| Summary: | Businesses are prominent actors in areas of contested authority, yet they respond in varied ways to its challenges, from seizing expansion opportunities, negotiating with armed groups, working with state armed forces, or leaving altogether. What are the conditions that affect businesses in areas of contested authority, how do they respond, and what security outcomes do they experience? I argue protection quality – whether protection is reliable and affordable – and business power – a business’s capacity to deploy financial or political resources – are the key conditions that affect business security outcomes in areas of contested authority. Businesses respond through three pathways: they pursue accommodation by passively absorbing the costs of insecurity, they use voice to influence coercive actors to gain better protection, or they choose to exit by closing their business, seeking alternative protectors, or leaving altogether. The underlying conditions create four distinct security outcomes: coexistence, entanglement, survival, and victimisation. I present a series of cases across Antioquia and Valle del Cauca in Colombia from 1996-2016, comparing the conditions, responses and outcomes for agricultural firms, capital-intensive enterprises, neighbourhood shopkeepers, and mining companies. When protection quality and business power are high, businesses maintained a state of coexistence with coercive actors. When business power is high, yet protection quality is low, businesses experience entanglement with coercive actors. When protection quality is good, but businesses have less power, they experience survival, and when businesses have low power and poor protection, they experience victimisation. I draw from interviews with businesspeople, business association officials, journalists and observers gathered over the course of fieldwork in 2019, supplemented by newspaper articles, court documents, government data, and secondary sources.
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