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Frontier Thesis

Article by D.R. Owram

Published Online February 7, 2006

Last Edited December 16, 2013

The Frontier thesis was formulated 1893, when American historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the availability of unsettled land throughout much of American history was the most important factor determining national development. Frontier experiences and new opportunities forced old traditions to change, institutions to adapt and society to become more democratic as class distinctions collapsed. The result was a unique American society, distinct from the European societies from which it originated. In Canada the frontier thesis was popular between the world wars with historians such as A.R.M. LOWER and Frank UNDERHILL and sociologist S.D. CLARK , partly because of a new sense of Canada's North American character.

Since WWII the frontier thesis has declined in popularity because of recognition of important social and cultural distinctions between Canada and the US. In its place a "metropolitan school" has developed, emphasizing Canada's much closer historical ties with Europe. Moreover, centres such as Montréal, Toronto and Ottawa had a profound influence on the settlement of the Canadian frontier. Whichever argument is emphasized, however, any realistic conclusion cannot deny that both the frontier and the ties to established centres were formative in Canada's development.

See also METROPOLITAN-HINTERLAND THESIS .

Recommended

Laurentian thesis, metropolitan-hinterland thesis.

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Frederick Jackson Turner

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• Wisconsin Life - Frederick Jackson Turner and the History of the American West
• Weber State University - Biography of Frederick Jackson Turner
• National Humanities Center - The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893
• Frederick Jackson Turner - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Frederick Jackson Turner (born November 14, 1861, Portage , Wisconsin , U.S.—died March 14, 1932, San Marino , California) was an American historian best known for the “ frontier thesis.” The single most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the United States was attributable to its long history of “westering.” Despite the fame of this monocausal interpretation, as the teacher and mentor of dozens of young historians, Turner insisted on a multicausal model of history , with a recognition of the interaction of politics, economics , culture , and geography. Turner’s penetrating analyses of American history and culture were powerfully influential and changed the direction of much American historical writing.

Born in frontier Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Turner did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams . Awarded a doctorate in 1891, Turner was one of the first historians professionally trained in the United States rather than in Europe. He began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in 1889. He began to make his mark with his first professional paper, “ The Significance of History” (1891), which contains the famous line “Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.” The controversial notion that there was no fixed historical truth, and that all historical interpretation should be shaped by present concerns, would become the hallmark of the so-called “New History,” a movement that called for studies illuminating the historical development of the political and cultural controversies of the day. Turner should be counted among the “progressive historians,” though, with the political temperament of a small-town Midwesterner, his progressivism was rather timid. Nevertheless, he made it clear that his historical writing was shaped by a contemporary agenda.

Turner first detailed his own interpretation of American history in his justly famous paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at a meeting of historians in Chicago in 1893 and published many times thereafter. Adams, his mentor at Johns Hopkins , had argued that all significant American institutions derived from German and English antecedents . Rebelling against this view, Turner argued instead that Europeans had been transformed by the process of settling the American continent and that what was unique about the United States was its frontier history . (Ironically, Turner passed up an opportunity to attend Buffalo Bill ’s Wild West show so that he could complete “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” on the morning that he presented it.) He traced the social evolution of frontier life as it continually developed across the continent from the primitive conditions experienced by the explorer, trapper, and trader, through maturing agricultural stages, finally reaching the complexity of city and factory. Turner held that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions on the frontier, in particular the abundance of free land, the settling of which engendered such traits as self-reliance, individualism , inventiveness, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism. Turner’s “frontier thesis” rose to become the dominant interpretation of American history for the next half-century and longer. In the words of historian William Appleman Williams, it “rolled through the universities and into popular literature like a tidal wave.” While today’s professional historians tend to reject such sweeping theories, emphasizing instead a variety of factors in their interpretations of the past, Turner’s frontier thesis remains the most popular explanation of American development among the literate public.

For a scholar of such wide influence, Turner wrote relatively few books. His Rise of the New West, 1819–1829 (1906) was published as a volume in The American Nation series, which included contributions from the nation’s leading historians. The follow-up to that study, The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935), would not be published until after his death. Turner may have had difficulty writing books, but he was a brilliant master of the historical essay. The winner of an oratorical medal as an undergraduate, he also was a gifted and active public speaker. His deep, melodious voice commanded attention whether he was addressing a teachers group, an audience of alumni, or a branch of the Chautauqua movement . His writing, too, bore the stamp of oratory; indeed, he reworked his lectures into articles that appeared in the nation’s most influential popular and scholarly journals.

Many of Turner’s best essays were collected in The Frontier in American History (1920) and The Significance of Sections in American History (1932), for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. In these writings Turner promoted new methods in historical research, including the techniques of the newly founded social sciences , and urged his colleagues to study new topics such as immigration , urbanization , economic development , and social and cultural history . He also commented directly on the connections he saw between the past and the present.

The end of the frontier era of continental expansion, Turner reasoned, had thrown the nation “back upon itself.” Writing that “imperious will and force” had to be replaced by social reorganization, he called for an expanded system of educational opportunity that would supplant the geographic mobility of the frontier. “The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle,” he wrote; “in place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science.” Pioneer ideals were to be maintained by American universities through the training of new leaders who would strive “to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.”

Whereas in his 1893 essay he celebrated the pioneers for the spirit of individualism that spurred migration westward, 25 years later Turner castigated “these slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and livestock for their own need, living scattered and apart.” For Turner the national problem was “no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest” but “how to save and wisely use the remaining timber.” At the end of his career, he stressed the vital role that regionalism would play in counteracting the atomization brought about by the frontier experience. Turner hoped that stability would replace mobility as a defining factor in the development of American society and that communities would become stronger as a result. What the world needed now, he argued, was “a highly organized provincial life to serve as a check upon mob psychology on a national scale, and to furnish that variety which is essential to vital growth and originality.” Turner never ceased to treat history as contemporary knowledge, seeking to explore the ways that the nation might rechannel its expansionist impulses into the development of community life.

Turner taught at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, when he accepted an appointment to a distinguished chair of history at Harvard University . At these two institutions he helped build two of the great university history departments of the 20th century and trained many distinguished historians, including Carl Becker , Merle Curti, Herbert Bolton , and Frederick Merk, who became Turner’s successor at Harvard. He was an early leader of the American Historical Association , serving as its president in 1910 and on the editorial board of the association’s American Historical Review from 1910 to 1915. Poor health forced his early retirement from Harvard in 1924. Turner moved to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California , where he remained as senior research associate until his death.

How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start

Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis informed decades of scholarship and culture. Then he realized he was wrong

Colin Woodard

On the evening of   July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history.

It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s gates. They had already sat through three other speeches. Some may have been dozing off as the thin, 31-year-old associate professor from the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison began his remarks.

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Turner told them the force that had forged Americans into one people was the frontier of the Midwest and Far West. In this virgin world, settlers had finally been relieved of the European baggage of feudalism that their ancestors had brought across the Atlantic, freeing them to find their true selves: self-sufficient, pragmatic, egalitarian and civic-minded. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” he told the audience. “In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”

The audience was unmoved.

In their dispatches the following morning, most of the newspaper reporters covering the conference didn’t even mention Turner’s talk. Nor did the official account of the proceedings prepared by the librarian William F. Poole for The Dial , an influential literary journal. Turner’s own father, writing to relatives a few days later, praised Turner’s skills as the family’s guide at the fair, but he said nothing at all about the speech that had brought them there.

Yet in less than a decade, Turner would be the most influential living historian in the United States, and his Frontier Thesis would become the dominant lens through which Americans understood their character, origins and destiny. Soon, Jackson’s theme was prevalent in political speech, in the way high schools taught history, in patriotic paintings—in short, everywhere. Perfectly timed to meet the needs of a country experiencing dramatic and destabilizing change, Turner’s thesis was swiftly embraced by academic and political institutions, just as railroads, manufacturing machines and telegraph systems were rapidly reshaping American life.

By that time, Turner himself had realized that his theory was almost entirely wrong.

American historians had long believed that Providence had chosen their people to spread Anglo-Saxon freedom across the continent. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Turner was introduced to a different argument by his mentor, the classical scholar William Francis Allen. Extrapolating from Darwinism, Allen believed societies evolved like organisms, adapting themselves to the environments they encountered. Scientific laws, not divine will, he advised his mentee, guided the course of nations. After graduating, Turner pursued a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he impressed the history program’s leader, Herbert Baxter Adams, and formed a lifelong friendship with one of his teachers, an ambitious young professor named Woodrow Wilson. The connections were useful: When Allen died in 1889, Adams and Wilson aided Turner in his quest to take Allen’s place as head of Wisconsin’s history department. And on the strength of Turner’s early work, Adams invited him to present a paper at the 1893 meeting of the AHA, to be held in conjunction with the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The resulting essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” offered a vivid evocation of life in the American West. Stripped of “the garments of civilization,” settlers between the 1780s and the 1830s found themselves “in the birch canoe” wearing “the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” Soon, they were “planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick” and even shouting war cries. Faced with Native American resistance—Turner largely overlooked what the ethnic cleansing campaign that created all that “free land” might say about the American character—the settlers looked to the federal government for protection from Native enemies and foreign empires, including during the War of 1812, thus fostering a loyalty to the nation rather than to their half-forgotten nations of origin.

