5. Contested state-building? A four-part framework of infrastructure development during armed conflict

Clara Voyvodic

Introduction

From the significant economic investment of the Marshall Plan in post-war Europe to the construction efforts in Afghanistan and state-building in South Sudan, infrastructure has long been a tool aimed at stabilising and strengthening fragile states. According to mainstream narratives, infrastructure interventions are intended to provide energy, water, and connectivity crucial to local mobility and businesses as well as opening up peripheries to both national and international markets (Mardirosian, 2010; Collier et al., 2015; Ali et al., 2015). In areas of internal armed conflict, infrastructure interventions also become a strategy of contested state-building. The assumed efficacy of infrastructure in opening previously inaccessible territories to wider licit markets is meant to reduce the reliance of local populations on illicit markets and the monopoly of armed-group control. These assumptions posit that infrastructure projects not only represent state power and presence (and access for state troops as well as state institutions), but also undermine armed-group control over illicit markets and local populations. As such, significant concern in infrastructure interventions is structured around the potential targeting and attack of infrastructure by non-state armed groups. These state-building logics assume that armed groups consider infrastructure interventions a symbol of state power and a threat to territorial control that invite an aggressive response.

This chapter seeks to go beyond these narratives by providing a more nuanced analysis of infrastructure and conflict. I argue that non-state armed groups do not always respond to infrastructure construction with aggression and that the state does not always perceive armed groups as spoilers to development. Drawing from empirical data in Colombia, and supported with evidence from other conflict areas, this chapter proposes a four-part framework on how infrastructure interventions shape interactions between the state and armed groups. I argue that an over-emphasis on confrontation risks obscuring less visible interactions, including subcontracted, co-opted, and complementary. This framework offers new insights and points of departure for future research into the nature of state-building and development, hybridised governance, parastatism, and the effect on authority-society relations.

In order to critically expand the significance of infrastructure in conflict, this chapter explores four key variations in how armed groups and the state interact that go beyond narrow conceptualisations of armed groups as spoilers: confrontation, subcontraction, co-option, complementarity. While I recognise the value in the orthodox assessment of state and armed-group confrontation around infrastructure, I seek to deepen and problematise its assumptions by drawing from theories and diverse literature on non-state orders, organised crime and criminology, corporate-crime complicity, parastatism, and theories of mediated stateness and hybrid governance. In examining the Colombian case – and drawing supporting evidence from other conflict areas such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, and Afghanistan – I argue that in the milieu and complexity of one conflict multiple interactions, relationships, and strategies can emerge between armed groups and the state that bely reductive assessments.

In the first section of this chapter, I identify the uncritical instrumentalisation of infrastructure in policymaking of fragile states and conflict-affected regions. I then discuss the relationship between infrastructure and state-building and the limited nature of research on infrastructure in state-building in conflict areas. This literature largely approaches the development of infrastructure as orthogonal to the aims of non-state armed groups and assumes a contentious relationship between existing armed groups and attempts by the state or international interveners in constructing infrastructure. Colombia serves as a useful case study to understand not only how infrastructure construction is a state-building mission but also how it is politicised and weaponised in the context of armed conflict. Colombia particularly exemplifies state-led infrastructure intervention which offers a unique case among the scope of infrastructure in conflict areas where the central state, rather than international actors, leads the development of infrastructure in its peripheries.

Infrastructure, state-building, and conflict

Through infrastructure, governments act not on people directly but through the control of their physical environment; infrastructure is both a good the state provides and an instrument for state power. Influential work by Mann (1984) and Scott (1998) has been fundamental in understanding the physical machinations that enabled the modern Western state to centralise power, capital, and decision-making through the building of roads and railways, communication networks, electrical systems, and organising social relations through the built environment. Mann (1984, p. 189) coined the term ‘infrastructural power’ to describe ‘the capacity of the state to actually penetrate civil society and to implement logistically political decisions throughout its territory’. Through infrastructure, a state does not need to act upon people directly but can do so through the control of their daily physical environment that both makes populations legible to the state and makes the state visible to groups even in its most peripheral territories (where it has limited presence). Scott (1998) argues that the state’s survival (control over population in a territory) entails a drive to make society ‘legible’ where states must ‘permeate’ their society by reaching the remotest region or social groups. Scott terms this infrastructural project ‘high modernism’, where authorities and engineers attempt to realise grand plans of social and physical engineering. However, he argues that these ultimately fail to take into account local conditions. While Mann (1999) has critiqued Scott’s narrow concentration on the state and his overvaluation of state capacity, Scott’s analysis of the physical manifestation of state-building remains an excellent roadmap for developing new insights into its impact.

