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El artículo presenta un balance de las diferentes nociones a partir de las cuales se ha pretendido definir históricamente la sociedad civil y considera la validez de su uso en América Latina. Señala los aspectos que hacen problemático y complejo el concepto de sociedad civil, particularmente cuando se lee y aplica mecánica y acríticamente en contextos diferentes a los que marcaron su concepción. La autora argumenta que, en su uso corriente, el termino sociedad civil continua siendo ambiguo, confuso y polémico, en tanto ofrece multitud de significaciones a multitud de personas.

El artículo presenta un balance de las diferentes nociones a partir de las cuales se ha pretendido definir históricamente la sociedad civil y considera la validez de su uso en América Latina. Señala los aspectos que hacen problemático y complejo el concepto de sociedad civil, particularmente cuando se lee y aplica mecánica y acríticamente en contextos diferentes a los que marcaron su concepción. La autora argumenta que, en su uso corriente, el termino sociedad civil continua siendo ambiguo, confuso y polémico, en tanto ofrece multitud de significaciones a multitud de personas.

This article critically reflects on the use of action-oriented participatory research to rethink violence and security in Latin America. The authors draw on 12 years of such research (2008–20) in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica and Mexico, working with communities living in the midst of chronic violence and criminality. Despite innovative experiments, security policies and practices in the region continue to be dominated by counterproductive militarized responses that have failed to address violence and crime. This article argues that in order to challenge politically potent punitive approaches to security and to highlight the interconnected social and economic drivers of insecurity, communities living these realities need to develop their own understanding of ‘security’. This can be used to inform sustainable solutions that address people’s complex experiences of insecurity on the ground. The article brings the agency of those living amidst chronic violence into the security debate through participatory action research. It demonstrates that people living amidst such violence can contribute to making public security equitable, accessible and capable of protecting them while addressing the conditions that reproduce violence and crime without reproducing further violence. This is what is meant by ‘humanizing security’.

This article explores the relationship between protest, violence and the possibility of a politics without violence. It argues that protest is not only a valid but also a necessary vehicle for the journey towards a politics without violence. Nevertheless, violence can emerge within protests as well as in response to them. The article will propose a thinking tool for understanding violence as a phenomenon with multiple expressions. It discusses movements to de-sanction violence and the research that has highlighted the role of non-violent protest, constructive nonviolent action and civil resistance in the history of social change. It will reflect on recent data bases which record the rise in protests in recent years and the role of violence within them. Finally, it will take the social protests in Chile and Colombia in 2019 and 2021, where although violence erupted mainly as vandalism and looting, with severe violent police responses, both protests, we argue, contributed to delineating a politics without violence through generating intermediation channels between the demands of the street and the institutional mechanisms for processing social change.

Security must not reproduce more violence. Instead, it should reveal the human face of society and show that the desire for revenge can be overcome, writes Jenny Pearce (LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre).

Relations between the state and oligarchic elites underpin the extreme rise of violence in Latin America, despite the fact that most of its victims and perpetrators are poor: violence is as much a problem of wealth as of poverty. Jenny Pearce (LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre) discusses her working paper for our new Violence, Security, and Peace series, Elites and Violence in Latin America: Logics of the Fragmented Security State.

La seguridad no puede reproducir más violencia. Al contrario, debería mostrar la cara humana de la sociedad, afirmando la posibilidad de superar el deseo de la venganza, escribe Jenny Pearce (LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre).

This essay reviews the following works: Illegal Drugs, Drug Trafficking and Violence in Latin America. By Marcelo Bergman. Buenos Aires: Springer International, 2018. Pp. v + 170. $89.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9783319731520. More Money, More Crime: Prosperity and Rising Crime in Latin America. By Marcelo Bergman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 392. $39.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780190608774. Tough on Crime: The Rise of Punitive Populism in Latin America. By Michelle D. Bonner. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. Pp. vii + 204. $40.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822945826. Argentina’s Missing Bones: Revisiting the History of the Dirty War. By James P. Brennan. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 195. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520297937. Modernity at Gunpoint: Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America. By Sophie Esch. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 284. $28.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822965381. A History of Political Murder in Latin America: Killing the Messengers of Change. By W. John Green. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. Pp. v + 360. $26.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781438456645. Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean: Subnational Structures, Institutions, and Clientelistic Networks. Edited by Tina Hilgers and Laura Macdonald. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. v + 298. $99.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107193178. Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability. By Antonius C. G. M. Robben. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 294. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812250053. Organized Crime, Drug Trafficking, and Violence in Mexico: The Transition from Felipe Calderón to Enrique Peña Nieto. By Jonathan D. Rosen and Roberto Zepeda. Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2016. Pp. vii + 158. $80.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781498535601.