He warned that with the disappearance of the force that had shaped them—in 1890, the head of the Census Bureau concluded there was no longer a frontier line between areas that had been settled by European Americans and those that had not—Americans would no longer be able to flee west for an easy escape from responsibility, failure or oppression. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past,” Turner concluded. “Now … the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

When he left the podium on that sweltering night, he could not have known how fervently the nation would embrace his thesis.

Like so many young scholars, Turner worked hard to bring attention to his thesis. He incorporated it into the graduate seminars he taught, lectured about it across the Midwest and wrote the entry for “Frontier” in the widely read Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia. He arranged to have the thesis reprinted in the journal of the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the AHA’s 1893 annual report. Wilson championed it in his own writings, and the essay was read by hundreds of schoolteachers who found it reprinted in the popular pedagogical journal of the Herbart Society, a group devoted to the scientific study of teaching. Turner’s big break came when the Atlantic Monthly ’s editors asked him to use his novel viewpoint to explain the sudden rise of populists in the rural Midwest, and how they had managed to seize control of the Democratic Party to make their candidate, William Jennings Bryan, its nominee for president. Turner’s 1896 Atlantic Monthly essay , which tied the populists’ agitation to the social pressures allegedly caused by the closing of the frontier—soil depletion, debt, rising land prices—was promptly picked up by newspapers and popular journals across the country.

Meanwhile, Turner’s graduate students became tenured professors and disseminated his ideas to the up-and-coming generation of academics. The thrust of the thesis appeared in political speeches, dime-store western novels and even the new popular medium of film, where it fueled the work of a young director named John Ford who would become the master of the Hollywood western. In 1911, Columbia University’s David Muzzey incorporated it into a textbook—initially titled History of the American People —that would be used by most of the nation’s secondary schools for half a century.

Americans embraced Turner’s argument because it provided a fresh and credible explanation for the nation’s exceptionalism—the notion that the U.S. follows a path soaring above those of other countries—one that relied not on earlier Calvinist notions of being “the elect,” but rather on the scientific (and fashionable) observations of Charles Darwin. In a rapidly diversifying country, the Frontier Thesis denied a special role to the Eastern colonies’ British heritage; we were instead a “composite nation,” birthed in the Mississippi watershed. Turner’s emphasis on mobility, progress and individualism echoed the values of the Gilded Age—when readers devoured Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories—and lent them credibility for the generations to follow.

But as a researcher, Turner himself turned away from the Frontier Thesis in the years after the 1890s. He never wrote it down in book form or even in academic articles. He declined invitations to defend it, and before long he himself lost faith in it.

For one thing, he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier’s environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture, one his family and most of his fellow citizens in Portage, Wisconsin, remained part of, with their commitment to strong village and town governments, taxpayer-financed public schools and the direct democracy of the town meeting. He saw that other parts of the frontier had been colonized by other settlement streams anchored in Scots-Irish Appalachia or in the slave plantations of the Southern lowlands, and he noted that their populations continued to behave completely differently from one another, both politically and culturally, even when they lived in similar physical environments. Somehow settlers moving west from these distinct regional cultures were resisting the Darwinian environmental and cultural forces that had supposedly forged, as Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, put it, “a new political species” of human, the American. Instead, they were stubbornly remaining themselves. “Men are not absolutely dictated to by climate, geography, soils or economic interests,” Turner wrote in 1922. “The influence of the stock from which they sprang, the inherited ideals, the spiritual factors, often triumph over the material interests.”

Turner spent the last decades of his life working on what he intended to be his magnum opus, a book not about American unity but rather about the abiding differences between its regions, or “sections,” as he called them. “In respect to problems of common action, we are like what a United States of Europe would be,” he wrote in 1922, at the age of 60. For example, the Scots-Irish and German small farmers and herders who settled the uplands of the southeastern states had long clashed with nearby English enslavers over education spending, tax policy and political representation. Turner saw the whole history of the country as a wrestling match between these smaller quasi-nations, albeit a largely peaceful one guided by rules, laws and shared American ideals: “When we think of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as steps in the marking off of spheres of influence and the assignment of mandates [between nations] … we see a resemblance to what has gone on in the Old World,” Turner explained. He hoped shared ideals—and federal institutions—would prove cohesive for a nation suddenly coming of age, its frontier closed, its people having to steward their lands rather than striking out for someplace new.

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Colin Woodard | | READ MORE

Colin Woodard is a journalist and historian, and the author of six books including Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood . He lives in Maine.

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• Frontier Thesis

1920 Turner's Frontier Thesis

Source:(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920, 1947; reprinted by Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1962), pp. 257-262.

The Turner's Frontier Thesis is a seminal work of American history, written by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. In his thesis, Turner argued that the existence of a continuously expanding frontier in the American West was a defining characteristic of American democracy and society. Turner argued that the frontier was not just a physical place, but a symbol of the American spirit of individualism, democracy, and self-reliance. He believed that the frontier had shaped American democracy by creating a unique American character that was egalitarian, independent, and democratic. Turner's thesis also suggested that the closing of the frontier in 1890 marked the end of a crucial period in American history. He argued that the end of the frontier would lead to the decline of the American character and democracy, and that America needed to find new ways to maintain its democratic ideals in the absence of the frontier. The Frontier Thesis was highly influential in shaping American history and historiography. It has been debated, discussed, and analyzed by historians and scholars for over a century, and its impact can still be seen in American culture and politics today.

Frederick Jackson Turner

The Frontier in American History

(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920, 1947; reprinted by Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1962), pp. 257-262.

The last chapter in the development of Western democracy is the one that deals with its conquest over the vast spaces of the new West. At each new stage of Western development, the people have had to grapple with larger areas, with bigger combinations. The little colony of Massachusetts veterans that settled at Marietta received a land grant as large as the State of Rhode Island. The band of Connecticut pioneers that followed Moses Cleveland to the Connecticut Reserve occupied a region as large as the parent State. The area which settlers of New England stock occupied on the prairies of northern Illinois surpassed the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Men who had become accustomed to the narrow valleys and little towns of the East found themselves out on the boundless spaces of the West dealing with units of such magnitude as dwarfed their former Experiences. The Great Lakes, the Prairies, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi and the Missouri, furnished new standards of measurement for the achievement of this industrial democracy. Individualism began to give way to cooperation and to governmental activity.

Even in the earlier days of the democratic conquest of the wilderness, demands had been made upon the government for support in internal improvements, but this new West showed a growing tendency to call to its assistance the powerful arm of national authority. In the period since the Civil War, the vast public domain has been donated to the individual farmer, to States for education, to railroads for the construction of transportation lines. Moreover, with the advent of democracy in the last fifteen years upon the Great Plains, new physical conditions have presented themselves which have accelerated the social tendency of Western democracy.

The pioneer farmer of the days of Lincoln could place his family on a flatboat, strike into the wilderness, cut out his clearing, and with little or no capital go on to the achievement of industrial independence. Even the homesteader on the Western prairies found it possible to work out a similar independent destiny, although the factor of transportation made a serious and increasing impediment to the free working-out of his individual career. But when the arid lands and the mineral resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation works must be constructed, cooperative activity was demanded in the utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was required. In a word, the physiographic province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier should be social rather than individual.

Magnitude of social achievement is the watchword of the democracy since the Civil War. From petty towns built in the marshes, cities arose whose greatness and industrial power are the wonder of our time. The conditions were ideal for the production of captains of industry. The old democratic admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to the rights of competitive individual development, together with the stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as enabled the development of the large corporate industries which in our own decade have marked the West.

Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief phases of the development of Western democracy in the different areas which it has conquered. There has been a steady development of the industrial ideal, and a steady increase of the social tendency, in this later movement of Western democracy. While the individualism of the frontier, so prominent in the earliest days of the Western advance, has been preserved as an ideal, more and more these individuals struggling each with the other, dealing with vaster and vaster areas, with larger and larger problems, have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the strongest.

This is the explanation of the rise of those preeminent captains of industry whose genius has concentrated capital to control the fundamental resources of the nation. If now in the way of recapitulation, we try to pick out from the influences that have gone to the making of Western democracy the factors which constitute the net result of this movement, we shall have to mention at least the following:--

Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free land has continually lain on the western border of the settled area of the United States. Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East, whenever capital tended to press upon labor or political restraints to impede the freedom of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the free conditions of the frontier. These free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. Men would not accept inferior wages and a permanent position of social subordination when this promised land of freedom and equality was theirs for the taking. Who would rest content under oppressive legislative conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land wherein to become a co-worker in the building of free cities and free States on the lines of his own ideal?

