There is no shortage of scholarly works examining the phenomenon of contemporary patterns of violence in Latin America and the Caribbean, emerging from the puzzling and alarming rise in violence that accompanied democratization in the region. But even in this crowded field, Hilgers and Macdonald’s edited volume stands to become a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners concerned with the region’s deeply entrenched modes of violence. Although the volume leaves some important conceptual questions unaddressed, it nonetheless provides a rich set of empirical analyses and novel insights for understanding the seemingly intractable violence in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The book features works that lie at the nexus of the subnational turn in comparative politics and what we might call the violent democracies paradigm (Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel Goldstein, Violent Democracies in Latin America, 2010), which views violence in the region’s democracies not as an aberration but as a standard practice of democratic politics and a resource routinely utilized by state and nonstate actors in their contestation for power. As such, the book as a whole will be of interest to scholars in both fields. The editors and contributors illustrate the centrality of both frameworks for understanding contemporary violence in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The empirical analyses underscore the key differences between national and subnational patterns of violence, as in the chapters by Jean Daudelin and Lucy Luccisano and Macdonald, as well as the considerable variation across subnational units, illustrated well in the careful studies by Hugues Fournier and Kent Eaton and Juan Diego Prieto. The authors also demonstrate convincingly how state armed actors such as the police—as in Markus-Michael Müller and Julián Durazo Hermann’s chapters—and the nonstate armed actors studied by Gaëlle Rivard Piché, Robert Gay, and Yonique Campbell and Colin Clarke, use violence as a strategy for building political power in the context of ordinary democratic politics. The merits of a subnational approach to the region’s “violent democracies” are evident in several chapters, notably Rivard Piché’s chapter on El Salvador, which sheds new light on the gang truce that has already been subjected to extensive examination at the national level. The book thus presents a compelling alternative to the still-dominant approach of studying violence through national-level processes and statistics, and an effective critique of the erroneous inferences drawn from such an approach.
The works compiled by Hilgers and Macdonald represent an admirable effort to push both literatures forward. At the same time, however, the edited volume exhibits important limitations, including the lack of development of key concepts, and inconsistencies between the broad framing and the individual chapters. As a result, the volume overall falls short of providing a systematic framework for understanding the varied causes, manifestations, and consequences of violence in Latin America and the Caribbean. The good news, however, is that in the introduction and conclusion, the editors provide a number of important building blocks that suggest what such a framework might look like, including the concept of embeddedness, the role of “identities,” and the multidimensional nature of violence.
The book’s introduction posits a provocative objective for the broader volume: to probe systematically the highly varied and intersecting forms of violence, as well as the multiplicity of actors who carry them out, and who, in turn, vary in territorial reach, relationship to the state, and relationship to ordinary citizens and communities. The empirical chapters, however, do not appear to be organized along this broad frame. Instead, the empirical chapters seem to be connected by an entirely different framework: clientelism. But while clientelism lends considerable coherence to these chapters, the editors offer little engagement with the concept of clientelism and its relationship to violence. That relationship remains undefined and underdeveloped in the introduction and is discussed only briefly in the concluding chapter.
The editors do introduce, however, a promising concept for overcoming this lack of cohesion: the notion of embeddedness. This concept, too, remains undefined in the book’s introduction, but with some additional theorizing, it could provide a rich framework for most of the empirical chapters—such as those by Müller, Campbell and Clarke, and Eaton and Prieto—which examine how violence results from linkages and mutual dependence of actors across multiple scales. According to these accounts, clientelism may constitute the “glue” that links the various actors to one another at different levels—whether gangs in Jamaica’s garrisons and national parties, or regional elites in Colombia’s departments and the national power structure. The basic elements of such a framework are present in the book’s introduction, but require further development—perhaps a typology of such networks—in order to constitute a theory that may be of use to other scholars in this field.
An additional inconsistency between the initial broad framing and the empirical chapters concerns the level of analysis. The empirical chapters are largely organized into cities and regions. While this is consistent with a subnational approach, it belies the important discussion in the introductory chapter about how “identities”—presumably race, class, gender, age, and others—shape vulnerability to different modes of violence. Indeed, the chapter urges us to “[scale] down, up, and across spaces and identities” (19), but such a lens is largely absent in the empirical chapters. Yet there is much to be gained from such “scaling down”; future scholars should heed Hilgers and Macdonald’s call for integrating the subnational approach and an intersectional analysis of violence (see also Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” in Martha Albertson Fineman and Roxanne Mykitiuk, eds., The Public Nature of Private Violence, 1994).
Another important concept that is proposed in the introduction but left largely unexplored in most of the empirical chapters is the relationship among multiple forms of violence. The editors argue convincingly for the need to reconcile the study of different forms of violence—structural, symbolic, gender-based, criminal, political, and so on. But while such a task is deeply compelling and urgently needed, the editors offer little in the way of a conceptual framework for elucidating the dynamics of intersecting forms of violence so that we may advance our knowledge of the problem and develop better solutions. The editors are surely correct that we need to improve our understanding of how structural violence shapes outcomes, such as exposure to physical violence, the likelihood of being a perpetrator of criminal violence, or the possibility of justice if one is a victim of state violence, but they stop far short of this, providing, for the most part, vague references to “identities.”
Moreover, the intersections of such identities and multiple forms of violence are largely absent in the analyses provided in the empirical chapters, with the exception of Daudelin’s brief discussion of gendered patterns of violence and Campbell and Clarke’s analysis of race, class, clientelism, and political and criminal violence in Jamaica. These chapters, however, along with Pablo Lapegna’s account of the intersection of state violence, structural and symbolic violence, and environmental violence, underscore the need for a framework that bridges these seemingly disparate forms of violence. This is no small task. As the editors note, these different modes of violence are typically studied by scholars from different disciplines and through different methodologies, underscoring the need for an integrated approach.
While the book leaves certain questions unaddressed, it serves nonetheless as an important roadmap for arriving at a more comprehensive framework for understanding patterns of violence in Latin America and the Caribbean. The book’s empirical chapters also offer an excellent application of the subnational comparative method, illustrating the strengths of this approach for studying complex phenomena such as violence. Overall, the book adds important nuance to ongoing debates among scholars and practitioners about the central causes, consequences, actors, and manifestations of violence in the most violent region in the world.
