Nearly a decade after the 2016 Peace Accord, peace remains elusive in Colombia. Instead of ending conflict, the accord reflects a familiar pattern in Colombia’s history: negotiated settlements that reduce violence by a particular actor while enabling the persistence, proliferation, and fragmentation of other armed groups, leaving peace a far-fetched ideal.

For much of the international public, the 2016 peace agreement was widely celebrated as finally bringing an end to a 52-year conflict–the beginning of peace in Colombia. Within the fields of peacebuilding and transitional justice, it was revered as one of the most comprehensive and innovative agreements of its kind, often positioned as a model for resolving intractable conflicts elsewhere.

Yet domestically, the agreement did not invoke the same optimism. In a 2016 October plebiscite, the Colombian public narrowly rejected the agreement. This outcome is frequently attributed to the opposition campaign led by former president Álvaro Uribe–President Juan Manuel Santos’ former Defense Minister–who criticized the agreement for its perceived leniency towards FARC members. However, reducing public opposition to Uribe’s discourse alone obscures a broader and more deeply rooted concern regarding the absence of traditional prison sentences for former FARC combatants. Surveys indicated that as many as 88% of the population hoped for this kind of retribution.

The earlier peace agreement with the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) imposed five to eight-year sentences under the Justice and Peace Law–penalties many Colombians already perceived as too lenient. In contrast, the absence of comparable jail time for FARC members, despite their longer and more extensive role in the conflict, appears deeply inconsistent.

Despite this, the peace agreement was slightly revised and signed the following month by the Colombian government and the FARC.

A decade later, hopes for peace in Colombia remain distant, as violence continues to follow patterns all too familiar to its citizens. From 2017 to December 2025, the number of armed group members has risen by 20,000, spread across both existing organizations and newly formed dissident factions that quickly assumed the power vacuums left by the former FARC.

Over the past five years, child recruitment has increased by 300%, while cocaine production has risen steadily since 2013, reaching a record 3,001 tons in 2024. Since 2016, Colombia has recorded 740 massacres, 480 assassinations of former FARC members, and 1,936 killings of social leaders. In 2026 alone, through April 26, the country has already experienced 48 massacres, a 140% increase compared to the same period in 2025.

On paper, the agreement is theoretically compelling in light of twenty-first century scholarly peace and justice ideals. It advances a purportedly victim-centered approach grounded in restorative justice while seeking to address key structural drivers of the conflict. In practice, however, these outcomes suggest a significant gap between the agreement’s normative aspirations and lived reality–a divergence anticipated by domestic skepticism and the rejection of the accord in the 2016 plebiscite. This case illustrates the limitations of restorative justice when not paired with credible mechanisms of deterrence, particularly when such approaches diverge from societal expectations for justice.

In 2025, seven ex-FARC leaders were “sentenced” by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) to eight years of restorative sanctions–including participation in demining efforts and the search for missing persons–for their involvement in tens of thousands of kidnappings. The JEP characterized this as a “historic milestone,” noting that prior impunity rates for such crimes reached as high as 92%.

Yet for many Colombians, these sanctions severely misalign with the severity of the offenses. Former hostages have described years spent in captivity–often in chains, under constant threat of death, and subjected to deprivation, forced marches, and disease, in some cases for over a decade.

Such imbalanced sanctions not only undermine victims’ traumatic experiences, but also weaken the overall deterrent effect. When consequences for severe crimes are minimal, they signal to other armed groups that such actions will not be met with meaningful punishment. In this context, the issue is not only moral but strategic: without credible consequences, there is little incentive for armed actors to alter their behavior.

More broadly, this reflects a recurring assumption within transitional justice frameworks that restorative mechanisms inherently generate personal and societal healing. Yet, as critiques of truth commissions have long demonstrated, truth does not automatically produce reconciliation–particularly when societal conceptions of justice prioritize punitive accountability.

This raises a more uncomfortable possibility. As Edward Luttwak argues in Give War a Chance, premature settlements risk the persistence and fragmentation of conflict. From this perspective, the central challenge in Colombia may not be the agreement’s leniency, but its timing. It is plausible that negotiations began before the FARC was sufficiently weakened to compel more stringent concessions, including stronger accountability measures. Continued military pressure may have altered the dynamics of negotiation.

A common counterargument is that stricter punitive measures would have rendered an agreement impossible, as FARC leaders would have had little incentive to demobilize. However, this assumes that negotiation at that moment was the only viable path. An alternative interpretation is that timing was the central constraint: as long as both sides retained the capacity to continue fighting, the government lacked the leverage necessary to impose more robust accountability measures. By negotiating under these conditions, the state may have conceded too much, too early.

As Colombia approaches the tenth anniversary of the accord, the implications extend far beyond its borders. The upcoming 2026 elections will serve as an inflection point, determining whether the country recalibrates its approach to peace and accountability or continues along a trajectory that has struggled to deter violence.

For the international community, the Colombian case warrants caution. The continued prioritization of restorative negotiation without sufficient attention to deterrence risks entrenching–rather than resolving–cycles of violence. Future peace processes must account for this reality, ensuring that accountability mechanisms are both restorative and credible enough to reshape the incentives that sustain conflict.

Citations

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3. Kreiman, G., & Masullo, J. (2020). Who shot the bullets? Exposure to violence and attitudes toward peace: Evidence from the 2016 Colombian referendum. Latin American Politics and Society, 62(4), 24-49.

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11. Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP). (2025, September 16). Statement 148 – The JEP issues its first ruling for the kidnappings committed by the last Secretariat of the FARC-EP. https://www.jep.gov.co/Sala-de-Prensa/Documents1/Statement%20148%20%E2%80%93%20The%20JEP%20issues%20its%20first%20ruling%20for%20the%20kidnappings%20committed%20by%20the%20last%20Secretariat%20of%20the%20FARC-EP.pdf.

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