In a word, then, free lands meant free opportunities. Their existence has differentiated the American democracy from the democracies which have preceded it, because ever, as democracy in the East took the form of highly specialized and complicated industrial society, in the West it kept in touch with primitive conditions, and by action and reaction these two forces have shaped our history.

In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial resources have existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of democracy increasing spaciousness of design and power of execution. Western democracy is contrasted with the democracy of all other times in the largeness of the tasks to which it has set its hand, and in the vast achievements which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of politics. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this training upon democracy. Never before in the history o the world has democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in the gross with such success, with such largeness of design, and such grasp upon the means of execution.

In short, democracy has learned in the West of the United States how to deal with the problems of magnitude. The old historic democracies were but little states with primitive economic conditions.... Western democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of man's struggle for a higher type of society. The Western wilds, from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, constituted the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old World, bound by the chains of social class, as old as custom and as inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life and greater well-being among the bounties of nature, into the midst of resources that demanded manly exertion, and that gave in return the chance for indefinite ascent in the scale of social advance.

"To each she offered gifts after his will".

Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men. It was unique, and the thing is so near us, so much a part of our lives, that we do not even yet comprehend its full significance. The existence of this land of opportunity has made America the goal of idealists from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. With all the materialism of the pioneer movements, this idealistic conception of the vacant lands as an opportunity for a new order of things is unmistakably present....

Cite Article : www.britsihcolumbiahistory.ca.com/sections/documents

Reference: Article by (Staff Historian), 2023

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2 The Making of a National Identity: The Frontier Thesis

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Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis became a significant force in shaping the national identity of the U.S. The ideologies incorporated into Turner's frontier thesis were not only meant to provide a historical interpretation of how the U.S. came into being but also satisfied the national need for a “usable past.” This frontier thesis was able to transmit a series of symbols that became imbedded in the nation's self‐perception and self‐understanding: Virgin land, wilderness, land and democracy, Manifest Destiny, chosen race. Race must be understood as an important piece of this developing national identity because the idea of “purity” of race was used as a rationalization to colonize, exclude, devalue, and even exterminate the native borderlands people.

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The Turner thesis concerning the role of the frontier in American history

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SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Was Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis Myth or Reality?

Two scholars debate this question.

Written by: (Claim A) Andrew Fisher, William & Mary; (Claim B) Bradley J. Birzer, Hillsdale College

Suggested sequencing.

• Use this Point-Counterpoint with the  Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893  Primary Source to give students more background on individualism and western expansion.

Issue on the Table

Was Turner’s thesis a myth about the individualism of the American character and the influence of the West or was it essentially correct in explaining how the West and the advancing frontier contributed to the shaping of individualism in the American character?

Instructions

Read the two arguments in response to the question, paying close attention to the supporting evidence and reasoning used for each. Then, complete the comparison questions that follow. Note that the arguments in this essay are not the personal views of the scholars but are illustrative of larger historical debates.

Every nation has a creation myth, a simple yet satisfying story that inspires pride in its people. The United States is no exception, but our creation myth is all about exceptionalism. In his famous essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner claimed that the process of westward expansion had transformed our European ancestors into a new breed of people endowed with distinctively American values and virtues. In particular, the frontier experience had supposedly fostered democracy and individualism, underpinned by the abundance of “free land” out West. “So long as free land exists,” Turner wrote, “the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power.” It was a compelling articulation of the old Jeffersonian Dream. Like Jefferson’s vision, however, Turner’s thesis excluded much of the nation’s population and ignored certain historical realities concerning American society.

Very much a man of his times, Turner filtered his interpretation of history through the lens of racial nationalism. The people who counted in his thesis, literally and figuratively, were those with European ancestry—and especially those of Anglo-Saxon origins. His definition of the frontier, following that of the U.S. Census, was wherever population density fell below two people per square mile. That effectively meant “where white people were scarce,” in the words of historian Richard White; or, as Patricia Limerick puts it, “where white people got scared because they were scarce.” American Indians only mattered to Turner as symbols of the “savagery” that white pioneers had to beat back along the advancing frontier line. Most of the “free land” they acquired in the process came from the continent’s vast indigenous estate, which, by 1890, had been reduced to scattered reservations rapidly being eroded by the Dawes Act. Likewise, Mexican Americans in the Southwest saw their land base and economic status whittled away after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that nominally made them citizens of the United States. Chinese immigrants, defined as perpetual aliens under federal law, could not obtain free land through the Homestead Act. For all these groups, Euro-American expansion and opportunity meant the contraction or denial of their own ability to achieve individual advancement and communal stability.

Turner also exaggerated the degree of social mobility open to white contemporaries, not to mention their level of commitment to an ideology of rugged individualism. Although plenty of Euro-Americans used the homestead laws to get their piece of free land, they often struggled to make that land pay and to keep it in the family. During the late nineteenth century, the commoditization and industrialization of American agriculture caught southern and western farmers in a crushing cost-price squeeze that left many wrecked by debt. To combat this situation, they turned to cooperative associations such as the Grange and the National Farmers’ Alliance, which blossomed into the Populist Party at the very moment Turner was writing about the frontier as the engine of American democracy. Perhaps it was, but not in the sense he understood. Populists railed against the excess of individualism that bred corruption and inequality in Gilded Age America. Even cowboys, a pillar of the frontier myth, occasionally tried to organize unions to improve their wages and working conditions. Those seeking a small stake of their own—what Turner called a “competency”— in the form of their own land or herds sometimes ran afoul of concentrated capital, as during the Johnson County War of 1892. The big cattlemen of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association had no intention of sharing the range with pesky sodbusters and former cowboys they accused of rustling. Their brand of individualism had no place for small producers who might become competitors.

Turner took such troubles as a sign that his prediction had come true. With the closing of the frontier, he said, the United States would begin to see greater class conflict in the form of strikes and radical politics. There was lots of free land left in 1890, though; in fact, approximately 1 million people filed homestead claims between 1901 and 1913, compared with 1.4 million between 1862 and 1900. That did not prevent the country from experiencing serious clashes between organized labor and the corporations that had come to dominate many industries. Out west, socialistic unions such as the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World challenged not only the control that companies had over their employees but also their influence in the press and politics. For them, Turner’s dictum that “economic power secures political power” would have held a more sinister meaning. It was the rise of the modern corporation, not the supposed fading of the frontier, that narrowed the meanings of individualism and opportunity as Americans had previously understood them.

Young historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his academic paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago on July 12, 1893. He was the final presenter of that hot and humid day, but his essay ranks among the most influential arguments ever made regarding American history.

Turner was trained at the University of Wisconsin (his home state) and Johns Hopkins University, then the center of Germanic-type graduate studies—that is, it was scientific and objectivist rather than idealist or liberal. Turner rebelled against that purely scientific approach, but not by much. In 1890, the U.S. Census revealed that the frontier (defined as fewer than two people per square mile) was closed. There was no longer an unbroken frontier line in the United States, although frontier conditions lasted in certain parts of the American West until 1920. Turner lamented this, believing the most important phase of American history was over.

No one publicly commented on the essay at the time, but the American Historical Association reprinted it in its annual report the following year, and within a decade, it became known as the “Turner Thesis.”

What is most prominent in the Turner Thesis is the proposition that the United States is unique in its heritage; it is not a European clone, but a vital mixture of European and American Indian. Or, as he put it, the American character emerged through an intermixing of “savagery and civilization.” Turner attributed the American character to the expansion to the West, where, he said, American settlers set up farms to tame the frontier. “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” As people moved west in a “perennial rebirth,” they extended the American frontier, the boundary “between savagery and civilization.”

The frontier shaped the American character because the settlers who went there had to conquer a land difficult for farming and devoid of any of the comforts of life in urban parts of the East: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.”

Politically and socially, according to Turner, the American character—including traits that prioritized equality, individualism, and democracy—was shaped by moving west and settling the frontier. “The tendency,” Turner wrote, “is anti-social. [The frontier] produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control.” Those hardy pioneers on the frontier spread the ideas and practice of democracy as well as modern civilization. By conquering the wilderness, Turner stressed, they learned that resources and opportunity were seemingly boundless, meant to bring the ruggedness out of each individual. The farther west the process took them, the less European the Americans as a whole became. Turner saw the frontier as the  progenitor  of the American practical and innovative character: “That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom – these are trains of the frontier.”

Turner’s thesis, to be sure, viewed American Indians as uncivilized. In his vision, they cannot compete with European technology, and they fall by the wayside, serving as little more than a catalyst for the expansion of white Americans. This near-absence of Indians from Turner’s argument gave rise to a number of critiques of his thesis, most prominently from the New Western Historians beginning in the 1980s. These more recent historians sought to correct Turner’s “triumphal” myth of the American West by examining it as a region rather than as a process. For Turner, the American West is a progressive process, not a static place. There were many Wests, as the process of conquering the land, changing the European into the American, happened over and over again. What would happen to the American character, Turner wondered, now that its ability to expand and conquer was over?