The critique of top-down infrastructural state-building is not always reflected in literature nor in practice that finds correlations between the absence of infrastructure and stalled development. Weak and conflict-affected states are thought to be products of truncated territorial extension and presence. Therefore, in state-building and peace-building, basic hard infrastructure – such as telecommunications, transportation, energy, and water – are prioritised (Mardirosian, 2010). They are meant to play a strategic and political role in linking rural territories into regional and international networks that strengthen the state and reduce the probability of conflict (Blattman and Miguel, 2010; Collier et al., 2015). This capacity-building approach to infrastructure is apparent in the strategies and agendas of many international interveners. Public works and infrastructure rehabilitation was one of four of the United Nations Development Plan (UNDP) stabilisation programme’s primary areas of engagement in fragile states (UNDP, 2016). The World Bank stressed that access to markets was necessary to restore economic growth and generate the preconditions for peace and reconstruction (Ali et al., 2015). This approach to state-building is not new however; as Yuri Gama describes in Chapter 4 on urban politics and public housing in Brazil, long-term interest in international infrastructural development is also apparent with projects such as the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s where the USA – with some assistance from the UK – sought to invest in Latin America’s infrastructure in order to halt the spread of communism in the region (Fajardo, 2003).

The infrastructural reach of the state has been linked in determining the probability of armed conflict; Fearon and Laitin (2003) demonstrated how state capacity was critical for variation in onset of civil conflict. In areas of conflict, the absence of infrastructure represents the lack of reach by the central state to all territories within its domain and therefore its ability to adequately govern, including the effective deployment of military strength (Soifer, 2008). In Colombia, Boudon (1996, p. 288) linked the Colombian armed conflict to the central state’s inability ‘to establish its legal authority and legitimacy throughout the entire national territory.’ As Soifer and Vom Hau (2008, p. 222) note, the FARC and Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) (National Liberation Army) ‘confront a state that has not built significant infrastructure in the rural regions of the country, but that remains quite effective in the major cities – and particularly in the capital of Bogotá’. Concern with the unstable periphery has led to peace-building and stabilisation missions to make efforts to introduce infrastructure earlier and earlier in interventions during armed conflict (Bachmann and Schouten, 2018).

However, these peripheries are not inherently unstable but rather inscribed with the risks of ‘underdevelopment’; as Richard (1992) notes, the concept of centre in Latin America is built around a metropolitan, Westernised ideal of intense capital accumulation and modernism. The periphery was that which in the modernising trend was justified as territory to be penetrated by foreign capital investment against backwardness in order to develop (also see Grosfoguel, 2000).1 Efforts to build infrastructure in order to stabilise the state reinforces this project; when these ‘peripheries’ are occupied by non-state armed groups then infrastructure interventions also become part of a militarised penetration that is meant to capture or recapture territories for the state. Infrastructure becomes part of an explicit counterinsurgent strategy. Van de Walle and Scott (2011) document how historically states not only use the provision of services for the purposes of penetration and establishing presence, but also in order to suppress alternative power sources. Infrastructure construction in Afghanistan and Pakistan is aimed at capturing ‘Hearts and Minds’, where both the provision of goods and the economic growth it produced was meant to undercut the Taliban’s appeal and the dependence of communities on the illicit markets controlled by the Taliban (Unruh and Shalaby, 2012). Kilcullen notes that the construction of roads in Afghanistan was meant to ‘send a message’ to potential spoilers of stabilisation efforts (2011, p. 65). Infrastructure provision becomes explicitly a strategy of counterinsurgency and a reflection of state power in conflict-affected areas.

From this logic of penetration and capture, it is assumed that armed groups would seek to destroy infrastructure in order to retain their control. This counterstrategy has been observed in multiple studies. Balcells (2011, p. 403) notes that ‘military-strategic factors normally play a crucial role in the decision to bomb a location … infrastructure locations are most likely to be targeted’. Bertelsen (2016, p. 32) argues that the destruction wrought by the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (RENAMO) (Mozambican National Resistance) in Mozambique was effectively a deterritorialisation of the state through the razing of its building and erasing of its infrastructure that lost the state its physical territorial presence. These attacks are valuable to the insurgents because they destabilise the state, reduce state capacity, force concessions, and avoid high levels of civilian casualties that could emerge as a reputational cost. In Colombia, infrastructure sabotage, such as attacks on oil pipelines or electrical towers, is considered a primary military strategy by armed groups aimed at producing economic losses and disruptions of service (Beittel, 2014). Wood (2003, p. 23) notes that the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) (Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation) in El Salvador shifted its strategy from conventional to unconventional warfare that depended on attacks on infrastructure in order to undermine the government’s economic strength as the conflict progressed. Infrastructure’s role in civil conflict is its antithesis in state-building; where its construction emphasises the power of the state, its destruction strengthens the position of armed groups. These studies and the visible examples of armed-group attacks on infrastructure have resulted the characterisation of armed groups in the ‘so-called’ peripheries as spoilers to infrastructure construction since they would naturally oppose any effort to reduce their isolation, autonomy, and increase economic opportunities for local communities that form their support group (de Boer and Bosetti, 2017; Jones and Howarth, 2012).

