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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how seemingly minor, technical jurisdictional decisions at Colombia’s transitional justice court are reshaping the history of the country’s war from one of narco-terrorism to political rebellion in the wake of peace.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that seemingly minor, technical jurisdictional decisions at Colombia’s transitional justice court are reshaping the history of the country’s war from one of narco-terrorism to political rebellion. Beginning in the 1990s, amid the rise of the U.S.–led War on Drugs, the Colombian state prosecuted suspected militants as narco-terrorists in criminal courts rather than as subversives in military courts, thereby denying the conflict’s political character. The 2016 peace accords marked a reversal: the FARC was formally recognized as a political actor, and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) was created to adjudicate crimes committed in the now-recognized armed conflict. Amnesty for minor offenses such as drug trafficking—a central component of the agreement—was designed to erase criminal records, free ex-combatants from prison, and support their reintegration. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bogotá with magistrates, lawyers, and former militants, the paper traces a single amnesty case excluded on jurisdictional grounds. In so doing, it reveals how the court must reconstruct decades-old criminal records produced when the war was officially framed as “narco-terrorism,” and read these archives against the grain to decide which acts count as political crimes of “the conflict” under its jurisdiction and which remain “ordinary” crimes for the penal courts.