ABSTRACT This article focuses onward the role of multinational corporations in the Colombian conflict.

ABSTRACT

This article focuses onward the role of multinational corporations in the Colombian conflict, particularly by what means they contributed to the escalation of land conflicts and to the violent transformation of the rural economy into the same based on rentier capital. It also explores to what extent these companies helped in fomenting and financing the war order an element that could partly explain the protracted persistence of the Colombian conflict.

A war method is a pattern of violent interaction among different actors sustained from one side of to the other a period of time. War methods are thus embedded in each civil war. War systems' emerging see the verb consolidation, and duration depend partly forward the evolution of the correlation of forces among the warring actors and in succession the political economies that each of the belligerent forces raises during the course of the conflict.

If the political, economic, and military assets that any actor obtains during the conflict exce what it had before the conflict, this is considered a positive political economy. Positive political economies could translate into incentives to continue the war until the particular actor prevails. War classifications are not rational constructs, nor are they perpetuated by way of one actor's behavior. War theorys are as much products of unwanted issues of actors' behavior or of actors' attempts to outsmart their opposers as they are products of structural constraints, similar as a balance of power or limited resources at actors' disposal (government or its armed opponents) or international conditions that inhibit a rebel dispose from pursuing a winning strategy. Agency and formation are integral parts of the war body model. Agency is defined in limits of how an organization, like as a rebel group, the military, or portions of classes (landowners, cattle ranchers, or proprietors of banks) articulate their political interests.

War methods then, are dynamic. They influence their units (and act as an independent variable), and their stability hangs on the outcome of units' behaviors and changes in their regional and international environment.1

WAR plan OR "RESOURCE CURSE"?

In the last decade, a strand in conflict theory emerg arguing that the availability of natural resources increases the incentives for the two "rebelling and looting." The larger the "lootable" wealth-say, oil, gold emeralds, diamonds, cobalt, coca production-the more likely that political entrepreneur will appear to challenge governments, given the payoff expectances In this scheme, as prolonged as the expected payoff is higher than the risks, the incentives for rebelling are high. Collier and Hoeffler (1998) argue that the results of primary commodity dependence are nonlinear and peak when of that kind exports reach about 30 percent of the gros domestic returns Consequently, such a country has a 33 percent risk of conflict. When like primary commodity expoits are and nothing else 10 percent of GDP, in contrast, the risk falls to 11 percent (Collier et al. 2003)

The public criticism of this approach is that it does not explain whether the availability of the "lootable wealth" is the main cause of violent conflicts, or whether the causes of civil wars lie in the way these resources are distributed among social classes, regions, and ethnic or religious clusters Nor does it clarify whether civil war outbreaks hang on the magnitude of micro- or macro-socioeconomic and cultural disruptions that are associated with the discovery of natural resources and its corollary, the "Dutch disease."2 Or are civil wars simply caused and perpetuated by dint of "low state distributive, regulative and acljudicative capacities"? principally likely the cause of civil wars is a combination of these factors, and varies with the specific cases in subordination to study (Collier and Hoffler 1998; Cilliers and Dietrich 2000; Berdal and Malone 2000)

Notwithstanding that Colombia's GDP is not on the same level close to the 30 percent support on primary commodity export-that is, the "danger benchmark" place by Collier and Hoeffeler; oil, coal, gold emeralds account for just beneath 5 percent of the GDP-the land suffered from a 40-year protracted civil war (Economist Intelligence Unit 2001 28)3 This article addresses three explanation relevant aspects of the Colombian case, brace of which are underplayed by way of the mentioned "resource literature" (2001 15) common is how multinational corporations, or MC disrupted the subsistence peasant economy, exacerbating violent conflict particularly through the access to land, which, in change the direction of consolidated the country's war body The second aspect is for what reason these companies triggered rent predation in a of the war system's main actors: state, guerrillas, and paramilitaries, thereby helping (directly and indirectly) to finance and maintain the war order without affecting MCs' profit margins to the point of discouraging them from further investment. The third aspect is by what mode the MCs helped to internationalize the conflict, which, in bend exacerbated the war system condition. The conjunction of these three factors, this thought argues, led to the consolidation of the war a whole given that MCs not sole generated violence but also financed opposing forces: guerrillas forward one side, the state and paramilitaries forward the other. Wittingly or unwittingly, MC helped to maintain a balance of forces (a comfortable impasse) that allowed the perpetuation of the war plan which explains the long duration of the civil war (Richani 2002)4