However, these studies on armed groups’ responses to infrastructure projects demonstrate a tendency to examine visible instances of aggression. A focus on more bombastic violence obscures other dynamics and limits understanding of how infrastructure interventions restructure state and armed-group interactions. It also tends to examine pre-existing infrastructure, rather than consider the implications of building infrastructure projects during conflict. Instances of successful infrastructure constructions in territories under armed-group control are rarely examined. As Scott (1998) argues, understanding the local conditions in the ‘periphery’ is hugely important in determining infrastructure’s failure or success. This is even more pressing when conditions at the periphery and centre are also characterised by violence, contested authority, and securitisation. The particular conditions of infrastructure and its impact on conflict areas receive only cursory attention in the literature on peace and conflict, reduced to an indication of state capacity or – in its destruction – armed-group strength. In this chapter I seek to address this gap in the literature and oversight in practice by producing a framework of different interactions between the state and armed groups during infrastructure construction, of which only one results in violent contestation between the two.

Colombia: armed groups, infrastructure, and state-building

In order to exemplify the ubiquity of this framework, I draw from empirical examples of the Colombian conflict and complement with cases from other armed conflicts. This allows me to demonstrate how different types of interaction can proliferate even in the same conflict. Colombia is a perfect case study to explore the variation in interaction. The internal armed conflict in Colombia dates back to the 1960s, formally initiated in 1966 with the foundation of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The longevity of the conflict has included multiple other armed groups, including the ELN, Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) (United Self-Defence Groups of Colombia), and various splinter groups and organised criminal groups that have emerged since. While both the AUC and FARC were disbanded in the last two decades, multiple armed groups continue to operate in the country, including splinter factions of both the FARC and AUC.

Unlike many states with internal armed conflict, Colombia does not resemble the so-called ‘fragility’ of Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or Afghanistan in its institutional framework, GDP, industrialisation, and rule of law. Its urbanisation, development, and institutionalisation in the centre make its absence in the peripheries all the more striking (Calderón and Servén, 2010). It also has a comparatively low level of international intervention in managing its state-building and peace-building processes. While the USA has invested millions of dollars in the last few decades in supporting Plan Colombia, and various other international organisations, including the UN, have assisted in Colombian development programmes, these interventions are much more limited in scope compared to other peace- and state-building projects across the world. Berdal and Zaum (2012) note that while the majority of the state-building literature focuses on the role and impact of international intervention, Colombia has largely managed these processes internally.

This internal process has seen a boom in infrastructural investment in Colombia over the last few decades (Yepes et al., 2013). Since the early 1990s, these interventions have aimed to ‘produce the requisite conditions for economic development while conveying the permanence of the state commitment to the region’ (World Bank, 2004). In a report for USAID, Hartzell et al. (2011, p. 20) reported that between 2007 and 2009, ‘50 percent of the 422 billion Colombian pesos in PCIM investments was targeted at infrastructure, including road rehabilitation and construction projects that are instrumental in connecting producers to markets and local populations to the rest of Colombia’. In 2011, the Ministry of Transportation alongside the National Infrastructure Agency also rolled out a list of proposed transportation infrastructure for the following decade that would include US$50 billion worth of investment. This was later incorporated into the 2014–18 Plan for National Development (DNP, 2014), where the infrastructure would provide marginalised communities new economic opportunities, particularly incentivising growth in licit industries, improve access to basic services and general quality of life. Infrastructure was also geared to broader economic growth in the regions including paving the way for mining and oil production industries (UPME, 2017).

This investment in infrastructure in the ‘periphery’ was not only about development and consolidating state presence, but also, as previously discussed, a counterinsurgency strategy. Zeiderman (2019, p. 8) notes that since the mid-20th century public works ‘were conceived as antidotes to insurgency’ while in most recent years, infrastructure such as highways ‘became a popular index of national security’. The assumption that isolation and poverty (framed as a lack of connection to economic markets) allowed armed groups to flourish unchallenged motivates the construction of infrastructure to remedy this isolation and underdevelopment. The 2003 Democratic Security Programme report by the Colombian Ministry of Defence – under President Uribe’s (2002–10) administration – explicitly outlines the protection of infrastructure as the defence of Colombian sovereignty and the consolidation of the rule of law (Ministry of National Defence, 2003, p. 37). The counterinsurgency and state-building elements of infrastructure are echoed in the words of the Major General Solarte, chief of military engineers, who noted that ‘the worst enemy of the groups at the margins of the law is a paved road’ (PARES, 2015).

Confrontation

The assumptions held by the Colombian government echo those in the international arena; infrastructure interventions strengthen state power and undermine or pressure non-state armed groups in areas of state absence. As a result, the expectation is that armed groups respond aggressively to state-led infrastructure projects. From 1988 to 2012 the National Centre for Historical Memory (2013) registered 1,739 attacks by armed groups against infrastructure in Colombia. Petrol infrastructure was particularly targeted: in the last 10 years, armed groups have attacked petrol pipelines over 1,010 times (Ochoa Suárez, 2019). In the southern department, Nariño, the state-owned Ecopetrol pipeline that ran from end to end of the department was often a military target, particularly by the ELN and occasionally the FARC, who would bomb the pipeline, drawing national attention and producing significant environmental damage.