Historical Reasoning Questions

Use  Handout A: Point-Counterpoint Graphic Organizer  to answer historical reasoning questions about this point-counterpoint.

Primary Sources (Claim A)

Cooper, James Fenimore.  Last of the Mohicans (A Leatherstocking Tale) . New York: Penguin, 1986.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”  http://sunnycv.com/steve/text/civ/turner.html

Primary Sources (Claim B)

Suggested resources (claim a).

Cronon, William, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds.  Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Faragher, John Mack.  Women and Men on the Overland Trail . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Grossman, Richard R, ed.  The Frontier in American Culture: Essays by Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson.  The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds.  Trails: Toward a New Western History . Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

Milner II, Clyde A.  A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West . New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Nugent, Walter.  Into the West: The Story of Its People . New York: Knopf, 1991.

Slotkin, Richard.  The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 . Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

Suggested Resources (Claim B)

Billington, Ray Allen, and Martin Ridge.  Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

Etulain, Richard, ed.  Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional?  New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.

Mondi. Megan. “’Connected and Unified?’: A More Critical Look at Frederick Jackson Turner’s America.”  Constructing the Past , 7 no. 1:Article 7.  http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/constructing/vol7/iss1/7

Nelson, Robert. “Public Lands and the Frontier Thesis.”  Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States , Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond, 2014.  http://dsl.richmond.edu/fartherafield/public-lands-and-the-frontier-thesis/

More from this Category

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Land, cows, and bullets: an untold history of cattle ranching during the armed conflict in colombia, 1980–2010.

• International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Tropical Forages Program, Cali, Colombia

This article reflects on the history of cattle ranching in Colombia and how it was impacted by the armed conflict in the country and its regions, and the transformation amongst decades of forms of violence and actors involved in this scenario. To conduct the analysis, a review of academic literature on the relationship between cattle ranching and armed conflict in Colombia and some African countries was carried out. Subsequently, a database of 206 violent events related to cattle ranching was constructed, covering three decades of armed conflict (1980–2010), based on primary sources from reports, police evidence, and testimonies of two previous databases. This database contributed to the analysis of the impact of violence on the cattle ranching industry. Thus, this article contributes to the understanding of the history of cattle ranching in Colombia and to the complex transitional process in Colombia today. It demonstrates that productivity and efficiency have not always been the prevailing principles in the history of the cattle industry, but that land tenure and accumulation have operated as a way of securing power by the agrarian and political elites of the country. Such approaches are crucial for comprehending the historical connection between conflict and cattle ranching, especially if the aim for this sector is to adapt to a logic of productivity and innovation in the contemporary world. Also, the findings show that further research on these topics, i.e., related to current environmental and social problems such as climate change, food security, and new social and geopolitical challenges, is needed.

1 Introduction

Historically, it has been assumed that the Colombian armed conflict has maintained a close relationship with cattle ranching, but academic readings on this relationship are scarce. Despite the regional dynamics of the conflict, displacement, and land use in certain areas of the country constituting tangible evidence linking large-scale cattle production to the war in Colombia, the historical understanding of this phenomenon is just beginning to take shape ( Cotte-Poveda and Duarte-Rojas, 2014 ; Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017 ; Ponce de León-Calero, 2019 ; Romero-Rodríguez, 2019 ). The significant political power of regional cattle elites, imperfect demobilization and disarmament processes of armed groups, and a systematic and violent silencing of those who amplify these connections also hinder the understanding and theorization of this relationship ( Romero, 2000 ; Reyes, 2009 ; Salinas and Zarama, 2012 ; Cotte-Poveda and Duarte-Rojas, 2014 ; Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017 ; Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2018 ; Ponce de León-Calero, 2019 ).

In the last decade, an emerging field of interpretation has been established in Colombia, mostly dedicated to conducting case studies and studying certain agricultural elites (including cattle ranching) and their agency in the Colombian war ( González and López, 2007 ; Cotte-Poveda and Duarte-Rojas, 2014 ; Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017 ; Ponce de León-Calero, 2019 ; Romero-Rodríguez, 2019 ). These studies point out the importance of revealing the role of cattle ranchers as agents immersed in a war, often victims of the illegal capture of resources, land dispossession, and extractive logics in a conflict without winners. Additionally, economically oriented research has gained strength and methodological solidity, aiming to understand the social and productive importance of cattle ranching, proposing a different perspective from those analyses that focus on it as a driver of dispossession and barbarism ( Arias et al., 2014 ; Arora et al., 2017 ; Charry et al., 2018 ; Burkart et al., 2021 ; Enciso et al., 2021a , b ; Pirela Ríos et al., 2022 ).

The conflicts arising from the unequal distribution of cultivable land (and unclaimed lands) are not just due to the existence of traditional agricultural (and political) elites who maintained and expanded their regional power since colonial times but also have a close relationship with modernization projects in the cattle industry in the country that resonated with producers and traders. Also, accumulating land has worked as a form of maintaining economic and political power by Colombian elites ( Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2018 ). This clearly demonstrates that when writing the history of cattle ranching in Colombia, one is also writing the history of conflict, and vice versa ( Ocampo, 2007 ; Van Ausdal, 2009 , 2012 ). Despite this close dual relationship, studies of cattle ranching in its productive dimension have paid little attention to how the war and its intricacies have interfered with the development and consolidation of the industry.

After the signing of the two most recent peace agreements in Colombia [the agreement for the demobilization of paramilitary groups signed in 2002 and the Final Agreement for the termination of the conflict and the construction of a stable and lasting peace between the FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the Colombian government in 2016], new social, political, analytical, and research possibilities have arisen, allowing for the reconstruction of the memory of this conflict. This has been enriched with the testimonies of victims, subjects, and agents of war in the first person, enabling the creation of more complex narratives and a deeper understanding of the twists and legacies of a long confrontation.

In this sense, this article seeks to investigate how the dynamics of the war system ( Richani, 2002 ), in which Colombia has lived for the last 60 years, have profoundly altered the productivity logic of cattle ranching. This can be due to violence affecting production and markets or because cattle ranching in agricultural colonization has served other purposes (securing land possession, enhancing marginal lands) that do not necessarily focus on production efficiency. To achieve this objective, a database was created based on primary sources of violent events related to cattle ranching during three decades of the armed conflict (1980–2010). Additionally, an academic literature review on the relationship between cattle ranching and armed conflict in Colombia and in some African countries, where such studies have also been conducted, was performed.

The article is divided into five sections. In the first section, the methodology used for its development and the reviewed materials are briefly described. The next section provides a synthetic historical and conceptual framework on the relationship between armed conflict and cattle ranching in the country. Subsequently, the results are presented based on the analysis of documentary sources, providing evidence of the main violent events and social actors related to cattle ranching within the context of the Colombian war. The fourth section proposes a discussion of these results, considering the literature review for both the national context and the African scenario, as well as the implications of the impact of armed conflict on cattle ranching in terms of food security. Finally, some brief conclusions are presented.

2 Materials and methods

A review of academic literature on the cattle ranching-conflict relationship in Colombia during the second half of the twentieth century was conducted with the aim of constructing a historical account of this connection, while also highlighting existing gaps. Furthermore, a database was compiled consisting of information gathered from primary sources regarding violent events—understanding an event as an incident that occurred at a specific location and date—that occurred within the framework of the Colombian armed conflict between 1980 and 2010 and were related to cattle ranching. The research began with the examination of digitized archives of the El Tiempo newspaper, the most widely circulated newspaper in Colombia's history. However, it was found that this archive is considerably incomplete, as only a few copies of the newspaper for each month were available for the study period, and in many instances, the digitalization was inadequate. Therefore, new sources were sought: the databases of Noche y Niebla , a magazine dedicated to reconstructing violence in Colombia, which makes up the Red Nacional de Bancos de Datos de Derechos Humanos y Violencia Pol í tica (National Network of Human Rights and Political Violence Databases, Red Bandatos ), and reports of violent events compiled by the Bolet í n de Justicia y Paz (Bulletin of Justice and Peace), conducted by the Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz (Inter-Ecclesial Commission for Justice and Peace), between 1988 and 1996. These sources collect direct information from reports, police reports, and testimonies.

To link the violent events to cattle ranching, all war-related incidents under the tags “ cattle ,” “ cattle farmer ,” “ cattle ranching ,” “ livestock ,” and “ cows ” were examined. The analyzed time range is from January 1, 1980, to December 31, 2010. The database recorded the date of each event, the location (municipality and department), and a brief description that accounts for the perpetrator of the violent act, the victim, and the details of the event. In total, 206 entries were recorded, with 99 coming from Red Bandatos and 107 from the Bolet í n de Justicia y Paz . Then, the events were classified in two different periods: (1) from 1980 to 1995, where the primary perpetrators of violent actions were guerrilla groups (113 events in this stage); and (2) from 1996 to 2010, when paramilitary groups gained more strength and became significant actors in the Colombian armed conflict (93 events in this stage). The relevant categories for the study were: data of the violent event, armed actor/perpetrator, department of Colombia where the event occurred and type of violent event related to cattle ranching (the classification of the events in this last category will be explained in the Results section). All data was analyzed applying comparative qualitative analysis and content analysis.

