By Dr Andrew Thomson.
The British and Irish governments, via the Independent Reporting Commission, will reportedly appoint an interlocutor in August 2025 to explore the possibility of a “process of engagement” to “transition” or “disband” paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland that have remained active post-Good Friday Agreement (1998).
What lessons can the Colombian case provide, particularly in engagement with so-called “pro-state” paramilitary groups? The Colombian government has negotiated the demobilization and reintegration of the right-wing “pro-state” paramilitary AUC in 2003-2005, but many successor paramilitary and criminal groups re-emerged and continue to operate in Colombia. The government also negotiated the collective “normalization” of the country’s main communist-inspired insurgent organisation, the FARC, culminating in a 2016 peace agreement, but some dissident FARC groups continued to fight (both those that never signed up to the 2016 agreement and those that abandoned it). Currently, the Petro government has vowed to negotiate “Total Peace” with various armed groups including the insurgent ELN (with whom the government has not previously reached any agreement), dissident FARC groups, and a constellation of successor right-wing paramilitary factions and organized criminal gangs. The present situation in Colombia has some parallels with Northern Ireland including the sustained presence of armed groups post-conflict/post-peace agreements and their increased engagement in organised crime.
- “Political” or “Criminal”? Debates in Colombia over categorising different armed groups as either “political” or “criminal” with all of the attendant considerations (such as the issues of recognising “criminal” groups by giving them a platform), have influenced how the Colombian government has approached engagement. Public and policymaking debates have treated “political” and “criminal” as mutually exclusive categories (assuming that the more “criminal” a group is, the less “political” it is and vice versa) and created fixed dichotomous approaches to each (i.e. “negotiations for peace agreement” with “political” groups and “dialogue for submission to justice” for “criminal” groups). Many groups, particularly those that want recognition and to receive enhanced benefits that may come with it, have rejected being categorised as “criminal” and have perverse incentives to cast themselves as “political” to pursue formal negotiations. An interlocutor in Northern Ireland might avoid framing these issues in binary terms, recognizing both paramilitaries’ troubles-era legacy and their involvement in organized crime to pursue more cross-cutting forms of engagement to encourage disbandment.
- A single framework or many? The Colombian government has strategically engaged with one group at a time (usually iteratively) and, in its pursuit of Total Peace, has now created various frameworks to engage different armed groups and criminal factions. This has produced a complex peace landscape with distinct approaches to engagement (e.g., formal negotiations for peace, submission to justice, localised forms of dialogue), various reintegration programmes (e.g., the AUC’s demobilisation, the FARC’s collective process, individual exit routes), and different justice mechanisms (e.g., the Justice and Peace Law, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace). A related challenge is that groups compare the concessions and benefits others have received, which can create a “benchmark” effect that hardens bargaining positions. In a Northern Irish context, dissident republican groups and loyalists are obviously likely to come to the table with very different agendas due to their divergent objectives, relationships to the UK state, and positions within their respective communities. Different factions are also likely to want different things (i.e. UVF versus UDA). A single framework could help ensure consistency and a sense of fairness, but risks being too blunt an instrument to deal with the different histories, motivations, and community dynamics of specific groups/localised factions. A plural or localised approach, while more flexible and tailored, risks producing a fragmented peace architecture and competitive grievance-mongering. The key lesson from Colombia is that the choice is less about “one or many”, and more about designing and coordinating in ways that allows tailored approaches to be grounded within a set of common principles and a long-term overarching vision.
- Engage/Negotiate with whom? Colombia’s talks with the AUC in 2003 demonstrated the risks of assuming armed groups are cohesive: in-fighting between blocs with which the government had to open multiple negotiation tables and disconnects between leaders and mid- or low-ranking members undermined commitment to the deals reached. In Northern Ireland, where dissident republican and loyalist networks have loose structures and local autonomy, engagement must anticipate fragmentation. This means building incentives for participation at all levels, setting credible consequences for non-compliance, and involving trusted intermediaries to reach beyond senior leadership. Without this, agreements risk being followed by splinter factions. To achieve this, interlocutors might consider broader sets of engagements with communities and/or social dialogue and coordinate government departments and civil society organisations for community transition.
