Homicidal Ecologies Illicit Economies and Complicit States in Latin America

Why has violence spiked in Latin America's contemporary democracies? What explains its temporal and spatial variation? Analyzing the region's uneven homicide levels, this book maps out a theoretical agenda focusing on three intersecting factors: the changing geography of transnational illicit political economies; the varied capacity and complicity of state institutions tasked with providing law and order; and organizational competition to control illicit territorial enclaves. These three factors inform the emergence of 'homicidal ecologies' (subnational regions most susceptible to violence) in Latin America. After focusing on the contemporary causes of homicidal violence, the book analyzes the comparative historical origins of weak and complicit public security forces and the rare moments in which successful institutional reform takes place. Regional trends in Latin America are evaluated, followed by original case studies of Central America, which claims among the highest homicide rates in the world.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Violence in third wave democracies; 2. Engaging the theoretical debate and alternative arguments; Part II. The Argument about Homicidal Ecologies: 3. Illicit economies and territorial enclaves: the transnational context and domestic footprint; 4. State capacity and organizational competition: strategic calculations about territory and violence; Part III. Divergent Trajectories in Central America: Three Post-Civil War Cases: 5. High violence in post-Civil-War Guatemala; 6. High violence in post-Civil War El Salvador; 7. Circumscribing violence in post-Civil War Nicaragua; Part IV. Looking Backwards and Forwards: 8. Concluding with states.

Deborah J. Yashar is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, New Jersey; lead Editor of World Politics; co-chair of SSRC's Anxieties of Democracy project; an editor of the Cambridge Contentious Politics Series; and former President of the Politics and History section of American Political Science Association (APSA). She is the author of Demanding Democracy (1997), Contesting Citizenship in Latin America (Cambridge, 2005), among other publications; and is co-editor of three other books, including States in the Developing World with Miguel Centeno and Atul Kohli (Cambridge, 2016) and Parties, Movements, and Democracy in the Developing World with Nancy Bermeo (2017). She is the recipient of Fulbright, USIP, and other awards.