Violence against infrastructure, however, does not fully capture the security dynamics at sites of infrastructure intervention. Ross (2004, p. 64) observes that government efforts to protect infrastructure by force might actually serve to aggravate and further intensify conflict as armed groups respond aggressively to the perceived threat of armed troops. One of the key offices of the Colombian military is the protection of strategic infrastructure around the country, including oil and gas pipelines, electrical installations, and road networks (Ministry of National Defence, 2011). Large-scale infrastructure is often pre-emptively accompanied by increased military presence to secure the project. This militarisation often provokes responses by armed groups. Operation Hercules, a 2,000-soldier strong military task force, was deployed into Nariño in order to seize back control of the region from armed groups and to secure the ‘116 km of oil pipelines, 640 power line pylons, and the Espriella–Río Mataje road project, which connects the ports of Tumaco and Esmeraldas’ in the region (Dussán, 2018). For the Awa, a local indigenous group, this presence generated more fear than security. As the Colombian military entered the indigenous territory in their bid to secure the land and existing infrastructure, the community became more vulnerable to aggressive clashes. One Awa leader explained that ‘the anxiety is great, the people do not trust that there is military … there is more fear because the people do not know now which [armed] group might come now’ (Interview with Awa leader reported in La Liga, 2019). The indigenous community feared that the close presence of the military to schools and community centres not only undermined indigenous autonomous control of their territories but might also provoke attacks by armed groups.

This escalation through militarisation is not only evident in Nariño. Human rights groups across Colombia have critiqued the government’s heavy-handed involvement in large-scale infrastructure projects for affecting the security situation as the increasing levels of militarisation lead to escalations of conflict with armed groups (CITPAX, 2012). The construction of the Hidroituango dam in northern Antioquia provides a clear example. The dam’s construction – initiated in 2009 – by the Public Enterprises of Medellín sought to generate the largest quantity of hydroelectricity in the country as well as invest in the local communities in the form of better infrastructure and royalties. The infrastructure project was accompanied by high levels of militarisation, particularly in the small urban centres. Troops came in and not only occupied battalions around the mountains and valley of the construction, but also took over buildings in the centre of the village of Ituango. Civil leaders flagged the presence of the military and their proximity to these schools and civilians’ homes and petitioned for their removal (Wåhlin, 2015). In Briceño, a town further down the valley near the dam’s construction, a confrontation between the guerrilla and the military led to the FARC placing new anti-personnel mines near the school the military had occupied (CCEEU, 2013). While the attack was targeted at the infrastructure, it was a response to the presence of state troops rather than the infrastructure itself.

As Weintraub (2016) notes, the incursion by the state into land governed by non-state armed actors is perceived as a threat, and non-state armed actors will respond through increased violence. This leads to a chicken-and-egg dilemma: where infrastructure is militarised as a supposed target for armed-group attack then it reinforces its importance as an object of war. Increased stationing of state military in order to protect the infrastructure provokes more attacks by armed groups concerned about the presence of hostile armed forces. The effects of securitised infrastructure are not only apparent in Colombia. Lacher and Kumetat (2011) explain that in Algeria attacks were more often targeted against security forces or private guards tasked with protecting pipelines rather than the infrastructure itself. In Myanmar, the government accompanied oil companies to help secure construction from the non-state armed groups; Larsen (1998) reports that, as a result, many of the attacks supposedly against the infrastructure were instead a response to escalating confrontation between Karen ethnic nationalists and the military.

These empirical examples only serve to problematise the causal processes behind the assumption of armed-group response to infrastructure, not to ignore the phenomenon of infrastructure destruction by armed groups. Armed groups have motive to attack infrastructure outside the presence of the military. As noted in Colombia, attacks were still levied directly at infrastructure rather than just military personnel. However, it is worth considering the exacerbating role that militarisation due to perception of aggression, can play in escalating tensions and particularly in making life difficult for local communities now caught between the armed group and the military. The framing of armed groups as potential spoilers and the peripheries as dangerous sites means that states are more likely to send (and private companies more likely to demand) military support to protect these projects. The presence of military personnel in a conflict region poses a threat to armed groups and provokes a stronger response, instead of assuming, sine qua non, that armed groups would inherently oppose and attack infrastructural projects in territories they occupy. In doing so, the state-building project becomes concerned with the protection of infrastructure over the safety of local communities. There is little analysis on how attacks are not always responses to infrastructure but rather a response to its securitisation and militarisation. The following sections also serve to illustrate the overgeneralisation of the assumption that infrastructure is intrinsically a target and site of contestation between the state and armed groups.

Subcontraction

States do not always interpret the presence of armed groups as a source of instability and threat for the roll-out of infrastructure. The existence of autonomous militias or armed groups are not necessarily indicators of state failure (Mazzei, 2009; Raleigh, 2014). In many cases these actors will often cooperate or collude with state forces, either out of financial interest, local territorial power, or shared ideology. This collusion does not undercut state capacity but instead can serve its state-building aims. In her exploration of civilian targeting by militias, Stanton (2015) argues that militias do not represent a loss of government control in a territory but rather a strategic extension of its power through both military and paramilitary means. The ability of states to operationalise violence is often a strategy of deniability that can increase their success in repressing counterinsurgency (Rudbeck et al., 2016). Armed groups’ knowledge of the local territory and extra-legal violence offer capabilities that the state does not possess (Sanford, 2003). As insurgent groups challenge the state’s control, the state can use non-state partners as a source of intelligence, deterring insurgent support in civilian populations through threat, supplying the state with auxiliary forces in operations, and providing plausible deniability (Eck, 2015; Ahram, 2016). This form of patronage allows the non-state armed groups to contract out their capacities to exert violence without accountability in exchange for some level of judicial protection or economic compensation (Eaton, 2006).

