical framework identifying three key factors shaping rebel responses to civilian resistance: (1) the nature of civilian demands (moderate versus maximalist), (2) the power of civilian resisters (including organisational capacity and institutional backing), and (3) the relative power of the rebel group. It argues that strong rebels confronted with weak civilians making demands that threaten core politico-military objectives are likely to respond with repression rather than accommodation.
Empirically, the study draws on extensive qualitative fieldwork in Colombia’s Caquetá department, including interviews with civilians, former FARC fighters and commanders, participant observation in rebel-controlled areas, and archival research. The analysis examines multiple forms of nonviolent resistance, such as refusal to comply with rebel directives, community mobilisation, and electoral participation under conditions of risk.
For example, when traders protested against arbitrary taxation/extortion at checkpoints, the rebels agreed to establish a more formal system. In another case, civilians pressured a different rebel group, the ELN, to reveal the locations of landmines. The authors classify the refusal of an Indigenous mayor to step down, and attempts to establish autonomous ‘peace zones’, as maximalist. In neither case did FARC respond consistently with repression.
This study focuses on Caquetá, a FARC heartland where the group created something like a parallel state. This is an area where peasant autonomous zones had previously been created and where the FARC initially emerged. The authors expect the group to be less tolerant here, particularly in a period where it was under siege. Due to military onslaughts, the group had abandoned rural centres, and relied on election boycotts and road blockades to maintain control. However, they had previously organised communities to establish their own rules in response to a wave of settlement and related problems (including such things as forced labour service). The FARC controlled community councils by infiltrating or coopting them, and the councils relied on the FARC for enforcement. The authors’ research suggests that the community boards were used both to transmit FARC information to the population and to express civilians’ discontent.
For example, demands were raised to dismiss abusive commanders who killed innocent people on espionage accusations. The unit concerned was eventually withdrawn by the central command and ‘never seen again’. Other disputes focused on freedom of movement and requirements to carry a FARC-issued ID. Permits were required to move between communities. This interfered with things like schooling, NGO projects, and government work. The FARC conceded exemptions for certain groups from travel restrictions. The authors point out that FARC’s own politics/rhetoric made it hard not to concede these demands.
In 1996 there were mass peasant marches against government bombing campaigns against coca farming. The FARC did not lead but endorsed these, and forced people to attend. Forced mobilisation, including of children, elderly people, and people who could barely walk, led to a turn in peasant opinion against the FARC. People began protest-voting against the group.
The findings show that the FARC only accommodated civilian demands when these were limited and non-threatening to its strategic goals, such as requests to regulate certain practices.
When civilians advanced maximalist demands, such as challenges to rebel authority, territorial control, or political dominance, the FARC responded with coercion, repression, or intimidation, even in contexts of widespread civilian dissatisfaction.
While some acts of resistance, particularly electoral defiance, did not always provoke immediate retaliation, they failed to produce sustained concessions or weaken rebel power. Civilians used Scottian tactics and resisters were hard to identify. However, the FARC did take revenge when there was clear opposition with identifiable leaders. For example, people seeking election for pro-government parties during the FARC election boycott, or who refused to step down from local council positions, were assassinated. The authors add that the FARC was able to show that it was undefeated even when driven from the towns, and this led to a stalemate which prevented the group’s defeat and led to later peace processes.
The article concludes that, unlike nonviolent campaigns against states, civilian resistance alone has not been shown to compel powerful rebel groups to make far-reaching political concessions or relinquish control. However, the FARC seems to have been prepared to make extensive concessions on specific issues. By foregrounding the strategic logic of rebel decision-making and the importance of relative power, the study advances debates on civilian agency in civil war and cautions against overgeneralising claims about the transformative potential of nonviolent resistance in rebel-held territories.
What it means for radicals: It’s revealing that the dynamics of popular resistance to states and ruling classes emerged so clearly in a case where the local powerholders were actively rebelling against the current rulers. Hopefully people have realised by now that rebels as well as governments can be authoritarian, and that a group’s claims to popular, leftist, or democratic credentials do not guarantee against this. Leftist guerrillas are meant to empower and defend workers and peasants – but that doesn’t mean they do. The same problems crop up a lot with guerrilla groups. One of the sources used documents similar issues in Rojava, where the Kurdish militia tried to impose conscription which civilians sought to evade.
Strategically, this kind of guerrilla authoritarianism makes little sense. Guerrilla warfare is based on reliance on the population as the “sea” within which the “fish”, or guerrillas, are able to swim. This is what gives guerrillas a decisive advantage over better-funded and better-armed state forces. All too often, however, this relationship is never established. Guerrillas become obsessed with military-style control, abuse their power to extort others, become paranoid about alleged spies and informers, etc. When this happens, the guerrilla group nearly always loses the support it relied on. However, keeping the capacity to strike – showing the group is undefeated – is also highlighted here.
I suspect the degeneration of guerrilla groups into local tyrants or bandits stems largely from two factors: the hierarchical nature of army structures and the groups’ reliance on more-or-less authoritarian ideologies, usually aiming for a culmination in a seizure of state power. The adoption of anarchist or autonomist approaches might counteract this tendency to tyrannize civilians, as might a sense that struggle is being used to free up space from state control, not to control it oneself and create a new state. The situation would also be different if civilians were armed or able to defend themselves in other ways, rather than being “protected” by a separate guerrilla force or by the state. It’s also not clear whether similar factors affect opposition groups using nonviolent or non-lethal approaches, who effectively never become power-holders in the same way.
