Abstract
COLOMBIA IS A COUNTRY of stark contrasts. On one hand, the country maintains the longest and most stable history of democratic governance in the Americas. On the other hand, it has also experienced one of the longest undeclared civil confl icts in the modern world. These two features characterize the literature on Colombian politics, with one set of contributions focused on the country’s political system and the other on the postconfl ict future.
In keeping with the theme of analyzing Colombia’s democratic institutions, many of the studies in this section address specific aspects of these institutions, such as the impacts