Bibliographical Essay

Luxuriantly documented episodes of lawlessness and violence have never been scarce in the historiography of Latin America. But only since the 1990s has violence achieved its current status as a distinctive category of systematic research, a move that coincided with the rise in the study of Latin American state formation.

Studies explicitly linking state formation and violence (variously defined) include Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Fernando Lopez-Alves, State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810-1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Robert H. Holden, Armies without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Two collections of essays stand out: Juan Garavaglia et al. (eds.), Las fuerzas de guerra en la construccion del estado: America Latina, siglo XIX (Rosario: Prohistoria Ediciones, 2012) and Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt (eds.), Armed Actors: Organized Violence and State Failure in Latin America (London: Zed Books, 2004). Less directly concerned with state building, but valuable for their treatments of state-centred violence, are Frank Safford, ‘Reflections on the Internal Wars in Nineteenth-Century Latin America', in Rebecca Earle (ed.), Rumours of Wars: Civil Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2000), pp. 6-28, and country-specific contributions in the same collection. For Colombia, see Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875-2002 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

The broadest historical treatments of the armed forces as an institution are Alain Rouquie, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and two books by Brian Loveman: The Constitution of Tyranny: Regimes of Exception in Spanish America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993) and For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1999).

Many works focus on particular aspects of violence and state-making, without explicitly joining the two. For caudillismo, John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and John Charles Chasteen, Heroes on Horseback: A Life and Times of the Last Gaucho Caudillos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), are essential. For violence and fraud as routine features of electoral politics see Richard Graham's masterpiece, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), Steve Stein, Populism in Peru: The Emergence of the Masses and the Politics of Social Control (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980) and Franpois Xavier Guerra, ‘The Spanish-American Tradition of Representation and its European Roots', Journal of Latin American Studies 26.1 (1994), 1-35. For its interpretative depth and range, and for exposing continuities and contrasts with the period of monarchical rule, almost all of Guerra's work remains indispensable for the study of violence and state formation in the nineteenth century; begin with his Modernidad e independencias: ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispanicas (Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992) and the collection he edited with Annick Lemperiere, Los espacios publicos en Iberoamerica: ambiguedades y problemas, siglos XVIII-XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1998). A landmark collection of essays amid the rising tide of work on the failure of the rule of law is Juan E. Mendez, Guillermo A. O'Donnell and Paulo Sergio de M. S. Pinheiro (eds.), The (Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999); particularly insightful is O'Donnell's concluding essay.

Rural rebellion and social revolution, staple themes of the historiography since the 1980s, have provided a platform for theoretical and empirical analyses of the role of violence in state formation. Here as in many areas, the quantity and quality of studies of Mexico outstrip those of other Latin American countries. The Mexican Revolution of 1910, looked to elsewhere in Latin America as a template for change, inspired a huge historiography; see Alan Knight's monumental, two-volume The Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); a useful survey of the preceding century is John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Among the few well- grounded comparative treatments of rural violence is Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). A mix of case studies and comprehensive interpretations of twentieth­century revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence are collected in Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph (eds.), A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). For a sociologically ordered comparison of Cold War insurgencies, see Timothy P. Wickham- Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Racketeering and banditry are old themes but their recent, newfound prominence, and their capacity to suborn or even substitute for state institutions, have attracted systematic attention in Enrique Desmond Arias, ‘The Dynamics of Criminal Governance: Networks and Social Order in Rio de Janeiro', Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006), 293-325; Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010); Luis Jorge Garay Salamanca and Eduardo Salcedo- Albaran (eds.), Narcotràfico, corruption y estados: como las redes ilicitas han reconfigurado las institutiones en Colombia, Guatemala y Mexico (Mexico City: Debate, 2012). For Mexico, Guillermo Raul Zepeda Lecuona's massively documented Crimen sin castigo: procuration de justicia penal y ministerio publico en Mexico (Mexico City: Centro de Investigacion para el Desarrollo, Fondo de Cultura Econòmica, 2004), is essential.