The Age of Insecurity: Violence and Social Disorder in the New Latin America

Organized Crime and Democratic Governability: Mexico and the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. Edited by John Bailey and Roy Godson. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Pp. 271. $50.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.)

Violencia Y Regulación De Conflictos En América Latina. Edited by Klaus Bodemer, Sabine Kurtenbach, and Klaus Meschkat. (Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 2001. Pp. 459.)

Náyari History, Politics, and Violence: From Flowers To Ash. By Philip E. Coyle. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2001. Pp. 263.)

Del Estrado A La Pantalla: Las Imágenes Del Juicio A Los Ex Comandantes En Argentina. By Claudia Feld. (Madrid, Spain: Siglo Veintiuno, 2002. Pp. 154.)

Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities. By Martha K. Huggins, Mike Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip G. Zimbardo. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. 293.)

Urban Poor Perceptions of Violence and Exclusion in Colombia. By Caroline Moser and Cathy McIlwaine. (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2002. Pp. 124. $22.00 paper.)

Citizens of Fear: Urban Violence in Latin America. Edited By Susana Rotker. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Pp. 265.)

Sad as it is to say, violence could arguably be considered the central—if not defining—problem in contemporary Latin America as it faces the new millennium. If nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholarship was concerned with liberalism, civil war, and state formation, and if mid- to late-twentieth-century scholarship was marked by a preoccupation with dictatorship and democracy, then the current explosion of writings on everyday violence, public insecurity, and deteriorating rule of law suggests that twenty-first century scholarship is about social disorder and disintegration, especially as produced by the routinization of violence and its expression in state practices and societal norms. Indeed, for scholars and residents of the region concerns about endemic violence and overall conditions of lawlessness are starting to crowd out the prior reigning preoccupations, including the renewed interest in formal politics and the strengthening of democracy and competitive party systems that resurged at century's end.

To be sure, these general thematics often are linked to each other, either by those who see connections between the explosion of violence and criminality and the neo-liberal democratic transition or by those who suggest that untrammeled violence and mounting criminality are themselves undermining citizenship rights, and systemically reinforcing the "unrule of law," in ways that prevent democratic deepening. But the wave of violence and social disorder that appears to be sweeping the entire region has become so unsettling and alarming that it has captured widespread attention in and of itself, and from a variety of disciplinary corners. It has been a long time since a single subject has drawn Latin American scholars from fields as diverse as political science, literary criticism, sociology, economics, criminology, history, anthropology, and media studies into a common pursuit. The inter-disciplinary breadth of the contemporary scholarship on this topic is nothing short of remarkable. But so too is the phenomenon itself, which has transformed fundamental power relations, the underpinnings of market economies, the legitimacy of longstanding political institutions, the basis for collective social order, and the psychological and social infrastructure of people's everyday lives and livelihoods.

The fact that scholars from such a large number of disciplinary home-bases are studying the topics of violence, lawlessness, and public insecurity has had a direct impact on the depth of our understanding of the widespread significance of the problem, even as it underscores the overall precariousness of the situation in Latin America. Studies show how and why citizens live in constant fear, how their governments react to or reinforce these and other problems related to lawlessness and violence, how individuals behave and communities organize in response to these problems, and how political and economic elites (both private and public sector-based) accommodate or challenge the principal...