Violence, Fear, and Impunity in Post-War Guatemala

Ystanes, Margit

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-39049-9_9

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Third, the study points to a devolvement of responsibility by NGOs upon local communities through rights awareness and demands for justice against forest violence. Yet, while such devolution constitutes a form of empowerment for communities, our study joins others seeing it as placing the burden of responsibility upon communities and putting them at risk of additional harm, especially given the uneven power relations at play and virtual impunity of (local) elites in many countries (Cronkleton et al, 2012;Daudelin et al, 1996;Grant and Le Billon, 2019;Peluso and Lund, 2011;Ystanes, 2016). We suggest that such processes risk pushing some communities, or community members, to buy into neopatrimonal arrangements.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 49%

Unrooted responses: Addressing violence against environmental and land defenders

Grant

Billon

2020

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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This study considers how participants in community forestry and development organizations respond to forest-related violence. The literature suggests that responses should seek to address the underlying causes of violence, enforce the rule of law, and promote human rights and political empowerment. Yet, these responses are often obstructed and neutralized by power relations and governance challenges, including pervasive corruption and patrimonialism. In Cambodia, the combination of distrust towards corrupt and abusive authorities, rigid legal-rational hierarchies and social conventions, as well as the belief that patrimonialism serves wealthy individuals and lack of awareness of rights makes it difficult to seek, and even less obtain justice for forest-related violence. Few communities, supporting NGOs and foreign donors appear willing and capable of addressing the roots of forest violence, leading to compromises undermining conservation objectives, systemic injustice, and continued exposure to violence for environmental and land defenders. The study points at four areas for further research to reduce the risks of physical harm for defenders, sustain community conservation objectives, and strengthen accountability for forest violence.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 49%

Unrooted responses: Addressing violence against environmental and land defenders

Grant

Billon

2020

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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“…But it also involves crucial points of continuity in terms of the political cleavages and actors involved. As discussed previously, Guatemala moved from a left-wing versus right-wing civil war characterized by rural insurgency and counterinsurgency to an environment of right-wing paramilitarism and targeted assassinations, alongside rampant street crime (Ystanes, 2016: 227–231). The key actors moved from being the official army to clandestine paramilitary groups, the goals changed from outright victory to intimidation and impunity, and the tactics shifted from counterinsurgency to targeted killings.…”

Section: Binary Measures Of Peace and Their Shortcomingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Varieties of post-civil war violence

Shaw

Young

2021

Violence: An International Journal

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Quantitative research on the “durability” of peace following civil wars typically captures the breakdown or survival of “peace” in a binary manner, equating it with the presence or absence of civil war recurrence. In the datasets that underpin such studies, years that do not experience full-scale civil war are implicitly coded as “peaceful.” Yet, post-civil war environments may remain free from war recurrence, while nevertheless experiencing endemic violent crime, state repression, low-intensity political violence, and systematic violence against marginalized groups, all of which are incongruent with the concept of peace. Approaches to assessing post-civil war outcomes which focus exclusively on civil war recurrence risk overestimating the “durability” of peace, implicitly designating as “peaceful” a range of environments which may be anything but. In this article, we discuss the heterogeneity of violent post-civil war outcomes and develop a typology of “varieties of post-civil war violence.” Our typology contributes to the study of post-civil war peace durability, by serving as the basis for an alternative, categorical conceptualization of “peace years” in conflict datasets.

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Violence, Fear, and Impunity in Post-War Guatemala

Cited by 2 publications

References 16 publications

Unrooted responses: Addressing violence against environmental and land defenders

Unrooted responses: Addressing violence against environmental and land defenders

Varieties of post-civil war violence

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