Like other civil wars, the armed conflict in Colombia has generally been seen as a continuous and homogeneous process, which has covered almost the entire national territory for several decades without substantial changes. In opposition to this common assumption and discussing with the traditional greed or grievance dichotomy and the theories of the new wars, the authors propose an alternative, deeply historical and interactive model who takes into account regional and local particularities in order to explain the way the national master cleavages and long term approaches interact with the logic of local and regional armed groups by emphasizing the geographical evolution of the Colombian civil war.