While this violence is often used for counterinsurgency purposes, armed groups can also be subcontracted for state-led infrastructural intervention. Armed groups act in order to secure land and prevent civilian opposition to projects. The deployment of subcontracted violence is better presented in the literature on corporate complicity in human rights abuses and conflict. Non-state armed groups, including private security, paramilitaries, and criminal groups, are utilised not for military purposes but in service of corporate profit-seeking (Stephens, 2017). For Reno (2004, p. 623), the collaboration between foreign firms and local strongmen re‐emerged in contemporary times as ‘[t]he cheapest and most efficacious option for indirect management of disorder’. Civil conflict shapes the availability of these extra-legal mechanisms; Bartilow (2019) argues that the expansion of the drug war across Latin America resulted in the privatisation of terror at the hands of corporations, colluding with non-state armed paramilitary or criminal groups. Privatisation allows for more opaque interactions with armed groups, subject to fewer calls for transparency and accountability than governments.

Unlike private companies and foreign corporations, infrastructure is an explicit state-led strategy of state consolidation, economic development, and service provision. While it may have private stakeholders and contractors, it is public funds and political institutions that tender these projects. Grajales (2011, p. 774) argues that the logic of paramilitary violence in Colombia should not be understood as totally separate and independent of state authority, but rather as ‘constitutive of logics of competition, accumulation and economic development’ that are the elements of state formation. Infrastructure is a more explicit interpretation of these elements; it is a combination of state power and presence as well as private gain. Ballvé (2012, p. 605) explains that in Colombia:

the paramilitary structures more broadly helped to socialise and materialise the state’s territorialisation through repression, infrastructure construction, bureaucratic procedures, agribusiness plantations, NGO activities, political participation, and public services – backed in all instances by ultraviolent force.

Paramilitarism therefore became an integral part of the state’s development into the peripheries of Colombia. Subcontracting armed groups to support infrastructure projects does not solely benefit the private sector at the expense of state capacity; it actively contributes to an infrastructural definition of state-building.

These dynamics are apparent in strategies of land clearance and civilian intimidation. Ituango, the site of the Hidroituango dam, was a hotspot of paramilitarism in the late 1990s and early 2000s as state forces and paramilitary groups clashed with the FARC. However, the presence of paramilitarism and massacres carried out in that territory have been linked to territorial cleansing for the large-scale dam project that would begin a few years later. In the 12 municipalities in the area of Hidroituango’s influence, there had been 62 massacres recorded in the 10 years before the dam’s construction began (Agencia Prensa Rural, 2019). The Rios Vivos group, an environmental and human rights activist organisation, denounced how – under the guise of counterinsurgency and the violence of armed conflict – paramilitary actions were aimed at removing communities from the territories to then build the large-scale dam (Tejada Sánchez, 2018). During the construction of the dam, there has been a clear threat against the human rights activists who have opposed the construction of the project by persisting neoparamilitary, state, and criminal organisations in the territories (Wåhlin, 2015).

In Buenaventura, the largest port city on the west coast of Colombia, violence by paramilitaries is also pervasive and at times linked to the construction of the port. One local leader explains to a journalist: ‘what’s at the bottom of this violence is not just drug trafficking, but territorial control over the city. It’s a tactic of terror to get the people to move from the paramilitary-controlled waterfront areas and flee to the rural zones so that the megaprojects can have free rein. The mafiosos, allied with businessmen, want to force people out through fear’ (Molano Jimeno, 2013). This port, however much it enjoys private investment, is a public project: The National Infrastructure Agency granted the Port Society of Buenaventura its public concession so that private companies could invest in the port for public use for Colombia (ANI, 2020). Large-scale projects to expand the port and increase trade and connectivity between Colombia and the world have been accompanied by violence leading to an ‘exodus of residents fleeing the threat of death or dismemberment’ that ‘feeds back to encourage capital investment in the development of port infrastructure’ (Zeiderman, 2016, p. 17).