The militarised approach to drugs supply continues to predominate, despite a new emphasis on drugs, peace and development. This viewpoint argues that the drugs road which often begins in peripheral, war torn or recovering, supply, processing and transport borderlands is part of a social, national and global system of inequality. States in such contexts, often reproduce and disperse violences and development policy fails to take account of community adaptations to survival livelihoods. To reset the conversation towards violence reduction and new livelihoods, it must involve the borderlanders themselves, protecting and enabling them to build a new road to peace.

Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace aims to generate pathways to justice that are acceptable both to victims and to a deeply polarised nation. If this novel and innovative institution can achieve a fair and effective form of transitional justice that encompasses truth, justice, reparations, and guarantees of non-recurrence, the country could make a significant shift into a new phase of peacebuilding and violence-reduction, write Gwen Burnyeat (UCL Anthropology), Par Engstrom (UCL Americas), Andrei Gómez Suárez (University of Bristol), and Jenny Pearce (LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre) following their joint hosting of a series of events with Giovani Álvarez (Chief Prosecutor of the Special Jurisdiction’s Investigation and Accusation Unit).

While Latin America’s high levels of chronic violence are mostly carried out by poor young men and mostly cost the lives of poor young men, the conditions for its reproduction are generated by logics of elite power and wealth accumulation. Drawing on more than 70 interviews with oligarchic elites from Colombia and Mexico, the paper offers propositions for further empirical research into these logics. It discusses why it makes sense to use the term “oligarchic elites” to analyse both the failure to invest in the rule of law and also the elite preference for a fragmented security state whose permeability facilitates influence trafficking. It studies the direct and indirect relationships between elites and varied forms of violence, exploring how they have affected the nature of the state in Latin America, the diffusion of criminal violences, and the emergence of micro criminal orders in many parts of the region. Latin America’s history of social action against violences – not least disappearances, feminicide, forced displacement, and state torture – should extend to de-sanctioning violence as a phenomenon. This could open up spaces for social and political participation to create the conditions of social justice which reduce violence.

This conversation between two peace scholars who have been deeply involved in Latin America and influenced by their experience and research in the region, discusses how this has shaped their understanding of peace and violence. The conversation ranges from their early research and human rights work during the revolutionary civil wars of Central America, to encounters with indigenous cosmovisions of the region, to experiences of the military dictatorships and struggles for democracy of the Southern Cone and Andean countries. This leads to the themes of many peaces (Dietrich) and many violences (Pearce). In the process of the dialogue, they emphasise how each acknowledges the significance of the material inequalities that generate violence in the region. However, each has reached their understanding of ‘transrationality’ (Dietrich) and ‘emotional enlightenment’ (Pearce), as ways of thinking about peace, including but beyond the material.

The introduction to this Special Issue sets out why it is important to learn from Latin America about peace and the building of peace. In particular, it explains why it matters to see peace in relationship to violence and not just war. It highlights the significance of the high homicide rates in the region, but also the reproduction of ‘chronic violence’, and why multiple expressions of violence have impacted on countries of the region which have experienced war and those which have not. Latin America’s high levels of violences even after peace processes, can also teach us about the challenges of building peace after war. The Colombia case studies reveal both creative potential for peace in the region and the many limitations.

This article uses the 'concept of history' of Walter Benjamin, to unearth the historical importance of a moment of peasant resistance in Chalatenango, El Salvador, at the beginning of the 1980s. The communities of the northeast of this department, not only suffered a savage exploitation and repression, but also organized their own Local Popular Power. They were not 'only' victims, but protagonists of their history. Although a brief experience of two years, more or less, was very important in historical terms. However, as Benjamin says, the resistances that do not end in a historically recognized success are lost to history, in fact 'flashes' of history. This article analyzes the role of the historian and a process of construction of history from memory, with the peasants themselves.

This paper explores the way violence is simultaneously absent and present in our everyday understanding of politics and the State. It argues that politics does not have to be an arena inherently and unavoidably reliant on the tools of violence. Indeed, politics could be seen as primarily an arena for violence reduction. Social action on violence is one route towards realizing such a goal. However, the ontological assumptions about human violence behind, for instance, the Weberian approach to the modern State remain a conceptual limit to such social action. They have provided an apparently intuitive foundation for why violence and its monopoly must be coupled to our understanding of politics and the State. While there have been philosophical challenges to this, they ultimately fail, it is argued, to provide a focus on violence as a phenomenon with its own distinctions. Social action on violence raises new consciousness about its lived experiences and multiple forms, including state violence. Such action can influence and be influenced by an emergent epistemological leap in the study of violence, made possible by the interdisciplinary potential of new knowledge. Over time, there is a source for a new foundation for the State and Politics, which does not rely on the tools of violence.