HMN 2025: How inventing political adversaries can create real civil division

While it is widely assumed that civil wars reinforce the existing political divisions, a recent sociological study sheds light on how these divisions actually can be reinvented during social conflict. The study, “Fabricating Communists: The Imagined Third That Reinvented the National Fault Line in Mid-Twentieth-Century Colombia’s Civil War,” by Laura Acosta (University of California-San Diego), is published in the December 2025 issue of the American Sociological Review.

The author explores how, through their political discourse and military actions, politicians in Colombia transformed conflict between liberals and conservatives into a civil war between the state and communist guerrillas.

How political discourse shaped conflict

Acosta analyzed archival records, oral histories of civilians and combatants, and newspapers to measure the effects of civil war on political divisions, or “fault lines,” over three distinct periods of conflict in Colombia, from 1948 to 1964. She found that, when Colombian politicians issued baseless accusations and preemptive actions against communists, they essentially created the very revolutionary threats they claimed to prevent—and thereby a new political “fault line.”

Acosta identifies three social processes that worked together to turn fabricated communists into an insurgency:

• Enemy legitimation—Through repeated false accusations about the presence of international communism, politicians convinced the public that it existed in Colombia, making it a suitable target for military attack.

• Boundary demarcation—In response to the believed presence of this enemy, political factions realigned, and new groups of supporters coalesced in favor of and in opposition to communism.

• Identity shift—Communism became a category of social identification that individuals used to make sense of the ongoing situation, recognize themselves and others, and mobilize to either protest or enable the attacks.

Implications for peace and policy

Acosta notes that this framework of fault line formation in civil war “opens new avenues for examining how political discourse can become self-fulfilling, how international threats are transformed into local enemies, and how wartime actors’ opportunities for action evolve—including the conditions necessary for sustained peace.”

Acosta highlights that building lasting peace requires addressing not only the political divisions that started the civil war but also the new and shifting fault lines that are themselves the product of the war. Only by doing so can policymakers understand whom citizens now perceive as the nation’s enemy and how these perceptions shape their political choices and collective action, ultimately affecting the implementation and success of peace agreements.

The content is provided for information purposes only.