Subcontraction in the Colombian case is often linked to armed groups whose ideology predisposes them to support large-scale development and landowners’ interests. However, in the aftermath of the paramilitary groups demobilisation in 2005 and the FARC’s demobilisation in 2016, an increasingly fragmented landscape of armed actors presents opportunities for collusion with the state even by actors traditionally ideologically opposed (HRW, 2021). Other conflict contexts around the world demonstrate how non-state armed groups can support large-scale infrastructure projects. In the Niger Delta, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta opposed large-scale oil development in the region. However, despite emancipatory rhetoric or secessionist interests, observers noted that aggressive stances towards foreign oil companies was more likely a product of rival national companies recruiting ‘some of the Delta militants to harass Chinese oil interests in Nigeria’ (Page, 2018, p. 11). Lund (2018) details how palm oil production in Aceh in Indonesia was complicit with both military, para-state militia, and even insurgency leadership in land grabs and dispossession of territory, as well as the brutal suppression of dissent and mobilisation. These do not always involve autonomous armed groups, but rather take advantage of civil conflict for illicit abuse of military power; in Myanmar, military forces were implicated in forced displacement and forced labour of the civilian population in the implementation of infrastructure projects (O’Connor, 2011).

By subcontracting armed groups and extra-legal violence, the state takes advantage of existing civil conflict and disorder to secure infrastructure interventions. Through less licit uses of violence that can evade public scrutiny, the state secures the land through displacement and threat, and removes civilian opposition for the infrastructure project. The issue of legitimacy at the national and international levels therefore means that states and companies are careful to put these forms of human rights abuses out of sight. Armed conflict and disorder – often cited as deterrents or obstacles to the roll-out of infrastructure – can instead be weaponised for the sake of the project at the expense of local communities.

Co-option

In some cases, armed groups may also find they would prefer to make use of state resources that the state finds inconvenient to withdraw (Kasfir, Frerks, and Terpstra, 2017, p. 259). Gledhill (2018, p. 706) argues that ‘when authorities are not willing or able to suppress armed groups, structures of opportunity favour insurgency’. While he refers more broadly to civil war onset, such a distinction can be made at the micro level. When states are not willing or able to suppress armed groups in the territories where they seek to build infrastructure, the armed group can take advantage of the infrastructure instead. In his work on the effect of natural resources and war, Ross (2004) contends that lootable resources (such as drugs, precious metals, or any high-value product that can easily be extracted and transported) produces a core set of financing for armed groups that allows them to effectively carry out the necessary actions of controlling a territory and a population. Infrastructure provides its own set of easily lootable resources: either rents, materials, or better logistical capabilities. When their survival is not at risk, armed groups can extract and benefit from the material resources that accompany infrastructure interventions.

In territories of contested statehood, private contractors for public projects are not always able to rely on the state to protect them while they work. Instead, contractors often pay the armed group’s ‘taxes’ in order to gain access to the territory and construct the infrastructure project without violent repercussions. Rent seeking and taking advantage of new infrastructure does not require the armed group to invest into any industry of their own and instead they can take advantage of a new influx of resources while retaining authority in the region. This relatively easy form of extraction only requires the armed group to be able to leverage sufficient coercive power to assert authority. In Colombia, the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht was revealed to have paid between US$50,000 to US$100,000 monthly to the FARC in order to have ‘authorisation’ to construct infrastructure in the areas controlled by the groups. Two executives of the company confessed to these accounts and stated that these extortions appeared in Odebrecht’s accounts as ‘operating costs’ or ‘territorial tribute’ (Semana, 2017). This arrangement emerges from an agreement between the company and the guerrilla in the 1990s that was mediated by an American group that had gone in to negotiate the freedom of two Odebrecht executives kidnapped by the FARC. Among others, these projects would include the Ruta del Sol [Route of the Sun] motorway that connects the centre of Colombia with the Caribbean coast. This insight into co-option raises serious questions about armed group attacks against infrastructure. If the failure to pay ‘tax’ also leads to violence against infrastructure, workers, and machinery, this complicates measurements of armed-group aggression as a product of isolationist tendencies and anti-state ideologies.

Armed groups can even take advantage of infrastructure they also deliberately target for attack. As noted in the previous section, the ELN and FARC would bomb oil pipelines, gaining swift public condemnation and government response. However, less visible was the daily perforation of the same pipeline by the same groups to use the fuel in cocaine production. Perforations are often referred to as ‘artisanal perforations’, denoting an unsystematic and ad hoc approach by local civilians (El País, 2014). The overwhelming coverage of how armed groups approach this pipeline is in the irregular bombing and attacks levied against it by the insurgents in the territory. However, armed groups account for a significant proportion of this crude oil theft, which was used for refining cocaine production (Verdad Abierta, 2016). These operations can sometimes involve machinery that the armed groups themselves contribute, attaching valves and spigots to the main pipeline (Portafolio, 2019). Local farmers and indigenous populations would also be employed in this effort; as indigenous leader Francisco Cortes explained, ‘with the lack of alternatives, natives do what can be done here. The earth is no longer fertile to plant, and one needs to work, whether scraping coca leaves or stealing oil’ (interview recorded in Bonet, 2016). Oil theft becomes part of the local economy under armed-group control. Attacks still occur against the infrastructure, but the armed group is equally content to take advantage and co-opt the pipeline. When the armed group requires a performative demonstration of strength (or is threatened by the possible installation of state military around sections of the project) then it uses force. However, in daily life, the armed group’s frequent interaction with infrastructure as a resource and an opportunity stand in stark contrast to more infrequent destructive incidents.