- Organised crime, political networks, and community entrenchment: In Colombia, the AUC demobilisation agreements largely ignored the economic, political, and social networks that sustained paramilitarism, including narco-trafficking and criminal enterprises, focusing instead more narrowly on reduced prison sentences in exchange for demobilisation and participation in transitional justice. This allowed successor groups to inherit those networks and structures. In Northern Ireland, any disbandment process must go beyond symbolic disengagement to dismantle the criminal enterprises, social recognition, and local conditions that enable paramilitarism. Engagement should address how these networks/structures will be addressed, with any agreements also integrated into cross-cutting initiatives, such as community development efforts encapsulated in the whole-of-system approach undertaken by the Executive Programme for Tackling Paramilitarism and Organised Crime, to reduce the space for re-emergence and strengthen legitimate community leadership. This would entail a massive, complex, and long-term undertaking that requires collaboration across government departments.
- Exit routes: Another lesson from Colombia is that exit routes and reintegration programmes for paramilitary members must address livelihoods, recognition, and be tailored to the specific histories and relationships of different groups. In Northern Ireland many former loyalist paramilitaries today report feeling “betrayed” by the state, have strained relationships with political groups, and are often shunned as criminals by their communities, whereas many former IRA members (are perceived to) have comparatively received greater community respect and symbolic validation after the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), indicating different post-GFA experiences. Designing exit pathways that meet the material, social, and psychological needs of each group, and individuals within them, will be essential to lasting disengagement.
There are, of course, many other lessons that might be more obvious to experienced mediators and institutions in these types of contexts. For instance, in Colombia, community, law enforcement/military, and international pressure were significant in ensuring armed factions and criminal entities agreed an exit to the conflict. Without credible consequences for the continuing the way things are, nothing is likely to change. In addition, the Colombian case suggests that paramilitaries and organised crime members often seek reduced sentences, amnesties, and retention of illicitly gained wealth as incentives for disbandment. The Colombian model paired such incentives with transitional justice measures that sought to address victims. In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement’s early prisoner-release scheme granted conditional leniency for paramilitary prisoners, contingent on sustained ceasefires, individual reviews, and other safeguards. Any new mechanism would most likely build on this precedent by balancing incentives for disengagement with accountability for victims. Leveraging a process of disbandment for further truth-telling and acknowledgement of harms, depending on the form it takes, could potentially help foster enhanced accountability and reconciliation, and is likely to be part of the engagement process.
Ultimately, the Colombian case underscores the need for those in charge of these “processes of engagement” in Northern Ireland to approach loyalist paramilitaries through a more internationally comparative informed lens. Whereas Colombia’s talks with the FARC drew heavily on global experience, including exchanges with former IRA and ETA members, among others, the AUC process lacked such comparative engagement, as does those with contemporary paramilitary groups and criminal gangs. While there is a wealth of international experience and expertise in engaging with dissident factions of insurgent groups, there is much less available recourse on dealing with those that view themselves as defenders of a nation and/or the status quo. This gap matters because negotiations with “pro-state” paramilitary groups and organised crime gangs differ from those with insurgents. So-called “pro-state” actors, like Colombia’s AUC or loyalist groups in Northern Ireland, pose distinct challenges due to past alignment with state security forces, hybrid governance roles, and community entrenchment, all of which make international comparisons as well as trust-building, third-party mediation and monitoring, and tailored incentives more important. Without learning from other contexts on how to persuade such actors to disband, efforts risk repeating Colombia’s missed opportunities and producing only partial reductions in violence and/or paramilitary influence.
About the Author
Dr Andrew Thomson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast and a Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. He is an active member of several academic societies and currently serves on the governing council of the Conflict Research Society (CRS).
Andrew’s research interests reside in the areas of conflict studies, political violence, peacebuilding, and U.S. foreign policy.
Image appears courtesy of a Creative Commons License and by Jorge Gardner.