Finally, a literature review was conducted, which, on the one hand, provides key empirical data to demonstrate the cattle ranching-conflict relationship and, on the other hand, analysis of studies on this same relationship in some African countries. The decision to analyze similar dynamics on that continent is driven by the need to find new analytical tools to address some of the gaps in research on armed conflict in Colombia. This is due to the understanding that a significant number of African countries, especially in the east (e.g., Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Sudan) and some in the west (e.g., Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Senegal), have experienced protracted armed conflicts in remote border areas (both national and regional, but also agricultural). These conflicts have significantly affected livestock ranching and share socio-economic factors similar to the Colombian case, such as land tenure inequalities, land grabbing, inadequate institutional presence, and population displacement.

3 Historical and conceptual framework: an approach to the history of cattle ranching and armed conflict in Colombia

As an economic and cultural activity, cattle ranching and its role in historical processes in Colombia are still in need of more precise analysis. This applies especially to the second half of the twentieth century and contemporary social dynamics, where the historical context of this industry is only beginning to be understood. Currently, there is a predominance of present-oriented analysis of where and how meat and milk are produced in Colombia and what could change within this process ( Gumucio et al., 2015 ; Arora et al., 2017 ; Charry et al., 2018 ; Triana Ángel and Burkart, 2019 ; Burkart et al., 2021 ; Enciso et al., 2021a , b ; Pirela Ríos et al., 2022 ), without fully grasping the complexity of cattle ranching practices and their agents over time. These studies highlight the vital economic role of cattle in various regions and producer communities in the country and its potential as a driver of progress and development. The association between cattle and progress, the expansion of the agricultural frontier, and the growth of meat and milk markets is, historically, an integral part of the narrative, and it is precisely in the genesis of this narrative where we can build bridges and methodologies to help us understand current circumstances.

Recent readings on cattle ranching in Colombia have two main aspects. Firstly, there are studies that focus on the economic analysis of its benefits, detailed examination of how to transform and increase its sustainability, especially on a small scale, contributing to an improvement in the livelihoods of rural families ( Burkart et al., 2021 ; Enciso et al., 2021a , b ; Pirela Ríos et al., 2022 ). Secondly, other contributions focus on the scientific study of various production systems, their challenges, opportunities, and their relationship with the environment ( Arora et al., 2017 ; Charry et al., 2018 ). Furthermore, there are social research efforts that conceptualize cattle production as both an economic and cultural activity, emphasizing the need to understand its operation from the perspective of various social actors ( Toruño Morales, 2012 ; Gumucio et al., 2015 ; Vázquez-García, 2015 ; Arora et al., 2017 ; Triana Ángel and Burkart, 2019 ). While these interpretations are essential for understanding the cattle activity in the country, they tend to be lacking in historical context, overlooking fundamental issues like the emergence of agricultural elites, their relationship with the birth and consolidation of armed actors, land disputes in Colombia, forced displacement, and other dynamics that have marked rural populations for at least the last 50 years.

The war in Colombia plays a central role in various aspects, becoming an unavoidable narrative when it comes to understanding the modern history of the country, something that recent cattle ranching studies have often neglected. While there is a growing body of literature on the relationship between cattle ranching and conflict (mostly focused on the history of the conflict and its actors), there is limited literature about the history of cattle ranching itself, particularly within the local context. Academic interpretations that shed light on the role of extensive cattle ranching in the internal armed conflict reveal what has intentionally been obscured, such as the involvement of certain regional agricultural elites in perpetuating the conflict. This is in line with historiographical debates on land tenure and the agrarian problem in Colombia ( LeGrand, 1989 ; Villarraga, 2007 ; Reyes, 2009 ; Thomson, 2011 ; Salinas and Zarama, 2012 ; Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017 ; Peña et al., 2017 ; Faguet et al., 2020 ). The unequal distribution of cultivable land, inherited from the colonial experience and the nineteenth century expansion of the agrarian frontier ( Faguet et al., 2020 ) is a specter that has hindered the fair development of rural areas and populations. As Faguet et al. (2020) show, the landholding elites captured land across the twentieth century in diverse rural areas of the country to secure their economic and political power. In areas where latifundia was low or absent, land distribution improved the income and wealth of poor peasants, by transferring productive assets to them and increased investment in public services. In contrast, where there was a high concentration of land, poverty increased. This has also revealed how the genesis of bipartite and ideological conflicts has always revolved (although not exclusively) around land and, therefore, is closely related to agricultural activities such as cattle ranching ( Acemoglu et al., 2009 ). Historical perspectives on this issue have been based on statistical data about land ownership and its uses and have dissected the structure and operation of various armed groups, finding tangible links between ideological factions and agricultural elites ( Villarraga, 2007 ; Acemoglu et al., 2009 ; Cotte-Poveda and Duarte-Rojas, 2014 ; Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017 ; Faguet et al., 2020 ).

Significant work was done on the historical memory of the victims and agents of the war, contributing to unraveling the participation of cattle ranching guild elites in the conflict and the experiences that residents of those regions endured during territorial clashes between various factions (paramilitaries, state forces, and guerrillas; Cotte-Poveda and Duarte-Rojas, 2014 ; Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017 ; Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2018 ; Ponce de León-Calero, 2019 ). However, the topic still requires more in-depth research. Much is known about the role of large-scale cattle ranching in the continuity of the conflict and dispossession practices, but less is known about the victimization processes of small cattle ranchers, who also had to navigate the complexities of the war ( Cotte-Poveda and Duarte-Rojas, 2014 ; Ponce de León-Calero, 2019 ; Romero-Rodríguez, 2019 ). Additionally, very little is known about the daily interactions between armed actors and cattle ranchers in various regions amid the web of conflict. Furthermore, it is mostly unknown how land ownership and the purchasing power of large producers served not only to finance the war but also to survive it ( Romero, 2000 ; Barón, 2016 ; Ponce de León-Calero, 2019 ).

A few historical readings on cattle ranching in Colombia between 1850 and 1950 aim to recognize and expand the multiple meanings and narratives surrounding its role in the expansion of agricultural frontiers, as the core of economic development projects and as a protagonist in transnational discourses about the tropics, which determined the nature of the activity as it is known today. For instance, Van Ausdal (2012) explains how the British merchants and meat exporters, driven by their fragmented diplomatic relations with Argentina, sowed the supposed (and impossible) promise of a solid, technified, and prosperous cattle industry in Colombia. European conceptions of tropics, which were factually foreign to them, led them to invest considerable sums of money in meat processing companies that ultimately failed. They also encouraged the adoption of improved pastures that time would show were not suitable for Colombian soils, and they persistently sought to transform traditional cattle ranching methods under the promise of greater economic returns and, consequently, a path to unattainable progress. This narrative intersects the economic history of cattle production with the natural history of early twentieth-century scientific discourses that attempted to turn the Colombian plains, teeming with native pastures, into petri dishes of artificial pastures, a transition that local producers quickly abandoned. At the height of the beef industry in Argentina and Uruguay with a focus on exportation (from the 1920's onwards), practices such as introducing European cattle breeds, technological innovations, and the intention to tap into new markets collided head-on with an almost non-existent government presence in rural areas, a deficient infrastructure, and limited impact of innovative proposals concerning pastures and rotation systems, which did not resonate much with local producers in Colombia ( Ocampo, 2007 ; Van Ausdal, 2009 , 2012 ). Far from becoming another cattle powerhouse in Latin America, Colombia remained partially relegated to continuing its more traditional and territorially extensive practices. This was because most logistical processes (not just breeding, fattening, and slaughter) could not be effectively carried out in a country dominated by three mountain ranges, with poor transportation routes and limited educational initiatives among its producers.

The associative ideas between cattle ranching and progress, however, left their mark on local producers. Even though most of them did not continue with the modernization processes on their farms, they did understand that meat (and milk) were valuable and in high demand. Consequently, the acquisition of land became urgent and central ( Van Ausdal, 2009 , 2020 ). By paying attention to how international traders early on introduced concepts of productivity, profits, and the expansion of cattle markets in Colombia, Van Ausdal (2012) introduces an overlooked element in the historical understanding of land disputes: the importance of scientific and economic knowledge (and the circulation of these discourses) in making cattle ranching a profitable and desirable activity for many rural producers, both small and large.

4 Results from the database on violent incidents, cattle ranching, and armed conflict (1980–2010)

The violent incidents related to cattle activities within the armed conflict during the studied period can be classified into the following categories:

• Ranchers (understood as individuals engaged in cattle ranching or commercial trade) killed by members of illegal armed groups (guerrillas, paramilitaries, or unidentified groups): 65 out of 206 recorded violent incidents, accounting for 32% of all cases.

