Bargaining under Polarization: The Case of Colombian Armed Conflict

The decades-old armed conflict between the government of Colombia and the FARC guerrilla group has been a highly polarized one, as is evident from the intransigent positions of the two parties and the repeated breakdowns of past peacemaking efforts. To account for this longstanding failure to reach an agreement, a distributive bargaining framework is developed in which a measure of polarization is derived from (i) externalities the parties suffer due to a kind of envy, and (ii) penalties the parties impose on their delegated negotiators when concessions are made in the bargaining process. The proposed model posits four negotiation outcome regions, two representing agreement and two representing disagreement (i.e., negotiation breakdown), arising from the interplay of two parameters: the conflict’s polarization level and the ratio of total gross payoff from continuing conflict to the surplus up for negotiation. It follows from this formulation that a necessary condition for a negotiated solution is the adoption of a dual policy that combines political and military strategies in a dissociative manner. This analytical approach is applied theoretically to conflicts in general and specifically to the Colombian conflict, identifying the conditions that explain the success – so far– of the current Peace Process.