Violence, fear, and development in Latin America: a critical overview

Abstract

This introduction presents the core concepts that shape this special issue on the impact of violence and the processes of development in Central and South America. The understanding of development is considered in terms broader than the economic context alone, in order to assess wider social and political aspects. With a similarly expansive scope, forms of violence are addressed that range from direct physical harm and bodily attack to the often more subtle aggression of racialised abuse or the pressures on community-centred production from dominant market forces. In these contexts, violence, economic initiatives, and political allegiances form unintended and often dangerous networks of consequence for development matters. All the articles in this volume exemplify further the spatial environments of violence and diverse ‘landscapes of fear’ that shape our existence and help to define our actions, territories, and understanding of what happens around us.

Keywords:

• Rights
• Civil Society
• Gender and Diversity
• Conflict and Reconstruction
• Governance and Public Policy
• Latin America and the Caribbean

Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to Deborah Eade for her great help and encouragement in producing this special issue. All authors would also like to thank Judith Adler Hellman for her energetic, insightful and extremely helpful contributions as a discussant at the annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, held in San Juan in 2006, at which the papers in this issue were first presented.

Notes

1. See also Furtado (1965) and Cardoso and Faletto (1979) for detailed studies in the Latin American context. Dependency theory built on the insights of the Argentinean economist Raúl Prebisch (1950). Appointed Director of the Economic Commission for Latin America in 1948, he formulated what came to be known as the ‘Prebisch thesis’. This stipulated that the global system is not a uniform market place but divided structurally between rich and poor economies, a centre of industrialised nations and a periphery of primary producers. Through this system, all of the benefits of technology and international trade would accrue to the centre. This structuralist approach to economics was taken up by dependency theorists, who regarded the economic development of the periphery within such an unequal world system as a near-impossible task.