• Cattle theft, dispossession, and harm to livestock: 29 incidents, 14% of the total.

• Ranchers kidnapped by an armed group, usually a guerrilla group, and subsequent rescue operations by the security forces: 12 incidents, 6%.

• Ranchers subjected to extortion and threats by an armed group: 14 incidents, 7%.

• Violent attacks by illegal armed groups against the Cattle Bank or commercial activities related to cattle: four incidents, 2%.

• Glyphosate fumigation affecting cattle and their livelihood: two incidents, 1%.

• Retaliations and alliances between ranchers, illegal armed groups, and security forces: two incidents, 1%.

It is important to mention that some victimizing incidents are mixed, meaning that more than one of the aforementioned events occurred simultaneously. The most common combinations were killings and kidnapping (12% of the incidents), killings and livestock theft (9%), and killings and extortion (7%). This means that if we add these three to the initial percentage of killings, we find that this victimizing event was the primary impact on cattle ranchers in the context of the conflict, accounting for a total of 60% of the victimizing incidents recorded in the consulted sources. Also, cattle theft and harm to livestock appears in the mix of related events with 33% of incidents, which is a significant amount of incidents, evidencing that such events are crucial for the financing of war activities by the illegal armed groups.

Regarding the characterization by the armed perpetrator, 50% of the incidents were caused by a guerrilla group (FARC-EP, ELN, EPL), 17% corresponded to paramilitary groups, and 11% to the Colombian armed forces (Army or National Police). In 19% of the cases, the armed actor was never identified. In four cases (2%), an alliance between paramilitaries and the Colombian armed forces is documented, and in one case, the harm occurred in the context of a confrontation between FARC-EP guerrillas and the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, paramilitaries). The high percentage (19%) of unidentified armed groups is striking, indicating both underreporting in these statistics and the need for further investigative efforts to contribute to the truth, the clarification of events, justice and reparations for the victims in the transitional scenario that is currently in operation within the country framed by the signing of the Peace Agreement with the FARC-EP in 2016. Tables 1 – 3 provide an overview on the violent events and perpetrator groups for the study period.

Table 1 . Violent events by stage of the armed conflict.

Table 2 . Violent events by perpetrator group.

Table 3 . Types of violent events.

It is also noteworthy that the majority of the reported violent actions took place in traditional cattle ranching regions of Colombia, particularly in the departments of Antioquia (18%) and Meta (13%), as well as the plains of the Caribbean region, mainly in Cesar (12%), Córdoba (9%), and Sucre (7%).

When analyzing the temporal evolution of violent events, two distinct stages related to the dynamics of the Colombian armed conflict in the studied period can be identified: (i) from 1980 to 1995, during which the primary perpetrators of actions against cattle ranching were guerrilla groups (113 recorded incidents during this stage); and (ii) from 1996 to 2010, when paramilitary groups gained more strength and became significant actors in the Colombian armed conflict, conducting actions against the rural, indigenous, or afro-descendant populations, as well as cattle ranchers (93 incidents recorded during this stage). Figures 1 , 2 show the geographical distribution of violent incidents during the two different stages of violence.

Figure 1 . Share of violent events related to cattle by department—Stage 1, 1980–1995.

Figure 2 . Share of violent events related to cattle by department—Stage 2, 1996–2010.

In the first stage (1980–1995), the following characteristics can be found in the violent incidents (see Table 4 ):

• Systematic killings of cattle ranchers by guerrilla groups (death occurred in 82% of the incidents recorded in this stage).

• A significant number of kidnappings of cattle ranchers by the guerrillas (27% of incidents). The main motivation for the killings or kidnappings is the collection of extortions (known in Colombia as “ vacunas ”) by the guerrillas or reprisals for non-payment of these (17% of incidents).

• The political motive is also present in the killing of cattle ranchers when, in addition to their economic activity, they have a public political role (mayors or councilors) or represent cattle ranching associations or groups (17 incidents, which represent 15% of the recorded killings in this stage).

• A greater presence of guerrillas as the identified victimizing actor (59% responsibility for the events), compared to paramilitary actions (6% of cases). Again, the percentage of unidentified perpetrator is high (32% of events without clear/identified armed group; see Table 5 ).

Table 4 . Types of violent events in Stage 1, 1980–1995.

Table 5 . Violent events by perpetrator group in Stage 1, 1980–1995.

Numerous battles between the Colombian armed forces and guerrilla groups, occurring during rescue operations of kidnapped cattle ranchers or attempts to prevent extortion collections.

On the other hand, the second stage, starting from the late 1990's (1996–2010), which corresponds to the rise of paramilitary groups and the intensification of the armed conflict across the country, has the following characteristics concerning the violent events related to cattle ranching (see Table 6 ):

• The killings of cattle ranchers by guerrillas continues, but it is found that paramilitaries also kill cattle ranchers when they refuse to collaborate or contribute financially (39% of the incidents in this stage, with an increased involvement of paramilitaries compared to the previous period (in 31% of the incidents paramilitaries were identified as victimizing actors, compared to 39% for guerillas; see Table 7 ).

• Systematic cattle theft, demonstrating that (a) cattle became a spoil of war resulting from armed actions, displacements, and settlements, and (b) cattle are a war resource because their possession equals a source of funding and can provide food and provisions for troops and combatants (64% of the incidents involve cattle theft).

• The rural population, caught in the crossfire between guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the Army, is stripped of their minimal subsistence assets (plots, cattle, and goods) and accused by different sides of assisting their opponents (12% of the incidents in this stage involve armed confrontations among different groups that victimize these populations). This is related to the violent persecution of rural programs and associations that had community cattle projects, always under the pretext that these organizations were guerrilla-affiliated (new incidents that were not recorded in the previous stage).

• Impact on rural cattle projects due to glyphosate fumigation in the government's fight against illicit crops.

Table 6 . Types of violent events in Stage 2, 1996–2010.

Table 7 . Violent events by perpetrator group in Stage 2, 1996–2010.

5 Discussion

5.1 cows and war: a partially told story.

The concept of a war system , coined by Richani (2002) , fully applies to the Colombian case. It is understood as a relational set of actors and circumstances around the dynamics of war that interact in the conflict through various tensions, whether through confrontation or affiliation, perpetuating and continuing the experience of armed conflict at a national level, integrating the actors involved in it (the state, guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug trafficking). This system is characterized by the failure of prevailing political institutions, channels, and mechanisms to mediate, arbitrate, or resolve conflicts among antagonistic groups, who mutually benefit from the continuity of the war.

It is within the context of this war system that cattle ranching has developed in Colombia. However, when attempting to provide an in-depth analysis of the relationships between armed organizations and relevant actors in Colombian cattle ranching, it becomes apparent that very little is known on the subject. What is known points to a causal relationship between paramilitary violence and regional agricultural elites in terms of financing and support for anti-communist ideological causes ( Acemoglu et al., 2009 ; Ronderos, 2014 ). Despite recent literature identifying economic crimes (extortion and substantial payments for protection or not targeting the lives of cattle ranching entrepreneurs) as one of the primary sources of funding (in addition to drug trafficking) for guerrilla and paramilitary groups like the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) in the 1990's, the nature of these exchanges, the level of coercion used, and the specific agency of certain cattle ranching elites have not been extensively explored, differentiating them rather than treating them as a discrete and uniform population ( Romero, 2000 ; Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017 ; Ponce de León-Calero, 2019 ; Romero-Rodríguez, 2019 ).

Similarly, there are few analyses that delved into the particular degree of victimization and vulnerability of small cattle ranching producers by guerrilla organizations and how these experiences propelled certain popular support for paramilitary movements, making sense of personal experiences in a long-lasting war and how they shape patterns of action and ideological support among different factions ( Barón, 2016 ). In the context of cattle ranching, interactions between armed organizations and the civilian population, as well as their regional variations according to economic activities, are still largely ignored, which hinders a proper understanding of conflict patterns and the role of cattle production within it ( Arjona, 2015 ; Kaplan, 2017 ; Ponce de León-Calero, 2019 ).

What recent studies indicate ( González and López, 2007 ; Peña et al., 2017 ; Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2018 ) is the clear logic of land accumulation and dispossession by paramilitary groups (with the desire for large land extensions being common to all armed actors). These paramilitary groups forcibly or voluntarily garnered support from specific segments of the rural population that did not necessarily correspond directly to small-scale producers but rather to the elites and owners of large cultivable and exploitable land, such as in the case of banana and cattle production in the Urabá region of Antioquia. This can be related to the findings in this study, which show an increase in victimizing events by armed actors identified as paramilitary groups in the second stage (late 1990's), where their responsibility for such events quintupled compared to the first period ( Torres Mora, 2020 ; Vargas Reina, 2022 ; Navarrete-Cruz et al., 2023 ). In fact, land grabbing and displacement of cattle ranchers appears as 5% of the total violent events, increasing from 2 to 9 events in the second stage of the conflict, corresponding to the major action of paramilitary groups and their relation to the forced displacement of population in Colombia ( Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2018 ).

