These four books give us several interpretative angles on Colombian armed violence. They are all timely contributions. President Uribe has made a strong and effective bid to persuade Colombians and the world that there is no armed conflict in Colombia, only criminality and terrorism. He has posed a profound question about how to describe the violence and bloodletting of the last 20 years. Even such a basic question has therefore become highly politicised in Colombia. How do these four books help us clarify the debate?

A good starting point is Mary Roldán's historical account of the mid-twentieth century period in Colombian history which has been acknowledged as a civil war and is known as La Violencia. An estimated 200,000 people died in two decades of violence between 1946 and 1966. Here, our first point of note is that while a broad description of the violence has been agreed, the analysis of its meaning has certainly not. It therefore parallels aspects of today's debates. A superficial consensus is that it was about party political or partisan violence. Detailed study reveals the complex interplay of multiple factors rooted in regional and local contexts. Roldán's is one of all too few efforts to build a regional account of how the violence played out (in Antioquia). Historical detail illuminates the cultural, religious, ethnic, racial and other social aspects of violence which has been crudely reduced to Liberal and Conservative party affiliation. Roldán's book is highly valuable in the context of President Uribe's attempt to reposition an account of Colombia's contemporary violence. Roldán herself argues for continuity between the earlier and today's violence in Colombia; she sees connections, not obvious or linear connections, but ones which prove the worth of the sharper lens and depth of field.

In an earlier regional study of Quindio, Carlos Miguel Ortiz questioned the relationship of local participants in the violence and the national party projects in whose name the violence was generally fought (Estado y Subversion en Colombia: La Violencia en el Quindío, anos 50, 1985, Fondo Editorial CEREC). In the locality, the savagery was often unleashed by an ambitious new group of politicians anxious for access to municipal public posts and the patronage they brought with them. But this does not mean that the violence had no relationship to national dynamics. Roldán argues ‘a regional study of the heterogeneous experience of local violence … enables us to explore how the meanings of concepts such as the state, partisan affiliation, clientelism, regional identity, and citizenship were contested and redefined in historically contingent ways by different sectors of society at different times and in different places’ (p. 28). The link between these local dynamics of violence and the national scene lies in the struggles over state formation and reformation. It is this point on which I heartily concur with Roldán, which challenges Uribe's efforts to depoliticise contemporary violence. It is this component of state formation, its unfinished and uneven character in Colombia, which connects the complex local contexts and the national process. Roldán conceptualises the state not as a fixed entity but as a claim or claims to structure fragmented attempts at domination. Such attempts, we might add, are rooted in social relationships of hierarchy and subordination.

The form this component of state formation (understood as local as well as national claim-making) took varied greatly within regions such as Antioquia as well as between regions such as Antioquia and Quindío. But for Roldán there is an underlying pattern which relates to the prior degrees of state legitimacy and infrastructural presence. Where this was strong, partisan violence did not threaten established structures of power. But where there was hostility between the regional state and citizens in geographically peripheral areas, regional and central state claims, each with their own partisan clientelist networks intensely fought over by a rising professional political class, clashed in ways which unleashed high levels of violence. In these peripheral areas, class and ethnic differences were critical variables. The regional Antioquia state had established very little presence in the peripheries and the relationship was more akin to colonizer and colonized, with comparable socio cultural as well as political subordinations. Hostility and mistrust were intensified when the peripheries also became sources of extractive wealth and exploitation of a marginalised labour force. These peripheries, argues Roldán through her meticulous empirical research, were the sites ‘in which the parameters of regional identity and authority were fought over and shaped and where violence became endemic and widespread’ (p. 41).

Understanding violence in Colombia through the lens of competing peripheral, regional and central state formation claims, embedded in socio cultural stratifications and exclusions is very fruitful. It is also important to point to the gendered aspects of the violence which is unleashed through these processes; the women who are victims of cruel sexualised violence as armed actors act out vendettas on wives and daughters and of forced displacements from land and homes. This brings us to the book by Richani on the political economy of war and peace in Colombia. This book looks at the evolution and escalation of violence in Colombia in the 1990s. Richani explores the emergence of what he calls ‘war systems’ and their economic dimensions. But his argument does not cohere with Uribe's reductionism. To begin with, Richani places the armed forces of the state within the war system. He explores what he calls the ‘comfortable impasse’ reached with the guerrillas. Enjoying considerable autonomy over the counter-insurgency war, the army used it to accumulate assets rather than confront the guerrillas in combat. Richani also roots this semi autonomy in the peculiar characteristics of state formation in Colombia and inter-elite contestations over the state. I would put more emphasis on the intra elite consensus on not allowing the military a role in political life. The outcome, however, is the same. Excluded from political ambitions, and unable to appropriate state resources, the armed forces were steered towards other means of enrichment and institutional development, including a vested interest in protracted war, alliances with landowners and drugs traffickers to finance it and the construction of an inflated military bureaucracy but weak military capacity. Either way, we return to the problem of state formation.

