Chronicles the peace process negotiations between Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia

In Between the Sword and the Wall: The Santos Peace Negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Harvey Kline, a noted expert on contemporary Colombian politics, brings to a close his multivolume chronicle of the incessant violence that has devastated Colombia’s population, politics, and military for decades. This, his newest work on the subject, recounts and analyzes the negotiations between Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which ended with a peace agreement in 2016.
 
The FARC insurgency began in 1964, and every Colombian president after 1980 unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a peace agreement with the group. Kline analyzes how the Santos administration was ultimately able to negotiate peace with the FARC. The agreement failed to receive the approval of the Colombian people in an October 2016 plebiscite, but a renegotiated version was later approved by the congress in the same year. Afterward, more than 7,000 rebels turned over their weapons to the UN mission in Colombia. The former combatants were then to be judged by a special court empowered to punish but not imprison those who had violated human rights. Throughout the book, Kline emphasizes the dual nature of the Santos negotiations, first with the FARC and second with the democratic opposition to the agreement led by former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez.
 
Kline provides readers with a well-researched analysis based on a variety of resources, including media articles and primary documents from the government, international organizations, and the FARC. He also conducted extensive interviews with twenty-eight government officials and Colombian experts from all ideological persuasions.

Harvey F. Kline is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Alabama. He is the author of Fighting Monsters in the Abyss: The Second Administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2006–2010; Showing Teeth to the Dragons: State-building by Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2002–2006; Chronicle of a Failure Foretold: The Peace Process of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana; and State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 1986–1994.

“Between the Sword and the Wall is deeply researched and well written and makes a unique and needed contribution to a country underserved by broader literature.”
—Steven L. Taylor, author of Voting Amid Violence: Electoral Democracy in Colombia and coauthor of A Different Democracy: American Government in a Thirty-One-Country Perspective— -

“Between the Sword and the Wall is a very important contribution to knowledge about the perspectives, proposals, and reactions of the Santos government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) during the 2010–2016 peace negotiations.”
—Cynthia McClintock, author of Electoral Rules and Democracy in Latin America and coauthor of The United States and Peru: Cooperation at a Cost— -