Infrastructure is also strategic for armed groups’ control over territory and illicit economies. Across Colombia, armed groups would utilise roads to levy taxes, set up roadblocks, and control territory (Alsema, 2018). In northern Antioquia, the main arterial highways through the town of Amalfi in the north-west were considered vital points of access and control over wider illicit economic markets for the armed group in those territories (Defensoría del Pueblo, 2016). This is not only limited to road infrastructure, Rubio notes a correlation between levels of telecommunication infrastructure in a region in Colombia and the presence of armed groups, in particular those who engage in drug-trafficking activities. He concludes that for drug-trafficking activities to work (a main source of financial income for armed group) ‘a minimum physical infrastructure is required’ (Rubio, 2005, p. 122). Rather than indicate how lack of state presence (via infrastructure) created the best conditions for armed groups, this finding goes against the ‘current discourse in the country’ (Rubio, 2005, p. 15).

These dynamics of co-option are not exclusive to Colombia. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the M23 rebel military group operating in the North Kivu province became very proficient at extracting money at road blocks, even establishing a de facto customs duty (Schouten, 2019). The Mexican cartels would also take advantage of existing or new infrastructure projects to improve their illicit operations and secure their ability to monitor and control populations (Sullivan, 2014). In Myanmar, leaders of the KIO ethnic armed group began to get involved in mining infrastructural projects, enabling the expansion of services and the construction of infrastructure by enriching themselves. This new group of rebels turned profiteers were perceived as having become ‘unfaithful to the KIO’ (Brenner, 2015, p. 348). When armed groups exploit easily lootable resources from an external source, this often leads to weakened relationships with local communities. Not only is there little systematic assessment of how armed groups respond positively to infrastructure projects – ostensibly meant for state-building – but also how it affects their relationship with civilian populations.

Complementarity

While co-option and subcontraction are dynamics that involve one side directly benefiting from the other’s presence in the territory, other interactions involve more tacit coexistence. Often less visible than acts of aggression or histrionic violence, complementarity emerges when the armed group and the state find a way, despite opposing ideologies or aims, to occupy the same space with the construction of infrastructure projects without taking advantage of the other. This type of interaction is drawn from a rich literature on hybrid or mediated governance. Menkhaus’ (2007) analysis of mediated states identifies more pragmatic engagements of the state that allow it to govern alongside non-state actors, just as Boege et al. (2009) argue that the state is merely one actor among many offering services and that hybrid political orders can emerge between the state and informal authorities. There does not have to be a monopoly of authority by one group over all the functions of governance for some form of governance to exist; as long as they enact non-contradictory rules on different functions of governance, multiple agents of authority can exist (Zanker et al., 2014; Gledhill, 2018). When there is an absence of direct threat and neither governance actors are able or willing to extract direct benefit from the other, both the state and the non-state are left with few additional resources in their arsenal.

In constructing infrastructure, the state is able to provide to local communities something the armed group cannot. Armed groups that exert rebel governance often place a premium on being perceived as effective and responsive by local communities to pursue legitimation strategies (Menkhaus, 2007; Arjona et al., 2015, p. 3). However, the desire to be perceived as a legitimate authority by the local community is undermined when the armed groups cannot provide desired infrastructure projects that require significant resources and expertise. In areas governed by armed groups, infrastructure represents a delivery of services that communities are rarely privy to. Therefore, armed groups seeking legitimacy with local communities would be more receptive to allow infrastructure construction that they themselves cannot provide.

In order to avoid confrontation and escalating violence, the state also refrains from militarisation and instead actively seeks to communicate and respond to communities. Staniland’s (2012, p. 256) wartime order of tacit coexistence offers useful theorising for this type of interaction. Where both actors operate in the same region and do not wish to confront each other, they allow intermediaries to negotiate terms for both. Unlike confrontational or co-optive interactions, the state can turn to civilian intermediaries to restrict over-taxation or aggressive response by armed groups. They are in turn more responsive to community needs as it is local communities who negotiate their access to the territory. Both the armed group and the state must find ways to coexist or even complement each other’s authority; the functions of governance, of protection, of taxation, of service provision, of regulation, and their accountability, can emerge piecemeal and fragmented rather than in competition.

The FARC and ELN have had histories of building simple roads in areas under their control, both for their own mobility and the communities, and as a form of social punishment for transgressions (Pearce, 1990, p. 186; Molano, 2000). However, anything more complex or expensive than a simple path runs into issues of resources and logistics. The state and private contracted companies, on the other hand, have the resources and experience to construct these projects, but do not have knowledge of the territory or a monopoly of force to guarantee safe access to the territories. A significant percentage of Colombia’s tertiary roads, which are currently targeted for improvement and maintenance, were in fact constructed clandestinely, and in many cases, by the FARC (Acosta Ariza and Alarcón Romero, 2017, p. 123). Rather than an infrastructure project being solely the proviso of the state, this hybridity is built on the local governance and resources of the FARC with later implementation of state capacity. This interaction is not cooperative or collusive; neither of these authorities is acting in concert, nor a desire to be in concert, with the other. However, the resulting tertiary road and its maintenance is an exercise of complementary governance. In some cases, this complementarity is more direct. In Arjona’s (2016, p. 189) influential work on rebel governance in Colombia, she observes that:

armed actors in Colombia do not directly engage in the creation of health or education systems as insurgents have done in other countries. Instead, they usually influence how local government officials provide those services, and sometimes fund certain projects. Armed groups frequently gave orders to mayors and council members directing expenditures of public funds for infrastructure, education, or health projects.