Colombia, did not establish a central state hegemony as part of a nation building project. It is in Roldán's peripheries that varied forms of resistance to efforts to expand landowner and other elite interests take place. The FARC and other guerrilla forces are responses to the vacuum of the state in the face of capitalist expansion into the peripheries. In the end, while some agreed to negotiate a political entry into electoral contestation at the end of the 1980s, the FARC and the ELN managed to build their own war systems based on local territorial power and economic predation and accumulation which enabled them to build armies capable of breaking the ‘comfortable impasse’. By the mid-1990s, these armies shifted the war out of the peripheries and into urban areas. Colombia's elites turned, as they had during the Violencia, to para state groups, so-called self-defence groups. In 1997, the fearsome United Self Defence of Colombia (AUC) was formally announced.

Regional histories of this period will in the future reveal the multiple local social and economic factors which drew people behind the different armed groups and the intensification of the violence. The state claim making dimensions of the violence became less clear, but no less present, as the armed groups of right and left disputed drug trafficking corridors, extortion opportunities, and resource accumulation at the expense of the civilian population. Thousands of peasants were expelled from their lands, mostly by the AUC, in a series of terrifying massacres. Forrest Hylton's short, left perspective on the Colombia conflict adds some key points to the other more scholarly and empirical accounts reviewed. A major theme of Hylton's book is to bring ethnicity as well as class into the account of the historical and contemporary violence in Colombia. As such it builds on a theme of Roldán's book, and highlights the disproportionate impact, on Colombia's African-Caribbean and indigenous populations in particular, of the right wing paramilitary violence which is unleashed in the wake of the ending of the impasse. While less savage than the AUC, the FARC are nevertheless indifferent to and abusive of the rights of indigenous and African-Caribbean peoples.

Similarly to patterns during the Violencia, it is the peripheries and particularly those with actual and potential natural resource extraction and export commodity production, which bore the brunt of some of the worst of the atrocities. State claiming, and resource accumulation to back up the claims, lie behind these dynamics, with the AUC or the narco paramilitaries according to Hylton, becoming the defenders of the state and private property for an oligarchy unable to develop a hegemonic national project. In turn, the AUC, have made their own claims on the state, negotiating the right to legitimise spoils of war and participate in the public sphere of politics. Revelations about deals between President Uribe's congressional supporters and local paramilitary commanders are precisely about this.

The Colombian Commission of Jurists has documented over 31,000 extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances between 1996 and 2006, 45 per cent by the paramilitary where the author of the violence is known. Winifred Tate's account of the culture and politics of human rights activism in Colombia is a fascinating angle on the polarised debates on interpreting the meaning of Colombian violence. Even ‘counting the dead’ as she titles her book, is caught up in the polarisations. Bravely, Tate enters into the different worlds of non state, state and military perspectives on human rights. Her ethnographic exploration probes the lives of human rights activists and the professionalisation in the 1990s of what began as a highly political endeavour to defend the lives of militants, armed and unarmed. At the same time, the state is forced to take on the discourse of human rights and the armed forces to recognise that they need to engage with it if they wish to continue receiving military aid. In the process, the limits as well as the importance of human rights talk becomes apparent. Human rights activism, argues Tate, is an ‘effort to bring certain public secrets into the public transcript, to make what is known but denied part of the general discussions about the nature and cause of violence and possible solutions’ (p. 293). However, the public secret is very different for NGOs, members of the state human rights bureaucracy and for military officers, for whom it is, of course, guerrilla attacks. Has ‘human rights’ as a framework enabled Colombia to evolve in its state and nation building at all, in particular to offer protection to citizens? The answer is somewhat depressing in Tate's book. Human rights is as mired in polarisations as the meaning of the violence itself, to the extent that armed groups have changed the way they practice violence in order to avoid it being categorised as a human rights violation. Tate points to the dramatic decline in abuses by the armed forces in the early 1990s and the equally dramatic rise in paramilitary abuses.

Tate is right to draw our attention to the varied appropriations of a concept which was intended to have universal rather than particularist content. We are drawn back to the violence which surrounds the Colombia state formation project. The very notion of citizenship rights, which emerged out of other historical state and nation building processes, cannot win a societal consensus in Colombia. However, this is partly due to the failure of elites to accept an autonomous sphere of social organising from which public opinion and state challenges can emerge peacefully. Uribe does not believe in such a sphere and can only identify NGOs and social activists with his ‘terrorist’ threat. Equally, the failure of elites (and one must acknowledge the looseness of that term) to concede to political claims that would open up Colombia to meaningful social reforms, has hardened many activists and continues to give the FARC its justification for ongoing armed struggle. In the meantime, the inter-generational cycles of violence continue to blight the search for political solutions. With a President who will not even acknowledge the political content of armed conflict in Colombia, it is hard to see an end to those cycles.