In the last fifteen years, Colombia's rapidly growing peace movement has produced activists who fervently work to create peace in a country that has been in conflict for more than forty years. These activists and the organizations that support them represent a heterogeneous group of people who use a diverse array of peace initiatives (or peace actions) to achieve their peace goals. Their work has attempted (and often succeeded) in influencing and impacting Colombian citizens, the government and foreign entities. This thesis focuses on how civil society peace initiatives have influenced and reacted to a changing political climate between 1997-2008 as the Colombian government shifted strategies from a negotiated settlement to a more militaristic approach. In this study I first examine the birth, decline, and rebirth of citizen participation in the Colombian peace movement. I demonstrate how the rise of citizen peace activism strongly influenced the government to sit at the negotiating table with non-state armed actors and how citizen frustration and the decline in participation caused the government to end negotiations and begin a new policy of Democratic Security. Next I analyze how peace organizations, especially at the national level have changed strategies in response to less citizen support and a governmental policy that has shifted away from a peaceful settlement. I suggest that these organizations have relied more heavily on public education, awareness, and networking than in previous years, and that these changes have made them more successful in fulfilling their missions.

White (2013) stated that dispositional causal thinking derives from experiences of acting on objects aquired early inlife. He made evident that, under uncertainty, particular cues in an interaction between an agent and a patient (e.g., two entities,agent focuses on patient, contact, effect in patient) guide people’s perception of causality. This study systematically examinesthe predictive strength of eight causal cues worked out by White (2013) and aims at comparing people’s reliance on these cuesin the physical and the biological domain.Children (7-year-old) and adults judged a prototype (mechanical collision event or stinging event) and another nine prototyperelated events, with systematically omitted cues.A general linear mixed models analysis revealed a significant effect for the number of cues in an event. Both age groupsrely on singular causal cues when interpreting physical and biological events. Moreover, the disposition of causality appears toharden with increasing age.