The state is willing to accept (if grudgingly) the presence of armed groups in order to carry out service provision through the needs of local communities. Armed groups seeking to respond to local needs also direct their own resources and authority at the provision of services by taking advantage of state resources and expertise – not for their own profit – in order to build needed infrastructure in the area.

Similar complementary dynamics in the provision of public goods can be found elsewhere. In Sri Lanka the LTTE did not always reject state institutions in rebel-held territory but instead took over functions of security and justice while permitting the continuation of health and education services by state institutions as they did not have the skills or resources to build these from scratch (Mampilly, 2012, pp. 112–13). In Myanmar, this complementarity also emerges in some townships. In an interview with Kim Jolliffe (2015, p. 53), a community organiser describes how ‘the government built all the infrastructure, but the DKBA [ethnic rebel groups] is still in control’ as ‘they are the ones that people will go to if they need to solve a dispute or get permission for something’. The separate provision of infrastructure and dispute resolution by the state and armed groups produced complementary public goods that created a hybrid form of local governance.

Colombia, like many regions affected by armed conflict, is not always a parcellation of smaller competing sovereignties; as the previous sections noted, states and non-state armed groups can and often do overlap in their territorial presence and their interests. Governance by armed groups can exist concurrently, in reaction to, or involved with the state as it extends its infrastructural presence into areas occupied by armed groups. Kasfir et al. (2017, p. 275) argue that ‘armed groups may be in conflict with the national government in one sector, while allowing that government’s service provision to continue on rebel-held territory in other sectors’. The provision of infrastructure is not inherently at odds with armed group authority, but it does symbolise a public good that the armed group is often unable to provide. Equally, the state’s ability to build the infrastructure does not inherently assure their territorial authority. Instead, both the state and armed group can negotiate the provision of infrastructure as a way to complement both of their authorities. Complementarity offers not only a new way to understand armed groups and state dynamics but also a new lens into how infrastructure and the provision of public goods is not a zero-sum gain in authority.

Conclusion

The state extends, builds, and consolidates its presence through physical infrastructure. While a wealth of literature exists on the nuanced significance of infrastructural roll-out in the context of statehood, economic growth, and legitimacy, it rarely engages with these notions in contexts of conflict. Instead, infrastructure is either an indicator of conflict onset or state failure. Where infrastructure interventions occur during conflict, the preoccupation is with armed groups as spoilers, inherently opposed to processes that strengthen the state and reduce the isolation that allows them to control territory unchallenged. Colombia provides a unique case of this dynamic: a state that is centralised and wealthy enough to invest (along with private stakeholders) its infrastructural power in peripheries that for decades has been occupied by multiple types of armed groups. Infrastructure is not solely for economic development, but also part of a state-building process. By the admission of the Colombian state and in line with existing literature, this connectivity, economic development, and service provision is meant to undercut the power and territorial control of armed groups.

This chapter proposed instead that infrastructure produces four types of interactions between armed groups and states, drawing from the literature on corporate complicity and parastatism, crime-conflict nexus, and mediated stateness and empirical evidence from Colombia as well as other conflict-affected states. While these four types are not necessarily discrete, they do demonstrate crucial distinct characteristics which I detail in the table on p. 144. Variation in these interactions (confrontation, subcontraction, co-option, complementarity) depend on the armed group and the state’s perception of threat, capacity to extract resources, and relationship with the local communities. I examined each of these interactions by drawing empirical examples from Colombia, a case study that embodies the overlapping realms of infrastructural state-building from the centre and the (in)secure peripheries occupied by non-state armed groups. However, while this chapter examines each of these interactions statically, they rarely (particularly in Colombia) emerge completely independent of each other. The interactive effects of temporality (a co-optive interaction following confrontation if the state backs down) and concurrence (a confrontational interaction between the state and one armed group at the same time as a subcontracted interaction with another) are worth further examination in future research.

These typologies of interaction are neither meant to discard existing research nor present an exhaustive explanation for the interaction between armed groups and infrastructure implementation. Instead, they offer a framework to explore the affective impact of infrastructure on state-building and violence during armed conflict. The implementation of infrastructure allows local communities to experience the state in new ways, as Diego Valdivieso (Chapter 1) argues in the arrival of the state to the islanders of Quehuli in Chile or Sam Rume’s analysis of tram development in Ecuador (Chapter 8). During armed conflict, infrastructure becomes a physical representation of the state and armed group’s varied interactions that communities must experience. By identifying these different interactions, I seek to address existing gaps in the literature, building a potential framework for how infrastructure reshapes dynamics between states and armed groups and the implications for the civilians caught between the two.

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