The Colombian civil war was a conflict between government forces and a left-wing guerrilla group called FARC; it caused more than 200,000 deaths and displaced millions. After becoming president in 2010, Santos launched formal peace talks with FARC under Norwegian and Cuban mediation. The agenda covered a cease-fire, disarmament, victim reparations, and rural reform—topics that were politically sensitive and technically complex. A final peace agreement was reached in 2016, and FARC handed over its weapons to the UN and converted into a political party. Although voters narrowly rejected the first version in a plebiscite, Santos revised the text and secured congressional approval, showing remarkable persistence. His work proved that dialogue can replace violence as a path to end protracted conflicts.

The Colombian conflict persisted for decades due to Cold War dynamics, land inequality, and the drug economy. The Santos administration adopted a “comprehensive negotiation model,” using a package approach with five parallel agenda points: rural reform, political participation, illicit drug solutions, victims/truth, and conflict termination/implementation. During the Havana talks, experts and victim representatives provided testimonies, bringing restorative-justice concepts into the accord. Disarmament and reintegration of roughly 13,000 FARC combatants were verified by a UN political mission using DDR international standards. The agreement was registered as a special agreement under international law, and a transitional justice mechanism (JEP) was created with complementarity to the International Criminal Court. The innovative institutional design and political leadership led the Nobel Committee to honor Santos individually.

The Santos administration adopted a closed-agenda negotiation, proceeding through six phases agreed in the Mexico City pre-talks. The process embedded guarantor states (Norway, Cuba) and accompanying states (Venezuela, Chile), establishing a layered guarantee architecture. After the June 2016 bilateral cease-fire, conflict-related fatalities dropped by over 90 percent. The final accord, exceeding 22,000 words, created the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), offering alternative sentences conditioned on full confession and victim participation, thereby satisfying ICC complementarity under Rome Statute Article 17. Following plebiscite rejection, revisions strengthened land cadastre mechanisms and clarified sexual-violence provisions, and the government used a congressional “fast-track” to approve the treaty. Implementation monitoring by the Kroc Institute shows more than 60 percent of stipulations completed or in progress as of 2023. The process, steered by Santos, is now a key case study in cross-sector peacebuilding for complex conflicts.