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Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world. It has suffered waves of repressive authoritarian rule, organized armed insurgency and civil war, violent protest, and ballooning rates of criminal violence. But is violence hard wired into Latin America? This is a critical reassessment of the ways in which violence in Latin America is addressed and understood. Previous approaches have relied on structural perspectives, attributing the problem of violence to Latin America's colonial past or its conflictual contemporary politics. Bringing together scholars and practitioners, this volume argues that violence is often rooted more in contingent outcomes than in deeply embedded structures. Addressing topics ranging from the root sources of violence in Haiti to kidnapping in Colombia, from the role of property rights in patterns of violence to the challenges of peacebuilding, The Politics of Violence in Latin America is an essential step towards understanding the causes and contexts of violence-and changing the mechanisms that produce it.
Policzer offers an original argument about the nature of authoritarian coercion while also changing our perception of the dynamics of the Pinochet regime in Chile.
Fitzsimmons argues that small mercenary groups must maintain a superior culture to successfully engage and defeat larger and better-equipped opponents.
This volume examines the promotion and defense of democracy in the Americas. Taking the Inter-American Democratic Charter (IADC) of 2001 as a baseline, it charts the evolution of the issue over the past decade. Although it considers historical antecedents, the main focus of the book is on key instances of promotion and defense of democracy in the Western hemisphere since the adoption of the IADC. It analyzes democratic norms, norm enforcement mechanisms and how they work in practice. Special attention is paid to the 2009 Honduras coup, the issues raised by it and the debates that surrounded it, as this was the first instance in which a member state was suspended in accordance with the IADC. Three central themes guide the analysis: the nature of challenges to democracy in Latin America; the role of regional organizations as democracy promoters; and the transformation of Inter-American relations. The book unveils the key achievements and limitations of the OAS in the field and will be of great interest to students and scholars of democratization, US-Latin American relations, international relations of Latin-America and international organizations.
This pioneering collection offers a comprehensive investigation into how to study public policy in Latin America. While this region exhibits many similarities with the North American and European countries that have traditionally served as sources for generating public policy knowledge, Latin American countries are also different in many fundamental ways. As such, existing policy concepts and frameworks may not always be the most effective tools of analysis for this unique region. To fill this gap, Comparative Public Policy in Latin America offers guidelines for refining current theories to suit Latin America's contemporary institutional and socio-economic realities. The contributors accomplish this task by identifying the features of the region that shape public policy, including informal norms and practices, social inequality, and weak institutions. This book promises to become the definitive work on contemporary public policy in Latin America, essential for those who study the area as well as comparative public policy more broadly.
The face of modern warfare is changing as more and more humanitarian organizations, private military companies, and non-state groups enter complex security environments such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Haiti. Although this shift has been overshadowed by legal issues connected to the War on Terror and intervention in countries such as Rwanda and Sudan, it has caused some to question the relevance of the laws of war. To bridge the widening gap between the theory and practice of the law, Modern Warfare brings together both scholars and practitioners who offer diverse perspectives on the key challenges to the law’s legitimacy: how to ensure compliance among non-state groups; the proliferation of private military companies in the employ of humanitarian organizations; tension between the idea of humanitarian space and counterinsurgency doctrines; and the phenomenon of urban violence. By bringing to light the law’s limitations – and potential – this timely book opens a path to preventing further unnecessary suffering and violence.
Armed groups operating beyond the state have become the most important actors in most contemporary wars and violent conflicts, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Colombia and Somalia. They come in a dizzying array of forms: some informally linked to the state and state power, others in opposition to the state; some pursuing classic political goals, others primarily predatory and large-scale criminal enterprises. All groups, however, challenge the state’s Weberian monopoly of the legitimate use of force, yet their origins, evolution, violent dynamics, and relations with state power are poorly understood. This interdisciplinary collection includes both conceptual and empirical studies of contempor...
This book offers a unique look at world inequality, by comparing the development problems and prospects of these two regions in the context of global restructuring and NAFTA.
War, Conflict and Human Rights is an innovative new inter-disciplinary textbook, combining aspects of law, politics and conflict analysis to examine the relationship between human rights and armed conflict. Making use of both theoretical and practical approaches, this book: examines the tensions and complementarities between protection of human rights and resolution of conflict - the competing political demands and the challenges posed by internal armed conflict; explores the scope and effects of human rights violations in contemporary armed conflicts, such as in Sierra Leone, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the former Yugoslavia, as well as the 'Global War on Terror'; assesses t...
How can the seeds of accountability ever grow in authoritarian environments? Embedding accountability into the state is an inherently uneven, partial and contested process. Campaigns for public accountability often win limited concessions at best, but they can leave cracks in the system that serve as handholds for subsequent efforts to open up the state to public scrutiny. This book explores the how civil society "thickens" by comparing two decades of rural citizens' struggles to hold the Mexican state accountable, exploring both change and continuity before, during, and after national electoral turning points. The book addresses how much power-sharing really happens in policy innovations th...