Violent Democracies in Latin America (review)

Democratization and violence are not new topics for scholars and students of Latin America. In the two decades or so since the region's "democratic transition," social science research there has often sought to address a basic conundrum: Why has the end of authoritarianism, state violence, and civil war in Latin America, the proliferation of electoral democracy, and the extension of basic civil and political rights to the populace been accompanied by a rise in various forms of violence? Contributors to the volume Violent Democracies in Latin America do an excellent job of opening new paths for exploring this abiding question. The book is well-suited for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars at all levels interested in Latin America, post-conflict or post-authoritarian states, or comparative politics in general.

In the volume's introduction, editors Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein overview and interrogate the dominant approaches to research on violence and democracy in political science and anthropology, their respective fields. One of the volume's many strengths lies in this interdisciplinary collaboration. As they point out, a methodological divide has long obstructed such meaningful conversations even as both fields attempt to address the same set of questions. Political scientists generally work within top-down, institutionally-focused paradigms while anthropologists concern themselves with bottom-up, experience-driven approaches. Although some might see this divide as an important ideological rift, Arias and Goldstein do not believe that either discipline has gotten it right, so to speak. Both fields have incorrectly assumed that "democracy" and "democratic citizenship" are most properly expressed in North American and Western European contexts, and that Latin American states have fallen short of these standards. The proliferation in political science and anthropology of such adjectives as low-intensity, weak, and disjunctive to describe Latin American democracy and citizenship demonstrates their point (see Collier and Levitsky 1997, Gledhill 2000). Anthropologists and political scientists also agree that violence is antithetical to democracy and democracy strictly opposed to violence. In Latin America, however, this is not the empirical case. Arias and Goldstein's principal complaint is that scholars have not taken the coexistence of violence and democracy seriously as a starting point of their analyses.

The editors advocate drawing on the strengths of all social science disciplines to explore the actual relationship between political democracy and violence in Latin America. They coin the term "violent pluralism" to tentatively describe the historical co-development, contemporary co-dependence, and deep everyday entwinement of democratic state formations and various violent practices. Violent pluralism is defined as " states, social elites, and subalterns employing violence in the quest to establish or contest regimes of citizenship, justice, rights, and a democratic social order" (4).

They wish to communicate two key points with this term. First, "violence in Latin American society [is] not merely concentrated in the state or in 'deviant' groups and individuals who contravene otherwise accepted norms" of how institutions and individuals should act in democratic settings. Second, "violence is a mechanism for keeping in place the very institutions and policies that neoliberal democracies have fashioned...as well as an instrument for coping with the myriad problems that neoliberal democracies have generated" (5). With these two points, the authors historicize the rise of democracy in Latin America as coeval with the rise of neoliberal economic policies and practices that have exacerbated inequalities, weakened state institutions, and encouraged a worldview that lays blame or praise with individuals rather than collectivities for society's successes and failures. Arias and Goldstein hope that social science research agendas built around the concept of violent pluralism will disrupt unproductive binaries between terms like democracy and violence, allowing scholars to more accurately describe the complex relationships between the multiple actors who employ violence—often in the name of democracy—in Latin America today.

This edited volume is remarkably coherent and the chapters fit together nicely. They address topics as diverse as the Dominican Republic's Plan for Democratic Security and how historical legacies influence...