As our study reveals, the impacts on cattle ranchers were widespread throughout the studied period. Killings of cattle ranchers, as well as cattle theft and kidnapping for extortion, were the primary victimizing events within the two analyzed periods. This means that economic crimes had a significant impact on the cattle industry, accounting for 39% of the recorded incidents. Taking this fact into account, although, as previously mentioned, there is substantial presence of political motives cited in several victimizing incidents (especially in cases of murders and kidnappings), it cannot be ruled out that this is not the main factor in the majority of incidents. This implies that other types of cattle ranchers are also affected. Who are these other cattle ranchers affected by the armed conflict, who cannot be identified as individuals with political capital and presumably economic resources in their territories? The information available through the database is insufficient to provide a sociodemographic characterization of the type of individuals affected by victimizing events (for example, whether they are large- or small-scale ranchers in terms of land or cattle they own). However, it is precisely these types of investigative exercises that need to be conducted to uncover the diverse and complex realities of the impact of the Colombian conflict on the cattle industry.

Some contemporary narratives even explore the ideological conflicts and tensions between medium and large-scale cattle ranchers and guerrilla organizations regarding the use of violence, extortion payments, or the circulation of popular discourses advocating for unionization and collective action to improve working conditions. These tensions and fractures propelled the support of certain sectors of cattle ranchers for the emerging self-defense groups in the late 1980's ( Villarraga, 2007 ; Reyes, 2009 ; Thomson, 2011 ; Salinas and Zarama, 2012 ; Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017 ; Peña et al., 2017 ). In the results of this study, we see that kidnapping and extortion are victimizing events that consistently ranked high in both established periods, with guerrilla groups being the primary perpetrators. Another important factor to highlight is the personal experiences and prior occupations of those who became leaders of paramilitarism in Colombia, some of whom had firsthand knowledge of cattle ranching practices, owned cattle, and found the use of large land extensions for this purpose particularly attractive and profitable. This droves the implementation of well-known strategies of land accumulation, dispossession, and forced transfer of land and cattle ( Cotte-Poveda and Duarte-Rojas, 2014 ; Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017 ).

Specific analyses carried out in the Meta department and general studies on the participation of agricultural elites in the Colombian war are conclusive in their findings, illustrating the dangerous connection between a rural cattle middle class in constant conflict with guerrilla groups like the FARC-EP and the National Liberation Army (ELN), the emergence of paramilitarism as an alternative to the confrontation between the state and insurgent groups, and its alleged nature as a protector of private property and economic interests of traders ( Cotte-Poveda and Duarte-Rojas, 2014 ; Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017 ). The conviction for aggravated conspiracy in 2018 of the former president of the Colombian cattle federation for his financial and logistical support to Carlos Castaño, one of the top leaders of the AUC, is just one of the many examples related to this. In our study, this can be correlated with the fact that if guerrilla groups were the main perpetrators against the cattle industry, it would make sense for them to support the protection actions offered by the paramilitaries, a situation that occurred in times and regions with a weak and fragmented state presence that greatly favored resolving conflicts and establishing order through self-help. Although paramilitaries initially seemed to present themselves as allies to the interests of cattle ranchers, this does not mean, as confirmed in the database events, that they were not perpetrators of violent actions against cattle ranchers, their cattle, lands, and infrastructure.

There are also data on the exponential increase in homicides linked to the sustained growth of large landholdings; reports of land conflicts and the intensification of homicidal activity and displacement have served as banners to support and substantiate this thesis ( González and López, 2007 ; Cotte-Poveda and Duarte-Rojas, 2014 ; Ponce de León-Calero, 2019 ). Simultaneously, a tangible relationship has been found between the acquisition of properties dedicated to cattle breeding and production and the consolidation of narcotics export routes, a vital source of profit for all armed actors in the Colombian conflict ( Cotte-Poveda and Duarte-Rojas, 2014 ; Ponce de León-Calero, 2019 ). This demonstrates that struggles for land ownership, the expansion of cattle ranching, and the course of the conflict in Colombia are and have always been interconnected stories.

In his study on the violent tactics used and perpetuated against the cattle sector, Ponce de León-Calero (2019) explores the diverse (and sometimes dissimilar) logics that interwove the relationships between cattle ranchers and armed groups, especially paramilitaries, in the process of forced resource extraction ( Gutiérrez-Sanín and Vargas, 2017 ; Ponce de León-Calero, 2019 ). While the author acknowledges the fundamental role of seminal studies in the field that outline the causal relationship between paramilitarism and cattle ranching mentioned earlier, his analysis focuses on understanding cattle as a plural activity, inhabited by multiple actors with diverse interests, and therefore, they should not be homogenized as mere beneficiaries of the war (in terms of large-scale production). Despite emphasizing the obvious and evident connections between cattle elites and paramilitary leaders, Ponce de León-Calero (2019) constructs a narrative in which plural memories of the conflict find a place, relying on interviews and testimonies from ranchers in various regions of the country who recount the events in their own voices. Through in-depth qualitative analysis, the author manages to unravel how the availability of resources (more present in ranchers than in other types of farmers due to the commercial value of meat and milk) allowed rural producers to strategically survive the conflict, reduce the risk of being attacked, or flee to other territories when their safety and lives were in danger ( Ponce de León-Calero, 2019 ). Ponce de León does not disregard the involvement of the cattle sector in the financing, formation, and expansion of paramilitary groups ( Ronderos, 2014 ), nor does he omit that in many cases, they were a military target of the FARC-EP ( Aguilera, 2013 ). His contribution lies in building bridges, as we propose here, seeking to understand everyday relationships beyond radical classifications such as supporting or resisting the onslaught of paramilitarism. In war, as is well-known, there are as many types of victims as there are perpetrators, an important subtlety that still eludes studies in Colombia that investigate the cattle issue, calling for differentiation between various types of production, agency, different and possible alliances, as well as the perpetuation of these conflicts in the present.

The article Land related grievances shape tropical forest-cover in areas affected by armed-conflict ( Castro-Nuñez et al., 2017 ) starts from the premise that many of the world's forested areas, which are now considered of high value due to their crucial role in carbon storage and therefore in mitigating climate change, are scenes of armed conflicts. Among its findings, it reveals that in Colombia, the socio-economic processes related to the impact of armed conflict on forest areas (illicit crop production, forced displacement of populations, low institutional capacity) are connected to the unequal distribution and land grabbing, processes framed within agricultural colonization-expansion. Similarly, cattle ranching is usually present in agricultural colonization processes, just like illicit crops; in both cases, they serve as tools to add value to initially marginal lands. Moreover, the primary tool to confirm and quantify the relationship between armed conflict and cattle is the measurement of deforestation rates: it has been demonstrated, through measurements of a specific area's carbon storage capacity, which is a characteristic of forests, that during the expansion of the agricultural frontier in each region, the intensity and quantity of armed or violent conflicts intensify as carbon sequestration rates decline. On the other hand, when colonized areas have consolidated, violence rates decrease, and the climate impact rises because carbon sequestration rates are low, and economic activities generating greenhouse gases (such as cattle ranching) have been introduced.

It is evident that victimizing events found in the database of this study, such as cattle theft, violent attacks on productive and commercial activities and infrastructure related to cattle, aerial glyphosate spraying, and armed conflicts in which ranchers and their cattle were involved, have affected the productivity of the cattle industry. However, these elements have not been considered from a historical perspective in the socioeconomic analyses conducted on the subject ( Gumucio et al., 2015 ; Arora et al., 2017 ; Charry et al., 2018 ; Triana Ángel and Burkart, 2019 ; Burkart et al., 2021 ; Enciso et al., 2021a , b ; Pirela Ríos et al., 2022 ). Armed conflict in Colombia often intersects with competition over land and natural resources, including water and pasturelands essential for cattle ranching. Climate change-induced resource scarcity could exacerbate these conflicts. Also, understanding how climate change impacts cattle productivity, water availability for cattle, and overall food production is crucial. Advances in agricultural technologies, such as climate-smart agriculture and precision farming, offer potential solutions to mitigate climate risks and improve food security. Future studies should assess the feasibility and effectiveness of these technologies within the context of Colombia's cattle ranching industry and consider their socio-economic implications for different stakeholders, but also examine how environmental stressors linked to climate change contribute to conflict dynamics and identify strategies to mitigate conflict risks.

Therefore, this article serves as a call to other researchers to explore the connections between this field of study and historical-political initiatives that emphasize the intrinsic relationship between cattle, land tenure, and armed conflict in Colombia. While the data presented in this database review is limited and insufficient for broad conclusions about these relationships, it exemplifies how to delve into Colombia's history of armed conflict and cattle ranching development as two deeply intertwined facets of the same issue. This will lead to a better understanding of how to enhance the sector's productivity in the contemporary world, especially considering the transitional process in which the country has been immersed since 2016, thanks to the Peace Agreements with the FARC-EP.

