Robert A. Karl. Forgotten Peace

The shelf containing books on the Colombian civil war known as La Violencia (1947–1965) is a long one. Robert A. Karl’s monograph on the peacemaking project that helped end La Violencia stands as one of the best among them. Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia is unique in that its focus is not so much on the armed conflict, but rather on the peacemaking process itself, made possible by a Liberal-Conservative power-sharing pact called the National Front (Frente Nacional, 1958–1974). The recentness of Karl’s study is a clear advantage. Not only does the author’s perspective benefit from long hindsight, but he also has benefited from writing his study as Colombians were involved in peacemaking at the end of the civil war that raged throughout the country between the later 1990s and 2010. That process ended the new time of bloodshed in Colombia that began in the mid-1970s and rose from the country’s illegal drug trade. Hence the author can conclude his work with an epilogue suggesting to Colombians that they have much to gain by taking a second look at the “forgotten peace” ending La Violencia, notable for the spirit of convivencia, or coexistence, that attended it.

Hindsight bias · Peace and conflict studies · Peace economics · Peacemaking · Political science · Power (physics) · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · Psychology

• Beyond armed and unarmed

  Juan Sebastián Lara-Rodríguez•International Journal of Conflict…•2026

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