Guerilla Warfare and the Use of New (and Some Old) Technology: Lessons from FARC-EP's Armed Struggle in Colombia

Studying armed political struggles from a CSCW perspective can throw the complex interactions between culture, technology, materiality and political conflict into sharp relief. Such studies highlight interrelations that otherwise remain under-remarked upon, despite their severe consequences. The present paper provides an account of the armed struggle of one of the Colombian guerrillas, FARC-EP, with the Colombian army. We document how radio-based communication became a crucial, but ambiguous infrastructure of war. The sudden introduction of localization technologies by the Colombian army presented a lethal threat to the guerrilla group. Our interviewees report a severe learning process to diminish this new risk, relying on a combination of informed beliefs and significant technical understanding. We end with a discussion of the role of HCI in considerations of ICT use in armed conflicts and introduce the concept of counter-appropriation as process of adapting one's practices to other's appropriation of technology in conflict.