5.2 A look at Africa

The fact that the history of Colombian cattle ranching reveals even more gaps than the history of armed conflict requires looking to foreign experiences on how livestock productivity is affected in conflict scenarios. Several African countries provide interesting data. While one of the essential characteristics of African conflicts related to livestock—tensions between nomadic or semi-nomadic cattle herders and land-owning farmers—is not present in the territory and history of Colombia, it is clear that other characteristics are similar, and their study and analysis provide tools for a better understanding of the subject. The African example not only confirms that in armed conflict contexts, livestock production follows different logics than productivity but also demonstrates that the deep-rooted violence stems from inequalities and disputes over land tenure, as well as the weak presence of the state.

An analysis of livestock policies in several East African (Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania) and West African (Burkina Faso, Mali, and Senegal) countries reveals that these policies have been oriented very little toward ensuring that land tenure is in the hands of farmers and herders ( Pica-Ciamarra et al., 2007 ). Insecurity in land tenure leads to problems such as an increase in the animal population, which can result in overuse of the land, contributing to resource scarcity and even issues of food sovereignty. It also leads to inefficiency in production and leaves few defenses against climate-related problems or price fluctuations. Livestock ownership becomes more a matter of security (against potential future problems and crises) than efficient production. Despite 60% of people in poverty in Africa relying on livestock, the current and growing demand for meat and milk has not brought improvements for them because production does not meet the demand, and several countries even import these products. The increase in livestock numbers, which does not translate into increased productivity, exerts more pressure on the land and, therefore, a greater potential for tension over scarce resources, in other words, more conflict. This is particularly observed in Ethiopia, Sudan, Mali, and some areas of Senegal, Somalia, and Kenya ( Pica-Ciamarra et al., 2007 ).

Another interesting case regarding the conditions of cattle and other livestock can be found in the South Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the post-conflict period. Maass et al. (2012) analyze how the low number of cattle on small family farms (the predominant form of production and land tenure in the region) is a consequence of recent armed conflicts. Farmers prefer smaller animals, and cattle breeding is oriented toward survival, anticipating future crises, and generating income for children's education.

On the other hand, studies conducted in the Horn of Africa region are based on the premise that violent conflicts in this area represent a failure at multiple levels of social and institutional interactions, primarily concerning governance, state-citizen relations, and resource allocation policies ( Pavanello and Scott-Villiers, 2013 ). The authors delve into the obstacles to achieving lasting peace in the livestock grazing areas of this region, some of which have fragmented governance systems, weak civic engagement, or negative attitudes toward pastoral activities. While this research finds examples of successful peace consolidation at certain levels, solutions almost never take a holistic approach that addresses the structural causes, and therefore, fail to achieve the goal of stable peace.

In the attempt to propose solutions to these conflicts, experiences in Nigeria illustrate how the cultivation of forage crops, such as those from the Urochloa (syn. Brachiaria ) genus or Megathyrsus maximus (syn. Panicum maximum ), can significantly aid livestock production and minimize conflicts between semi-nomadic herders and farmers ( Mwendia et al., 2018 ). However, despite efforts in various African countries, conflicts between farmers and herders have increased exponentially in recent years. Preexisting violent conflicts have been compounded by organized crime and corruption, eventually becoming matters of national security. This combination of elements is starting to solidify a system of war, as the emergence of uncontrolled local armed groups, significant conflicts between ethnic groups, the inability of regional governments to control peripheral areas, and the growing politicization of conflicts indicate a highly conducive environment for the emergence of insurgent movements ( Cline, 2020 ).

While the armed conflict in Colombia has not presented large-scale situations of food insecurity, its direct connection to deforestation and non-productive or inefficient practices in livestock and agriculture serves as a warning for the future and becomes a signal to prevent crises that have been seen in Africa. There are several ways in which armed conflicts affect food security: they destroy crops, livestock, agricultural infrastructure, and assets; disrupt food supply chains and increase prices due to difficulties in accessing markets or transportation; induce displacement and create fear and uncertainty about meeting future needs; and generate political instability ( Dago, 2021 ). In a cyclical manner, food insecurity can trigger violence and instability, especially in areas with significant inequalities and weak institutional presence ( Dago, 2021 ).

Urgent actions need to be taken by governments in relation to these issues and the current scenario of climate change. Social conflicts must also be analyzed with the variable of environmental degradation, from an interdisciplinary and innovative perspective ( Nguyen et al., 2020 ). Climate change exacerbates pre-existing social conflicts, including disease, insecurity, death, and hunger. Lessons from the African context should be considered in Colombia to avoid repeating mistakes that have already been made in these countries, where the lack of modernization in livestock farming, resource degradation, land disputes, and violence form a spiral of situations can exacerbate the existing issues of social and economic inequality among their populations.

6 Conclusions

It seems that depending on the sources and archives consulted, a different story can always be written, and that the silences loudly speak about what has not yet been fully resolved or learned in all its complexity. This cacophony of voices and memories represents, in sum, not only the history of the internal armed conflict in Colombia but also the history of cattle ranching itself and its participation and agency in the struggle for territory, the expansion of the agricultural frontier, scientific and economic discourses about tropicalism, and the exponential growth of markets, among other factors. Vital for the survival of thousands of rural families, potential to empower women and young populations, traditional ways of production, and central in Colombian cultural customs, cattle ranching has always been at the heart of all kinds of political, economic, and environmental disputes: for land and water, domestic markets, the colonization of public lands, the accumulation of large estates, associations and guilds as symbols of community work, and yes, also at the very core of the war in Colombia.

In many undeniably useful ways, this story has only been partially told so far. For the most part, it seems like we are witnessing a black and white narrative with victimized populations and victimizers on either side of the equation, where individual agency and personal experiences have been blurred or have yet to be heard. It is true that the story that has been told about the link between cows, pastures, and war almost naturally follows its teleology: it could not be any other way. The systematic silencing of dissenting voices, imperfect and problematic peace processes and demobilizations, and the lingering fear in rural areas of Colombia have made it difficult to obtain a proper historical assessment. It could be said that the exercise has only just begun and is on the right track. While much is known about cattle ranching and its economic potential and transformative power for producing families throughout Colombia and Latin America, there is a constant search for new and better ways to produce meat and milk, who is involved in the process and how. The history of cattle ranching practices has been relatively underexplored, and there is still much to learn from somewhat older historiographies where the multiple, conflicting, and complex nature of the cattle ranching profession reflects its richness and endurance over time.

Historically, it can be stated that cattle ranching in Colombia has developed far from the logic of productivity. The first obstacles can be traced back to the mid-twentieth century when attempts were made to establish productive cattle ranching but encountered challenging geography, limited access routes, and educational and technical deficiencies. Subsequently, starting in the 1960's when the armed conflict in Colombia began, a genuine war system started to take root with increasing strength (at least until the signing of the latest peace agreements). This war system distorts efficiency in the management of cattle production in various ways.

It is already evident that if Colombia does not manage to resolve fundamental issues related to land tenure and the presence of the state in the peripheries of its territory, violence will persist, and the war system will endure, preventing the transition to productive cattle ranching. The need for productive cattle ranching is urgent in times of climate change, which demands efficiency and sustainability. For these reasons and in pursuit of these goals, it is necessary to fully understand the complexities of cattle productivity: how to improve it, make it sustainable, and thus benefit the rural populations suffering from severe inequality. It is also crucial to elucidate the problematic and undeniable connections between large-scale cattle ranching and the actors of war. But even more important is that both narratives are integrated, that they converse with each other, that they intersect to achieve a plausible transformation (or preservation) of the ways of life of a vibrant and age-old cultural practice that deserves much more than gray photographs, sharp divisions between good and bad, or silent stories that fail to capture its constant evolution and inherent multiplicity.

Data availability statement

Data will be made available upon reasonable request. Requests to access these datasets should be directed to: n.triana@cgiar.org .

Author contributions

NT: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. MP: Formal analysis, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. SB: Funding acquisition, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by the One CGIAR Initiative Livestock and Climate (L&C). The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

Acknowledgments

We thank all donors who globally support our work through their contributions to the CGIAR System.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

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The views expressed in this document may not be taken as the official views of these organizations.

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Keywords: cattle, armed conflict, violence, warfare system, cattle sector

Citation: Triana Ángel N, Burkart S and Pazos Cárdenas M (2024) Land, cows, and bullets: an untold history of cattle ranching during the armed conflict in Colombia, 1980–2010. Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 8:1374861. doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2024.1374861

Received: 22 January 2024; Accepted: 25 July 2024; Published: 15 August 2024.

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Copyright © 2024 Triana Ángel, Burkart and Pazos Cárdenas. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Natalia Triana Ángel, n.triana@cgiar.org

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