The Local Dynamics of Violence in Post-Accord Guatemala: Historical legacies, community cleavages and grassroots agency.
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Bristol
Department Name: Politics
Abstract
The conceptualisation of peace as a limiting negative epistemology -the absence of war, needs to be overcome. Central America's internal armed conflicts ended in the 90s. Today, violence continues to cripple lives, development and democracy. This research aims to explore the strategies that have emerged from the grassroots to tackle this violence epidemic. I seek to fathom their relationship to the varying types and levels of violence in Guatemala and El Salvador. Further, I intend to document manifestations of hybridity in the interaction between local efforts and international actors. This evidence will add to Peace Studies theoretical debates on hybridity in peacebuilding and will advance efforts driving towards contextual, positive conceptualisations of peace. The policy implications of the proposed research are wide, since the project grapples with questions of why ambitious peacebuilding efforts have failed to render peaceful societies. This knowledge will contribute to our understanding of conflict transformation processes and their impact on conflict-affected peoples.
Organisations
Studentship Projects
| Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Student Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES/P000681/1 | 01/10/2017 | 30/09/2027 | |||
| 1930852 | Studentship | ES/P000681/1 | 01/10/2017 | 01/02/2022 | Daniel Herrera Kelly |
| Description | Guatemala experienced some of the world's highest homicide rates long after its peace accords. Literature on post-accord violence is prolific, yet two key puzzles remain. Subnational geographic variation challenges the most widely accepted explanations, focused on structural factors (e.g. history of conflict, socio-economic marginalisation and inequality, state absence). Second, without convincing accounts, homicide rates are dynamic and decreased since 2009. The thesis proposes a local turn (to local dynamics) is required: analysing causes for variation, characterising local experiences amid increasing/decreasing homicides and exploring the role of grassroots agency. The thesis funded by this award investigates how macro-meso-micro causal mechanisms interact in two concrete localities, drawing on interviews (national experts and from two urban neighbourhoods) and documentary evidence. I found that structural causal mechanisms (many stemming from historical patterns of exclusionary state formation and legacies of the conflict) enabled post-accord violence to take plural trajectories in interaction with community cleavages. Amid these myriad pathways, two causal mechanisms explain variation in the urban cases studied: varying territorial control and competition between gangs. While localised competition produced spirals of mass homicidal violence, unchallenged control can trigger the imposition of localised order through coercion (criminal pacification). Characterising local experiences in both scenarios demonstrates that despite divergences in homicide levels, prominent illicit gang activities (namely extortion) result in continuing widespread forms of violence targeted at residents. Therefore, grassroots agency needs to be considered as a key dimension of local dynamics: violence affects agency (undermining social fabric), but agency can also shape patterns of violence. Both scenarios elicit grassroots self-protection strategies (silence, self-isolation, displacement) that strain cohesion, undermine social capital, and weaken local leadership. Yet non-violent grassroots agency (intervening in disputes or negotiating with gangs) can disrupt violent dynamics, attaining security gains, and can begin to mitigate impacts of violence, restoring cohesion, strengthening social capital and fostering informal leadership. |
| Exploitation Route | The outcomes include academic publications and a socialisation of findings with stakeholders in the peacebuliding space (practitioners). I am in the process of writing academic papers with the findings and also in conversations with the partners who collaborated to identify interview participants on the best way to disseminate findings with non-academic stakeholders. |
| Sectors | Government, Democracy and Justice,Security and Diplomacy |