Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for activist and defenders. It is calculated that at least 1,500 leaders of human rights organizations and civic movements have been assassinated in the last 10 years, while many others have received dead threats or survived killing attempts. The expectations for finally achieving long-lasting peace were very high after the signing of the peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas in 2016. However, the results were paradoxical: while there was general and sharp decline in indiscriminate violence, there was an increase in the selective killing of leaders of vulnerable communities and citizenship movements.

As a practitioner on human rights and conflict analysis in Colombia, I have gathered information on this phenomenon, building a database that includes more than 2,000 cases of these selective killings from 2016 to 2025. I have also collected data on other types of violence against the leaders and their communities, such as dead threats, rigged trials, and forced disappearances.

Previous research on the killing of social leaders has focused on the statistical analysis of each murder as individual cases, in example, finding econometrical variables about gender, possible perpetrator, municipality of assassination and type of leadership (peasant, union, ethnic, etc.). My goal to apply for funding from ISRF is to pursue independent research to understand the impact of these murders in democracy. More specifically, by developing an innovative network analysis to map out the affected communities and grass-roots movements and how these killings and other selective violence have fractured their social tissue, disintegrated organizational ties and diminished their capacity to participate in democracy. The outcomes of this analysis may shed light for the attention and prevention of this type of violence in Colombia in other countries, for instance by the creation of security protocols.